THE RECKONING

#102: When Works of Art Come Home to Roost

One of my grad school mentors and I would sometimes met at an Irish pub in New Haven, where we would squander an afternoon in banter about books, painting, movies, and politics. After we cleared our plates, drained a few pints, and exhausted more stimulating topics, the conversation might turn to the art world.
“Well. I’ve outlived my own career,” he said with a smile, after taking a sip of Guinness. His paintings were selling at auction for a fraction of what the gallery was asking for similar works. I had just completed my appraisal training, and explained why such disparities were somewhat normal. Retail Replacement value, or the asking price in a retail setting, can be twice to three times greater than auction results, which Internal Revenue accepts as Fair Market value, which is defined as,

“. . . the price at which a property would change hands between a willing buyer and a willing seller, neither being under any compulsion to buy or sell, and both having reasonable knowledge of relevant facts, in the most appropriate market.”

For example, a Ganado blanket would be expected to bring a better price in the American Southwest than at an auction-house in Mumbai. The belief that a retail price can be undermined by auction results is somewhat misguided. Here’s why. The competitive thrill sought by auction bidders seldom appeals to gallery clients, who prefer to pay a premium for a more personalized kind of collecting experience. Another factor to consider is that the life expectancy in Western society has increased significantly in the past fifty years. Professional ballet dancers might hang up their toe-shoes by forty, while painters like the late Knox Martin or Will Barnet might live past 100, without having to adjust their telemetry.

My luncheon companion opined that in America, making art was not seen as a job before the WPA Federal Arts Project. This notion took root with the proliferation of studio art programs in higher education, fueled by the GI Bill of Rights and the Baby Boom. Art-school professors were expected to produce a solo exhibition every couple of years, to meet publish-or-perish requirements for keeping their day jobs. One university where I taught pressured junior faculty members to enter juried shows, which it nearly impossible to assemble bodies of work of interest to galleries or curators. The more I learned about how museums and the art business actually works, the more I regarded this rigamarole as a rat-race that generated nothing more than academic capital.

I had started showing at galleries just after my graduation from Yale. I had an inkling of how the art business worked from my mentors; all of whom showed with prominent New York galleries. One of my classmates started showing at O.K. Harris Gallery while still an undergrad. My work first appeared in new talent shows in Boston and Philadelphia. Ten years later, it was represented by art dealers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New England, and Washington DC. By 2024 it had appeared in almost 50 solo exhibitions and an even greater number of group-shows. Most of these exhibitions featured 15-20 new paintings, and ran for three or four weeks. Even when sales were brisk, some of the works would come back to me.

Six months after a show comes down, unsold works are returned to the artist. This is standard practice with galleries that seldom wish to show paintings that had been exhibited previously, or shown somewhere else and not sold. Pieces that fail to sell at auction are tainted as “buy-ins,” but not at galleries. Auction results are published, while gallery purchases leave no paper trail. I found that sales were no measure of merit. This is because most buyers are not discerning collectors, but affluent consumers of luxury home goods. A piece that hadn’t jumped off the wall in a month might have been the best painting in the show. The more exhibitions I had,the more work I sold, the more pieces came back to their maker.

My mothballed surplus expanded over the years; from a corner of the studio to a ten-by-twenty-foot lockup. When I finally decided to process its contents, I shifted an unknown quantity of paintings and drawings from a warehouse in Poughkeepsie, into my Rockland County studio. Hurricane Lorenzo blew rainwater through a leaky skylight in 2019. A number of paintings and works on paper were damaged. Having set these aside to be trashed, I started finding other pieces that were neither up to par, nor reflective of my present artistic persona. Large unstretched canvases from the ‘70s and ‘80s had been rolled around half a dozen Sonotubes. Most were consigned to the junk-heap, along with irksome nudes of ex-wives and girlfriends, student works, and unfinished paintings. The more ruthless I was, the more cathartic it felt. When the truck was loaded, I handed a check to the driver.

“Where’s all this going?” he asked me.

“I don’t care,” was my reply.

Kathie and I were in the process of buying a second home when the pandemic struck. We spent four months in lockdown in northern Manhattan; working through proxies on contracts, inspections, and closing the deal. The house was intended to be a getaway, not a primary abode. Its configuration did not lend itself to blending domestic space with a proper studio. Four years would pass, before I found a storefront to rent in Au Sable Forks.

I was stunned to find that nearly 300 paintings and 700 drawings had survived my Rockland studio triage. The question was what to do with all this material. How many pieces should I keep? How many might be marketed? How many dead lab rats had escaped the first purge? I had worked with paying clients to address just such questions.

My solo show at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe had been moderately successful. When Peters suddenly closed his gallery of Naturalism and Western Art, we all were stunned. Having been handed sour fruit, I had to find a way to make lemonade. Much to its credit, the gallery sent a shiny new Mercedes van across the country, to return works to artists from Texas to Chicago, New England, and upstate New York. When the driver pulled away from my warehouse, I had an idea. My next work of art would be a performance piece, in which I pretended to be caretaker of the estate of the late James Lancel McElhinney. I engaged an archivist, with whom I had worked in the past, to build a digital database. After weighing the relative merits of Excel and other software options, we settled on Filemaker Pro. Unpacking, measuring, and photographing the artworks took far less time than I had expected. Relevant data was scribbled onto yellow pads, then re-entered into Word document. Photos were taken and tweaked with my iPhone 15, and uploaded to a file-sharing site. These were mugshots, for purposes of identification. High resolution photos could be taken later, after a final culling.

I wondered what numerical cap I should place on my holdings, and resolved to let quality decide. Some I would keep. Some would be fed to the market. Whatever remained would be given away, or destroyed. Like winning a game of Spit, the goal is to quit the table with as few cards as possible.

(To be continued)

—James Lancel McElhinney © December 10, 2024