IN JANUARY 2020, less than two months before galleries around the world closed to the public because of Covid-19, Lauren Halsey had a solo show at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. She was exhibiting works about the historically Black community in South Central \u2014 where she was born, raised and still works \u2014 which is physically quite close to the gallery in Mid-Wilshire but is spiritually farther away. A big crowd came to the opening to see Halsey\u2019s large-scale sculptural installations, which resembled storefront signage, some featuring protest slogans. \u201cReparations Now! In Memory of Our Black Ancestors,\u201d one of them read. \u201cBlack Workers Rising! For Jobs Justice & Dignity,\u201d said another.<\/p>\n
But the show soon caught the art world\u2019s attention for a different reason after a white collector posted on Twitter what he claimed to be a note attached to a sales list from the gallery, which indicated that a number of Halsey\u2019s works were not for sale. Or at least not for sale to him. According to the gallery, in a statement released to Artnet at the time, \u201cPer the artist\u2019s wishes, we reserved certain (not all) sculptures from this body of work for people of color and public collections.\u201d Halsey, 36, wanted her art to be acquired \u2014 to be lived with \u2014 by a diverse group of owners who\u2019d have a special appreciation for the artist\u2019s overall project, which is dedicated, as she\u2019s put it, to \u201cthe empowerment and transcendence of Black and brown folks sociopolitically, economically, intellectually and artistically.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the exception of a co-op apartment, buying a work of art is unlike buying anything else in America. Just because you have the funds to purchase a painting doesn\u2019t mean you can. Since the art world has few formal regulations, it\u2019s guided instead by longstanding rules of decorum: Galleries, which are responsible for discovering artists and fostering their careers, generally take a 50 percent cut, exponentially higher than that of manager equivalents in other creative fields. And visual artists, unlike any other cultural producer, receive no official percentage in residuals, thanks in large part to the outdated first-sale doctrine in U.S. copyright law. This has helped make flipping art at auction a common revenue-generating practice among a certain collector class.<\/p>\n
One way that artists and galleries have protected themselves from speculative buyers is by making potential owners audition for the privilege of purchasing art. A first-time buyer can expect to be questioned by a gallery, with no apparent irony, about what other works they have in their collection. Another collector might need to promise to buy two works by the same artist: one they vow not to sell at auction, the other they pledge to give to a museum. Some artists have had success with other strategies. Major works by the painter Julie Mehretu have only rarely been resold at auction, which has made her work among the most expensive by a living artist \u2014 there\u2019s never enough supply to meet the demand. The conceptual artist David Hammons spent much of his career not showing in white-owned galleries and making difficult-to-sell works, preferring to exhibit in public areas like vacant lots.<\/p>\n
Historically, the artists who\u2019ve made collectors prove their good intentions have been those, like Hammons and Mehretu, with enough power and influence to make the business bend to their will. Most artists have no autonomy, which means that once their work leaves the studio and goes to the gallery, their involvement with it is through. Lately, though, the practice of auditioning collectors has changed, especially as galleries and museums attempt to elevate work by artists who\u2019ve long been neglected or ignored by mainstream institutions. A younger, more diverse generation of artists are asking for more control over how their work gets sold and to whom. Their motivation is as much cultural \u2014 and personal \u2014 as it is financial.<\/p>\n
ONE OF THOSE artists is Janiva Ellis, whose paintings she once described as \u201cinherently Black because I am.\u201d She said it was witnessing the art world\u2019s \u201cgross and stressful\u201d embrace of Black painters, especially figurative painters who focus on Black lives, during the protests against racial injustice in 2020 that \u201cencouraged me to be more intentional\u201d in deciding who gets to collect her work. At 35, she has a resale agreement that grants her residuals so long as she\u2019s living, and she\u2019s tried to prioritize what she calls \u201csafe stewardship.\u201d<\/p>\n
Black artists are not the only ones pushing against precedent. Queer artists \u2014 another historically marginalized group \u2014 are also fighting for the same rights.\u00a0These efforts have unsettled standard practices in an industry that remains overwhelmingly white, and attempts by artists of color and others seeking a more equitable share have proven controversial enough that few art-world figures are willing to talk about the subject. Ellis was an exception: She agreed to speak on the record but only over email in a conversation mediated by her gallery, 47 Canal in New York, where a representative told me, \u201cShe is open to talking, but I hope you understand that we\u2019d like to be cautious as we approach this.\u201d Both Halsey and Kordansky declined to comment on the details of the sales contract for her show in 2020.<\/p>\n
Among collectors, the response has varied. Gardy St. Fleur, an art adviser originally from Haiti who has helped galleries place works by artists of color with \u201cpeople who look like them,\u201d said it was important to find collectors who will truly value a work rather than cash in on what\u2019s popular. \u201cFor some people,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s cool they collect Black art, but they\u2019re not hanging that stuff in their home. I\u2019ve dealt with collectors who will want to collect Black artists, but then they\u2019ll just put them directly into storage.\u201d But Komal Shah, a philanthropist and former tech executive who grew up in India and now lives in California among some 300 pieces of art made by women and artists of color, told me that the idea of sorting collectors by race left her feeling \u201ca little dismayed \u2014 because works by Black artists going to Black collectors does not really make for a broader acceptance.\u201d It was the same logic, she said, as arguing that art by women can only be enjoyed by women: \u201cTo me, that sounds almost like death upon arrival.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the people who bought Halsey\u2019s work at the 2020 show at Kordansky was the visual artist Rashid Johnson, who\u2019s spent his career making works that subtly and often ambiguously center Black identity. \u201cIf Lauren feels that she\u2019s empowered and feels rewarded by having her work located in the homes of Black families, then that is absolutely her right as an artist,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019m not even sure it has to be viewed as an activist position. I think to view it as an activist position is to condition the experience of Blackness as one that is inherently radical. Whiteness is nothing if not great at centering itself. This act by a young Black woman saying this is what she wants for her work can be taken by a white audience as somehow being about them \u2014 when she has explicitly said that this is about the Black folks [whom she wants] to acquire the work, not about a rejection of whiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnson is also one of the few artists who\u2019s made work that explicitly addresses the idea of white ownership of Black art. In 2019, he directed a film adaptation of \u201cNative Son,\u201d based on Richard Wright\u2019s 1940 novel about the tragedy that results after a 20-year-old Black man, Bigger Thomas, is hired as a driver by the Daltons, a wealthy white family in Chicago. In the book, the Dalton patriarch is also Bigger Thomas\u2019s landlord, the owner of the rat-infested building where Bigger lives with his mother, sister and brother. In the film, which updates the story, Bigger is a lover of punk music, and Mr. Dalton is a philanthropist and an art collector. The walls of his mansion are covered in works by Sam Gilliam, Deana Lawson, Glenn Ligon, Henry Taylor and Johnson himself \u2014 all Black artists the art market has recently anointed as valuable. Mr. Dalton\u2019s taste in Black art is intentionally difficult to interpret. \u201cThere\u2019s a read of this where we recognize that Dalton sees the opportunity to invest in a group of voices with incredibly thoughtful and critical ways of amplifying their thinking,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cThere\u2019s a more sinister read that could imagine Dalton as opportunistic. There\u2019s also the hybrid read, which is the place where I think we mostly live.\u201d In that case, Johnson said, Dalton \u201cis all of the above.\u201d As a prominent man of wealth, he\u2019s certainly able to buy this work. But left unanswered is the question of whether he truly has the right to it.<\/p>\n