New jobs in the arts are few, fleeting, and underpaid. Look at any Gallery Assistant opening on Linkedin; even at the world’s richest galleries in the world’s most expensive cities, you won’t find an offer over twenty dollars an hour. Yet, young professionals—masters of art history and alums of prestigious internships—apply to new posts by the thousands, playing a tenuous game of musical chairs.
Nearing the end of college, I’ve begun to shed my willful ignorance and search for plausible, sustainable pathways into the art world. While listening to the podcast Art Sense, I found Magnus Resch, art market economist, author of multiple Art World how-to guides, and Lecturer at the Yale School of Management (SOM). On the podcast, Resch spoke optimistically about the future of the market, especially with young collectors. He lamented the art market’s myopic catering to the uber-rich and professed optimism for a world in which changing tastes and lower prices would significantly increase access to collecting. It was enough for me to email and ask to audit his class. Within ten minutes, I got a response: “Great. Welcome to the class. Happy for you to audit it.”
MGT 838: Entrepreneurship in the Art Market is unlike anything I’ve taken at Yale. Once a week, for three hours, the class brings together students from the SOM, the School of Art, and the college in hopes that the perspectives of each will be uniquely helpful to the rest. Each class starts with an MFA or college student showing (and sometimes selling) their artwork to the class. Then, they answer questions. Resch hosts extracurricular opportunities in addition: early in the semester, the class went to New York for the Armory and Spring Break art fairs; later, we had a mixer at the bar, BAR—a timed event where students rotated from table to table, mingling with new artists.
In class each week, Resch invites two Art World titans to speak, each representing a distinct section of the market–galleries, artists, and journalists, to name a few. Guests have included Marc Porter, chairman and Head of Private Sales at Christie’s Auction House; Marc Glimcher, CEO of Pace Gallery; Yana Peel, Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel; famed artist Derek Fordjour, and Jerry Gagosian, icon of internet art criticism. Once they’re in the class (often via Zoom), they are asked questions prepared by a small subset of the class, and after, the floor opens to the rest of the one hundred or so students.
It’s a rare opportunity to be candid with such powerful people and, in turn, for them to be candid with us. Derek Fordjour warned the artists and gallerists in the room to avoid contracts no matter what: “Art is the last handshake business, and I like it that way…When the contract doesn’t exist, you can have your perception, and I can have mine, and I can move down the road…you need that kind of mobility, especially at the beginning of a career.” When asked about which jobs were viable for SOM students, Marc Glimcher, head of one of the world’s most influential galleries, shared some bad news for the tech-founder types in the room: Due to how slow the art world moves, “The people who want to innovate have no path. But we’re trying to change that. The people who are born to sell, those who are good at representing, are good.”
When esteemed guests aren’t speaking, Resch is lecturing on the rules and trends he’s learned through his research and relationships. His training is in economics, but before he got his doctorate, he was a gallery owner: “The realization that other galleries were outperforming mine piqued my interest in understanding what exactly drives success in this industry. This question became the foundation of my PhD research.” Today, Resch teaches and continues to research the economics of art. His goal, he told me, is to expand the reach of his course “both within Yale and beyond…” and, ultimately, “ to create a new generation of artists, collectors, and business leaders who will bring transparency and innovation to the art world.”
I’ve never met someone quite like Resch in the art world. He is unrelentingly frank about the economic realities of art. In one session, a student asked if he had enjoyed the most recent Second-Year MFA show at Yale’s Green Hall. He told them that it was good and that he appreciated the fact that the works would go on a wall—that they could be purchased. Too many MFA shows, he said, dealt in works that would never sell. Perhaps even more alarming to the artists in the room, Resch advises them to spend far less of their time at Yale making art and far more time making connections.
On the other hand, much to the frustration of some SOM students, Resch reiterates that the art world works on sparse data, at best, with the only public insight into prices coming from auction results. As you learn in the course, it’s not a science. In fact, the allure, the scarcity, and the mystery are all part of the market’s design. Everyone loves to be in on a secret.
Things are changing, kind of. As tech opens the market to new buyers and new makers, the art world is becoming more accessible, but it’s happening slowly. There remain necessary strategies for artists and art professionals to position themselves for success. The strategies are simple enough, so long as we get out of our own way. For those passionate about the arts, it can feel sacrilegious to monetize our work, but rest assured: the wealthy have no problem exploiting that heedlessness. For the sake of creating more opportunities in the art world, we need to see the market for what it is. Fortunately, Magnus Resch’s course gives more than enough sugar to help the medicine go down.
