When Valentina Castellani was invited to teach a class at New York University on the history of the art market from the Renaissance to today, she came up against one obstacle in her preparation of the syllabus, even despite her expertise in the matter, with longtime art market experience at both Sotheby’s and Gagosian.
“I couldn’t find a book that actually covered all this span,” she said in a phone interview. “There are excellent books and academic studies on many of these periods, but I couldn’t find one that gave the whole panorama.”
Aiming to fill that gap is her forthcoming book Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery, to be published by Gagosian itself. (The book was complete by the time Gagosian made the offer, Castellani said, and the gallery and the dealer had no input on its contents. According to Castellani, the book hardly mentions the gallery’s famed founder, Larry Gagosian.)
Featured on the cover is a new artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, and inside is an introduction by New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni. It will be available from the Gagosian Shop for $40 on May 1 and will be distributed by Rizzoli in the fall.
In the earliest times described in the book, the Catholic Church and the aristocracy drove the art market. She then ranges over subjects including the birth of the first free market in 17th-century Holland, followed by the establishment of state-supported and -controlled academies and royal manufactories under France’s King Louis XIV. Alongside the birth of Impressionism came the inception of the gallery system, conceived by the early Paris dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. That system has grown by leaps and bounds ever since, even to the degree that art galleries stage museum-caliber exhibitions. The growth of markets in China and the Middle East come under consideration, as do changes to the market after the Covid-19 pandemic, including the rise of digital technologies and demographic and generational shifts.
Valentina Castellani.
Courtesy Valentina Castellani
Key historical developments in the auction world also come under consideration, such as the sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $450.3 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever to sell at auction, as well as auctions from the Goldschmidt Collection at Sotheby’s London in 1958 to Damien Hirst’s auction of his own fresh-from-the-studio works in the sale “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” at Sotheby’s London in 2008.
The author was deputy director at Sotheby’s in London and New York, followed by 11 years as senior director at Gagosian in New York, where she spearheaded exhibitions devoted to artists including Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana, and Pablo Picasso. Since 2019, she has been on the faculty at Steinhardt School at New York University as an adjunct professor in the master’s program in visual arts administration.
One essential book for her approach, she said, was Arnold Hauser’s 1951 book The Social History of Art. “I studied it at university, and it goes into the economic and social circumstances in which art was produced,” she said. “Throughout the different market models, each was the result of distinctive economic, political, social, and religious circumstances, and each market model changes how we value a work of art.”
While today we tend to think of artists as individual creative geniuses, she said, she aims to give examples of how they were often, especially in earlier eras, very much driven by the desires and dictates of their patrons. For example, she includes the story of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, featuring Giotto’s famed cycle of paintings. “The paintings were commissioned by Enrico Scrovegni to atone for the sin of usury,” says Castellani. “Enrico’s father was a usurer, and Dante had placed him in Hell, and Enrico didn’t want to follow in his footsteps, so he asked Giotto to paint this chapel. You see him among the blessed to Christ’s right, holding the model of the chapel.”
While Castellani doesn’t necessarily get into the month-to-month ups and downs that fascinate art market reporters, she does make some observations about today’s world, in which collecting has been changed by factors like social media and changing generational tastes—but she brings a historical lens to them. For her, one striking factor about the rise of the Middle East patronage, for example, is the way that the model there looks backward to the state and royal patronage that was key in the earlier periods she discusses.
“It’s interesting to see how history repeats itself,” she said.
