Contributed by David Carrier / We art critics are utterly dependent on the art market. Without the labors of curators, the well-dressed servants of the collector class, we would have nothing to review. I was trained as an academic philosopher, and in my home discipline money was not much of a concern. But when I made my way into the art world, I became aware of its importance. The first time I was paid for art writing, I hurried to cash the check, believing some mistake had been made. In all my years as a critic, only once have I purchased art from a dealer. David McKee, now retired, sold some $250 prints by a marvelous gallery artist, Jake Berthot. Usually, however, critics are too poor to afford the art in commercial galleries. One of our minor pleasures is the occasional opportunity to socialize with collectors at dinners for upscale artists. Any reader of Henry James could not but enjoy and learn from such situations.
Magnus Resch, an academic expert in the art market, has real practical experience as a collector. In his recent book How to Collect Art – free on Kindle if you have Amazon Prime – he advises not spending more than $15,000 on an artwork at least at first, emphatically betraying the fact that he is in a different financial league from those of us who ponder whether they can afford cab fare to galleries. But he has an agreeable, welcoming tone, encouraging new collectors. And his book has good, reliable information about the mechanics of collecting: how to negotiate with dealers, the nature of art fairs, and other key practical concerns. He urges, wisely, that you should collect what you love without excessive or overt concern about the dictates of the marketplace. How to Collect Art is thus at once a sociological treatise, a modern supplement to Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, and a practical guide for aspiring collectors. The common-sense information Resch provides is fascinating even if you don’t plan to be a collector.
To me, what is most striking about the book is its absence of moralizing criticism. From critics, we expect judgments about what is good and what is not. Resch says: “Whatever you like is good art.” For him, then, there is no bad art, just bad investments. He believes critical judgments are totally subjective. That’s why he doesn’t discuss art criticism. As he rightly says, if more people simply collected what they enjoyed, the world, including the art world, would be a better place. He does offer a hierarchical rating system for artists, galleries, dealers, museums – Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta – and nicely explains how the differences among them affect pricing. But he offers no explanation of why, for example, there are only four Alpha dealers, or why there are very few Alpha artists. He estimates that only 6,000 people spend $100,000 a year on art. If that seems like a lot of collectors, remember that the art world is a financial pyramid, with a few very ultra-wealthy collectors accounting for much of the market’s development. I would like to know more about why the art market is so buoyant, and why it has the structure he merely describes. Perhaps Resch will eventually tell us.
Thanks to the generous support of art dealers, I now and again enjoy visits to art fairs. At Frieze London, you could see a remarkable array of stylish people walking past the booths of the dealers. Though apparently a glamorous occupation, being an art dealer looks like exhausting work. As Resch explains, the booths are expensive to run – and necessary, it seems, to establish the dealers’ reputations. Frieze London displays an amazing variety of art, laid out in the booths to afford crowds of people an idea of what’s on offer as quickly as possible. Fast, unwavering sales are undoubtedly a goal of much contemporary art commerce. Now, I take great interest in how displays of visual art influence how we understand it. I’ve written books about the art museum and, with Darren Jones, about the art gallery as a formative institution. I couldn’t write such a book about art fairs. They provide conspicuously little support for the pleasures of traditional aesthetic contemplation and do not encourage focused looking. When I was young, there was a marvelous seller of antiquarian books and prints called Craddock & Barnard in London right down the street from the British Museum. Sitting in the front room of the shop, you could look at leisure. I learned a lot from the hours I spent at this shop. Naturally, it’s long gone.
Magnus Resch, How to Collect Art (Phaidon/Magnus Books, 2024)
Frieze London, 15–19 October 2025
About the author: David Carrier is a former Carnegie Mellon University professor, Getty Scholar, and Clark Fellow. He has published art criticism in Apollo, artcritical, Artforum, Artus, and Burlington Magazine, and has been a guest editor for The Brooklyn Rail. He is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
Some might call me a nitpicker, but I was brought up short by Carrier saying, “To me, what is most striking about the book is its absence of moralizing criticism. From critics, we expect judgments about what is good and what is not.”
I, too, want (although I no longer expect) judgments from critics about “what is good and what is not.” But I would never in a million years call judgments about art “moralizing criticism.”
“Moralizing criticism” means examining the ethical or moral implications of a work, and few do this. Granted, people use the words “good” and “bad” when talking about art and morals both. In the first case, however, they are talking about quality, in the second, about actions.