It’s a rich man’s world: economics, art, and education

Tatiana Schlossberg assesses the market value of School of Art grads from New Haven to Chelsea.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of art.

And if you want good art, buying from Yale School of Art graduates may be the way to go, according to David W. Galenson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

In 2005, Galenson wrote a policy paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled “Anticipating Artistic Success (Or, How to Beat the Art Market): Lessons from History,” which proposed this theory: “Auction market records reveal that during the past five decades the Yale School of Art has produced a series of graduates who have achieved great success commercially as well as critically. Recognizing Yale’s role can allow collectors to identify important artists before they become widely recognized, and therefore before their early innovative work rises in value.”

Galenson’s paper aims not to discover why the Yale School of Art produces so many economically successful artists but rather how to attain the best—read: most lucrative—art using Yale as both a filter and a guarantor.

To his credit, Galenson does acknowledge the importance of aesthetics in buying art and does not rely on monetary value alone. He gives tips on how to find artists whose work is the best—ask their peers, their professors—and the recommendation that “the collectors who have realized the greatest success in the art market have been drawn from among those who had the greatest appreciation of the art they bought.”

However, the overarching tone of the paper fits within a larger trend: the commoditization of art, a result of the boom in the art market, which began in the early ’00s and continued up until the recession. This boom and its accompanying era of inflated prices are evident in the exorbitant prices paid at auction. In 2007, Jeff Koons’ “Hanging Heart” sold for 23.6 million dollars, the highest price paid for a work by a living artist, and Damien Hirst’s infamous diamond-encrusted skull, “For the Love of God,” sold to a consortium of buyers—Hirst included—for 50 million British Pounds, which at the time was 99.4 million dollars.

In our culture, one in which the attraction to celebrity, wealth, and brand names are paramount, it is not a surprise that the art school has come to the fore of the young contemporary art scene and has caught the attention of prominent dealers.

The end result of the Yale School of Art and an education therein may be profitable art sales for recent graduates, but this trend stands in direct opposition to the artistic principles espoused by the school and its professors, the stewards of this creative beacon.

Galenson’s notion about somehow reducing art to an investment or commodity are “very small ideas about art,” as Samuel Messer, MFA ’81, professor and Associate Dean of the School of Art, put it. “That’s not how we like to spend our time,” he said. “We prefer to think about making work.

“Being an artist is not an easy path,” he explained. “It’s a long and hard journey, so while people are in school, we try to not engage them in the commercial aspect.”

Luis Gispert, MFA ’01, who graduated from the sculpture program and has gone on to have a good deal of commercial success—his works were featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many other venues—agreed. “When you’re in school, that’s your last chance to experiment, be in a bubble, and have the ability to make work without being at risk that it won’t sell.”

The Yale for Haiti Benefit Auction, which runs until Mon., Feb. 8, exemplifies the separation of the market from the art school. Students and professors of the school are currently auctioning off their work for a fraction of its worth with all the proceeds donated to Haitian aid organizations.

Sarah Lasley, MFA ’08, who remains at Yale, teaching Introduction to Digital Video, confirmed this attitude. “They try to keep the market out of the program, and they never support us in setting up commercial success,” she said. “The name ‘Yale’ though does have a reputation, but we are never told directly that it will help us commercially.”

But if Yale isn’t teaching its students how to beat the market themselves, how do so many alumni become enormously successful? Can it be chalked up to the program itself?

Certainly. The name Yale isn’t enough to garner 1,289 applicants for 119 spots in 2009—a less than one percent admission rate.

According to Lisa Kereszi, MFA ’00, who now teaches undergraduate photography, “The program at Yale gives you four things: One, the people who are accepted in the first place are the cream of the crop; we look for talent as well as potential, which helps explain some of the success. Two, you go through a boot-camp-like experience: It’s intense, you have to do your best, and it feels awful if you haven’t, because you have giants of photography dismiss you. Three, you’re around important photographers: teachers, peers, famous photographers, that network of Yale magic. Four, you get a stamp of approval: A lot of people can ‘think for themselves,’ but Yale automatically says you’re something.”

Others point to the network created by Yale professors as the biggest help in getting access to the often-ironclad doors of the art world. “Professors are able to help you out and give you a break down the road,” Gispert said.

Joshua Chuang, SOM ’05, an Associate Curator of photography at the Yale University Gallery, credits alumni devotion to their alma mater for the establishment of this network. “There is a tradition of School of Art students with very successful careers who come back and serve the school in some way, as faculty, visiting professors, and board members.”

It would be naïve to say that an MFA from Yale means nothing to anyone. Although the name itself might not earn someone representation at a gallery or make a private sale, it can help to deflate the balloon of the art world and make sense of it all.

“Name brands bring a normalization that would put a collector at ease,” Chuang said.

As with a degree from any of Yale’s various schools, the MFA can help provide an entrée to an exclusive club. A diploma is a pedigree, much like one asserting the purity of a dog’s breed.

“I experienced this in the magazine world,” Kereszi remarked. “Before I was at Yale and even while I was a student, I would go after a magazine or an editorial and they would ignore me. Once I was out of Yale, all of a sudden they didn’t ignore me anymore.”

But the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. “The Yale brand does open a certain amount of doors, but once you get your toe in, you’re on your own,” Gispert said.

For some people, the name brand “Yale” can even be a repellent because of what the institution has historically represented within academic culture. “Some artists have the notion, ‘I don’t want anything to do with Yale,’” Messer said. “Before I came here, because of my upbringing and because I am Jewish, I didn’t want to go to a place like Yale because of the reputation it had.”

Ronald Feldman, the owner and founder of Feldman Fine Arts, a New York City gallery open since 1971 that has represented heavyweights like Andy Warhol and Roxy Paine, claimed that an artist’s educational history has nothing to do with his decisions.

“It’s more important to use your own judgment [when evaluating work], and yeah, going to Yale may give you an edge, but honestly, who cares?”

But even if Yale isn’t a turnoff to collectors or gallery owners, it doesn’t play a large part in many decisions. Nancy Grover, a long time photography collector who, along with her husband Robinson, has decided to donate her collection to the Yale University Art Gallery, maintained the relative irrelevance of branding.

“Image is all for us,” Grover said. “The work must hold up aesthetically and the subject must challenge us intellectually. Those are our only criteria.”

At the museum level, the fact of an artist’s education is meaningless, unless its lessons have positively informed the work.

“The art school—Yale or any other—that an artist, whose work we may be considering for acquisition or exhibition, has attended has no bearing on our decision to present their work,” affirmed Associate Curator of Nineteenth Century, Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Anne Strauss. “We base our decisions on the quality and strength of the work.”

Regardless whether or not this myth about the destined success of Yale alumni rings true, it is interesting to examine what effects, if any, it has on the mindset of students while in attendance.

Kereszi recalled her open studio at the end of her final year of study: “We all desperately needed money, and I sold my work for 20 or 40 dollars. I made more than my rent that month out of 20 dollar increments. Starting a few years ago, the students started pricing their work at 1,000 dollars because gallery owners were coming up from New York and buying work. To me, it seems icky to price your work so highly as a student. Of course you want to value what you do, but you’re still a student. It seems naughty to pin your work up at Yale and ask for 1,500 dollars, but if the buyers are there, why not?”

Yale students have also begun the practice of hosting gallery shows to pay back student loans, and though the shows are student-organized, the faculty and administration have taken a stance against them.

“The school takes the position that the value of work is beneath us, and we concentrate on making work,” Kereszi said. But at the same time, she admitted that the lines are often lightly sketched. “When I was a student, I was getting mixed messages: My classmates showed at fancy galleries and the critics at our panels were selling their work for 100,000 dollars but [we] weren’t supposed to care about money.”

Of course, being offered a lot of money for your work as a student has an undeniable allure, but the implications for quality are of primary concern for educators and students alike.

“It’s a bit of a danger when students become ‘collectable’ while they’re still trying to figure out what they’re making,” said David Hilliard, MFA ’94, former lecturer of photography at Yale and current professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. “It potentially stagnates and labels young artists at a very early and formative stage.”

Even for collectors or gallery owners, buying students’ art can be both a risky endeavor and an exercise that extends no farther than conquest. “Collectors turn their attention especially during the boom, to buying art form students still in school or about to graduate,” Feldman said. “I don’t know that it was made popular by articles like this, but contemporary collectors want to be there first, to get there early, it’s like a game. I think that’s so tacky.”

Enter Galenson. “Art students go to school in order to be successful…no one will say they’re going to make money because there is a distrust of people with pecuniary motives in art,” he said.

Ever the economist, Galenson believes that money does not run in direct opposition to culture, especially not to art. “Money gives artists freedom to not have to work for a salary. It’s difficult enough already to make a living in art,” he explained. “Our society is hypocritical when it comes to art—people who say that artists shouldn’t make money are morally wrong.”

However, this art-sales-for-the-artists-sakes perspective is only evident from conversations with Galenson and does not appear in his paper.

Regardless, there is some truth to what he says: If your work sells, you don’t have to compromise, which for photographers, means avoiding commercial photography. Working for magazines or advertising doesn’t produce pictures, as Kereszi put it, “that mean anything except for correct formal composition.”

In fact, allowing money a position in art during the early phase in an artist’s career can be held partly responsible for the extravagancy of the art market in recent years. For many artists, art sold for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is no longer art: It ain’t nothing but a number.

“Auctions and works that ask and go for millions of dollars are at he bottom of culture,” Gispert said. “It’s art, but it’s also a commodity, like stock or cattle. All of that got blown out of the water when Damien Hirst made the most expensive piece of art [“For the Love of God”], and it was a stunt generated by an artist and his dealer as part of a cultural phenomenon to create a rift in the market.”

Artist Damien Hirst, the most prominent member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), who have dominated the contemporary art scene since the ’90s, like Andy Warhol before him, falls into a tradition of modern art in which artists seek to mock their collectors by making art out of commonplace objects, while requesting outlandish prices for them. As Chuang put it, “people who love it without getting it become part of the thesis.”

Hirst, however, has taken this to a new level of extravagance: “For the Love of God” a human skull meticulously encrusted with 8,601 diamonds takes a piece of human anatomy, paints it in luxury, calls it art, and demands 50 million pounds.

Another of his major works, on loan to the Metropolitan until later this year, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” displays a shark, its skin wrinkled by age and chemicals, suspended in a tank of turquoise formaldehyde. Hirst borrowed the idea of fossilizing dead animals from artists of the ’60s, but this work, which delicately straddles the line between art and obscenity, was sold for eight million dollars.

However powerfully it evokes death, why is a dead shark worth that much money, considerably more than a painting by Spanish master, Velazquez, whose surface ripples with thousands of brushstrokes, each a mark of considerable skill?

In the end, it all comes back to a question of branding. Arguably, Damien Hirst the brand rather than Damien Hirst the artist is responsible for his exorbitant success, just as Yale-the-brand is seen by some as more important than Yale-the-school.

“A Rembrandt is cheaper now than a Hirst,” Messer said. “What does that tell you abut our culture? It means that people aren’t actually interested in the art?”

But for Galenson, the monetization of art is irrelevant.

“Hirst has had a very positive impact on art. He gets people to go to museums, gets them interested in art,” he said. “Popularity is a good thing for art.”

But what are the consequences of the popularity of brands in “high culture”? Ultimately, it’s a double-edged sword. Without money, celebrities, and brand names, the ownership of art remains confined to a class of people who have the fortunes of a small principality, leaving museums with no rock stars with which to attract the attention of America, a largely art-ignorant culture.

But turning art—one of the last bastions of sophistication (theater seems its only compatriot)—into the equivalent of a designer fashion label seems to desanctify it, and transform a Jasper Johns, Picasso, or Michelango into at best a trophy, and at worst a Louis Vuitton backpack.

Cover design by Jinjin Sun.

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