Steven Maier - Gallery Confidential: Confessions of an Art Dealer

Art is a funny business. If I taped a banana peel to this page you would visually slip on it and that would be funny. But if I tripped on it, that would be hilarious. We all probably do a double-take and quietly smirk when a banana, duct-taped to a wall in an art fair, sells for $120,000.00, thinking in the back of our minds that the buyer is monetarily tripping on that banana.

Titled Comedian, that duct-taped banana actually joined the art historical process by becoming a commodified conceptual art piece and is now part of the Guggenheim Museums collection. Along with a nice tax write-off, the donors clinched their place in art history. What a beautiful business. Not one for prat-falling monkeys.

There is a classic James Thurber cartoon of an erudite-looking man standing on a chair in an art gallery, head-cocked, intently inspecting a painting. Three figures are off to the side, looking at him, and one says: He knows everything about art, but doesnt know what he likes.

Thurber defined the irony of expertise. Its easy to squeeze the joy out of looking and seeing. To overthink the experience instead of reveling in it.

Lets revel.

Kissing and telling is not nice, but at times I cant help myself. I aim to titillate. To truthfully tantalize. Taken together, these sketches paint a portrait, sometimes two-faced, of highlights during the pinball trajectory of my topsy-turvy career.

These stories are meant to describe how both buying and selling art actually work. Instead of a tutorial, this is more of a TRUTH-TORIALnothing theoretical about it. This is how the mid market works. You can draw, or doodle, your own conclusions.

For me, the last half-century in the art business has been like a torrid romance in a cheap romance novel, and the moral of the storyambiguous. These recollections pull the skirt up and the curtains back on the gallery business. But generally, the art business is just funny.

These vignettes are not varnished or censored, not chronological or apocryphal. Meant more to entertain than to educate. I hope you enjoy the stories and are amused at the decades-long professional pratfall that partly describes my art career. I am not convinced that we can learn from other peoples mistakes, but if we can, there are lessons to be learned here through clucks and chuckles.

If you prefer a scholarly read by a bald bow-tie-wearing proper British expert (like the fellow featured in Thurbers cartoon), a learned treatise, rather than this bumpy ride with arts butt cracks showing, there are good ones to choose from.

Otherwise, reader discretion is recommended.

Rejected book cover converted to B&W

Still heading down the boomer highway seven decades in. Mostly in the slow lane, but still enjoying the ride. Tollgate ahead. Looking back through the rearview mirror, some things get distorted and transposed in memory and can appear closer than they really areyou know this if youve looked into a cars rearview mirror and read the fine print.

It can be challenging to discover the turning points in life, the events that send us in unexpected directions. How did an art consultant and gallery director/art dealer become Sonny Pops: Hawaiis Ambassador of Nuu Pop?

These stories draw from a long and winding art career. A road trip with detours and warning signs: bumps ahead. If this were a seminar on buying and selling art I would have to charge $199 and feel like you got the best part of the deal. If this were stand up comedy the door charge would be ten bucks and I would feel like I got the last laugh.

Y ou could sell wet matches to Eskimos. (That should be illegal, but it isnt). So said a friend of my mothers, a seasoned and perhaps masterful artist and one of the early aloha shirt designers, Johnny Meigs, describing my ability to sell art.

I was and remain offended by his remark. Thats not the reputation that I aspired to. Because what you sell and how you sell it matters to me. Johnny made that remark because I was selling limited edition Dali prints to tourists, and, in retrospect, given what I know now, I understand and respect his commentary. If you see me selling matches, get a lighter.

Over the years, I have tried to be honest and to sell with integrity, but an art dealer is only as good as his sources. Even auction houses have made egregious mistakes. Trust but verify was President Reagans mantra about his arms deals with Russia. It might apply to art as well as nuclear weapons.

The art market is sometimes fraught with ethically questionable practices. An art consultant may run into a dealer who may not be honest about the provenance of a piece of art. Or a publisher may not be straight about the legitimacy of a print. (It took the experience of the Dali market fiasco for me to understand the necessity of digging into the market to ferret out fakes and frauds.) Or a client may give you something to sell on the secondary market, and he may believe that it is legit, but there could be issues of which he is not aware. It is incumbent on art consultants and dealers to explore the provenance and legitimacy of the art they offer.

When you represent a gallery, you have faith in the integrity of the art. That, and realizing that unscrupulous players prey on unsuspecting collectors, made me wary.

Almost all of my relationships have been mutually beneficial and harmonious, but probably the ones you want to hear about are the ones that werent.

Ill tell you about both.

B efore moving to Waikiki in 1982, I had been a single father living in Sausalito, California. Living in the Bay Area was a good choice; I loved it, but my career was off course. I was a painting and decorating contractor and realized that it was not what I wanted to do.

As my first daughter grew from a toddler to a young child, it became clear that she needed her mother. Her mom, after a rough patch, was finally in a healthy place to care for her. A mothers love is uniquely important in a childs life. Reuniting them was the right thing to do.

Was I having a pre-midlife crisis? I was still at least a decade too young for that. Nonetheless I thought: Why wait? A much- needed life change had been percolating in my mind, so I brewed up plan A.

Hawaii was calling.

After years of round-the-clock work and child care (I gained enormous respect for single parents during that time), I felt that I could finally make a move and change careers. It felt like it was now or never.