How to make it in the Art World

Ok, this is a little bit of a copy and paste, sorry, but this article was just too amusing not to (via NYMAG):

The art world made it through the real-world crash relatively unscathed, but not unchanged. And even as money still courses thick and blue-chip through its veins, the system is beginning to reexamine itself. Last month during ­Armory Week, there was not just the big Establishment fair but a handful of smaller and less-Establishment fairs; a couple of anti-money, anti-Establishment fairs; and at least one anti-anti-Establishment fair, which was both a tribute to the Armory Show’s origins and a flip of the bird to its corporate values, and might also just have been one big art-punk hotel party (we’re still figuring that one out). And now, for the first time, London’s Frieze fair is coming to town; when it arrives next week, it’ll challenge incumbent kingpin Armory for supremacy in the city. Our art critic Jerry Saltz, for one, is excited by this, as he is by quite a bit of the new art he sees burbling out there, art that seems to be getting smaller rather than bigger, intimate rather than corporate, and intangible and performative rather than industrial and perfectly resolved—the stranger and more mercurial, the better. It’s a moment of weird equipoise, as the Art Death Star and the Rebel Forces are battling to the quick. To mark it, we’ve decided to present our own version of performance art: a tongue-in-cheek rulebook for how to make it in the art world now—as artist, gallerist, collector, hanger-on. Many of the case studies demonstrate this period’s impish contradictions (“Make Art That’s Difficult to Collect,” “Pretend You’re an Outsider, Even When You’re at the Center of Everything”). And many of them show how to walk a line that has become particularly well trod of late: Used to be, new galleries admired the powerhouses and young artists envied the established ones—until they deposed them. These days, the envy runs both ways. Everyone wants in, and the only way to get in is to act like you’re out. Which means nobody wants to cop to having made it already, and everyone acts like they’re overthrowing the system by thriving in it. Maybe they are.

Rule No. 1Saltz
Reject the Market. Embrace the Market.
How Jerry Saltz has found new magic amid all that money.
Rule No. 2Recent Trends
Stay on Trend…
Some things we’ve been seeing a lot of lately.
Sarah SzeRule No. 3
Make Art That’s Difficult to Collect
So only museums will collect it.
Gates JohhsonRule No. 4
Be Young, Post-Black, and From Chicago
Rule No. 5Alex Katz
Survive
With your head down.
Rule No. 6Kehinde Wiley
Outsource to China
While riffing on the Western canon. Kehinde Wiley’s global reach.
Rule No. 7
Know These 100 People
An insider’s list of art insiders.
Trading UpRule No. 8
Don’t Be Afraid to Trade Up
When a bigger gallery comes calling, listen.
Rule No. 9Art Fair Portraits
Show Up
The art world in a photo booth.
Rule No. 10Patronage
Pick Your Artists and Stick With Them
Whole-life art patronage—collecting work is just the start.
What to BuyRule No. 11
Buy the Same Thing Everyone Else Is Buying
A shopping list.
HeirsRule No. 12
Get Born Into It
The inheritance class.
Reena SpaulingsRule No. 13
Don’t Let a Gallerist Take Half the Profit
The Chinatown collective Reena Spaulings.
RuthlessRule No. 14
Be Ruthless
Making a killing in the art world’s dark market.
Family BusinessRule No. 15
Pretend You’re an Outsider Even When You’re at the Center of Everything
Family Business is a gallery that’s not a gallery, run by two art stars slumming it as art nobodies.
Rule No. 16
Pack Your Bags, Fly Around the World, and Hang Out With Everyone You Know From New York
The don’t-miss-out itinerary of the art-world world traveler.
Rule No. 17Obrist
Be Everywhere at Once (But Rarely New York)
Hans Ulrich Obrist, frequent-flying super-connector of the art world.
Rule No. 18Gavin Brown
Join the Establishment. Cling to Your Street Cred.
Gallerist Gavin Brown on not becoming Larry Gagosian
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