Good Times at Sotheby's

Editorial of The New York Sun
May 13, 2008

The New York Times is greeting the spring auction season with a dirge. "The art world's ever growing valuations are a symptom of a growing imbalance in the American economy: the unprecedented concentration of the spoils of growth at the very top," the Times said in an editorial this week. "This is not a healthy thing for any country, especially one that eschewed royalty a long time ago."

Here at The New York Sun, we have a different point of view. We think growing valuations in the art world are a healthy thing for New York City, which is the artistic capital of America. The high prices enrich artists and gallery owners and shrewd collectors, few to none of whom are "royalty," in the sense of vast, generations-long inherited wealth of the sort seen in Europe. To give but one example, the hedge fund manager and art collector Steven Cohen "grew up in Great Neck, N.Y., in a strictly middle-class family, with a father who worked in the dress manufacturing business and a homemaker mother," according to BusinessWeek.

The artist Damien Hirst is the son of a car mechanic, while Jeff Koons, the son of a York, Pa., furniture dealer, worked for a while selling admission tickets at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The art dealer Larry Gagosian, the son of a Los Angeles accountant, reportedly worked for a while parking cars. The chairman of the board of Sotheby's itself is Michael Ira Sovern, who, according to Wikipedia, was born in the Bronx to a dress-salesman father and a bookkeeper mother and is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science.

What the art world boom exemplifies is not a concentration of wealth or royalty but social mobility. It is something to cheer, not to bemoan. Why, the publishing dynasty that owns the Times itself is closer to royalty than anything in the art world. Not that there is anything wrong with it. If the Times would prefer to be reporting on declining valuations rather than increasing ones, let it turn its attention to its own story rather than that of the art world.