The same can be said for all of Kim’s furniture. You never know what he’s going to make next—as with other rare talents, his creative vocabulary expands as he goes along, rather than getting stuck inside it—but when it’s finished, it all makes perfect sense. Surface magazine once asked him to describe “the problem that his work solves,” a question you’d only ask a designer, not an artist. His response was fascinating, if a little puzzling: “Sometimes my work allows one to place a piece of furniture where they don’t really want a piece of furniture there.” My guess is that he wasn’t being literal when he said this; he wasn’t thinking only about activating a particular part of a room. As always, he was thinking poetically. Where can furniture go that it hasn’t been before and where it might never be expected? Kim is one of the artists who can tell us.

I’m still trying to figure out what was going on in Marc Spiegler’s New York Times op-ed on Friday. In the column, he wrote that galleries feel the art world has “fallen off its axis,” and their former sense of “noblesse oblige” in “a cozier, somewhat esoteric place” governed by “gentlemen’s agreements” has been replaced by an art world that “became part of pop culture, with flashy museums opening in cities around the world” and art fairs that “became cultural events themselves, attracting celebrities and lots of media attention.”

But according to Spiegler, the costs of participating in the supersized art world are too great for galleries. And also that there are new collectors who aren’t in it to support artists but are instead “driven more by a desire for social cachet or to engage in financial speculation.” Naturally, to protect their artists, galleries have to treat new collectors with suspicion, even hostility, “driving them into the welcoming embrace of auction houses.”

His solution: “Most urgently, galleries need to push for legally enforceable resale agreements that can block flipping and let them be less fearful of unknown potential clients. And galleries need to stop promoting art as an investment.” After that, galleries need to act local and develop markets closer to home. The race to internationalize the art market, in Spiegler’s view, left many young galleries unstable at home. He said he warned them of this trap when he ran Art Basel.

On the face of it, none of this advice is terrible (except the fixation on resale agreements, which are not enforceable because of property law that will not change.)  The growth of Art Basel has led to the art fair’s own regionalization. I suppose there’s logic to telling galleries that they should be well resourced in their home market and see art fairs as access to specific regions other than their own. Though I’m not sure why this advice needed to be in The New York Times.

But Spiegler lost me long before he got there. I’m not sure I recognize the art world he describes, in particular the “noblesse oblige” and “gentlemen” stuff, or the idea that the art world is an eternal battle between art galleries and auction houses. This seems to be a fixation of Spiegler’s going back 20 years. I don’t think it was true then, but it was a useful mindset for an art fair director trying to convince galleries that you had their best interests at heart. I’m not sure what purpose it serves now.

Yes, galleries have to make a choice between selling indiscriminately to anyone who walks in the door or placing their artists’ work with collectors who might advance the artist’s career. There’s nothing new in that. They also have a tendency to overplay that hand by demanding new collectors buy the gallery’s slow moving inventory as a demonstration of loyalty.

Is the art world driven by financial speculation? Not really. There have been moments where one sector of the art market accelerates, creating the brief perception that everyone is making money but you. Those moments are self-correcting—and we’re a good three years past the last one, with few potential buyers thinking they’ll make a quick buck in art.

Thanks, Glenn, for your profile of Minjae Kim. I’m looking forward to going to Oberon sometime this summer. In the meantime, I’ll be heading to the Art Institute of Chicago tomorrow morning to see the de Kooning show there. Then we make the drive to Cleveland. I’ll have more to report on Tuesday.

Looking forward to getting back to Gotham,
M