How the rich ruined the art market

When Michael Findlay arrived in New York in 1968, as an aspiring art dealer aged 23, there was no such thing as an “art market”. The word wasn’t used at all. “The market meant a grocery store.”

Today the art market is a glittering international pageant, an endless parade of art fairs, openings, biennales, ever more eye-popping auction prices and galleries that drop their artists as soon as they fall out of fashion. Art is an asset, an investment and a security — and you might never hang it on the wall. It wasn’t always so mercenary. The Sixties art scene conjured up by Findlay in his memoir Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man is maverick, experimental and far less bothered about