Djelloul Marbrook

New York’s Hudson Valley and the nearby Berkshires and Taconics are alive with art galleries. When people buy second homes in these
scenic treasuries they look to local galleries to provide them mementos of their new environment. They’re missing a huge bet.

If I were a fledgling or even a seasoned collector of contemporary and recent estate art I would comb these galleries (inset, Warren Street, Hudson, NY, home to seventeen galleries) as an alternative to the pricier Hamptons and Manhattan galleries where prices are driven up by overhead, including the high cost of taste-making.

Traditionally buyers look to the Hamptons and Manhattan to enhance their city homes or their investments. They tend to beautify their second homes with Hudsoniana or art relevant to the locale of the homes. This categorical mindset doesn’t well serve the buyer or the country galleries.

Who am I to press this theory? Well, I’m seventy-three-years-old and I grew up in a family of Manhattan artists, and I’ve managed art estates, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with the art scene.

There are exciting modern artists showing their work in these secondary-markets. As I write this I think of Leslie Bender, Jenny Nelson, Andrew Franck, Chris Metz, Leigh Palmer, Christie Scheele, Ragellah Rourke and Laura Von Rosk, to name just a handful.

There are also estates that for various reasons haven’t reached the Manhattan market.

One of the issues at play is gatekeeping. Manhattan and the Hamptons create markets where there were none; that’s why artists clamor for representation by these galleries. They don’t merely present artists who interest them. When you buy a painting from them it comes with the cachet of having purchased it from a tastemaker, a player. The rural galleries I’m talking about can’t claim this authority. They rarely have the advertising budgets required to compete in the Hamptons or Manhattan.

But if a buyer can muster enough self-confidence to roll the dice in such an unpretentious environment where the gallery owner can’t claim to be a mucky-muck, he can find important buys and build a substantive collection for a fraction of the cost of dealing with the big shots. But he must pit his judgment against convention, against the weight of the establishment. And he must formulate his own guidelines. Size and media are factors. A great deal of fine art is executed on paper and is therefore much less costly than work executed on canvas. But not all work on paper is small, which suggests it’s not always necessary to pay big bucks for big art. On the other hand, much fine art is done on a small scale and is generally less expensive than larger works.

This is not like the difference between Target and Bergdorf Goodman. You go to Target to buy modestly priced goods. You go to Bergdorf for luxury items. But you can find world-class art in these small rural galleries. Sometimes the artist is dead, sometimes the artist is young and restless. No fancy gallery, no rave review in Art Forum has yet declared the artist promising or great, but if you hone your intuition you can find and buy top-notch work while it’s still inexpensive, somewhere, say, in the $350-to-$2,500 range. You’re on your own. No one’s twisting your arm, no one’s promising you a killing, you could be wrong, but it’s fun—and it’s just possible you’re beating the odds.

It’s like the difference between putting your portfolio in the hands of Merrill Lynch or calling your own shots, based on your own savvy. If you have the stomach for it, and if you can acquire the taste, you can beat the market, and in so doing you can turn towns like Woodstock and Hudson, New York, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Kent, Connecticut, into important elements of the overall art market. You can empower the rural economies in which you became involved as a visitor or a part-time resident. You would be paying back the local economy for the pleasure it has afforded you and you would be foxing the system.

But how do you do this? Do you rely on the expertise of the rural galleries? Well, you can certainly educate yourself listening to them, but you don’t have to follow their advice out the window. You can ask to meet the artists. You can visit artists in their studios. Doing this will confront you with the ethical question of whether to make end-runs around the local galleries, buying directly from the artists. This is a gray area. If you feel indebted to the gallery for having shown you something worthy that you otherwise might not have seen, you owe it to the gallery to pay its commission. But if you happened on an artists’ collective or some the work at a flea market or encountered an artist’s work by word of mouth, you’re free to act.

My take on ethics here is simple. These struggling galleries are performing a heroic service to you and to the artists and to the region. They deserve all the support they can get and then some. In many cases, they are reviving whole towns that have fallen on hard times. Such is certainly the case in Hudson, the Columbia County seat, where no fewer than seventeen galleries and many more interior design venues have rejuvenated a failing city.

But grasping the ethics of art buying comes with the time you spend educating yourself instead of just letting the taste-makers tell you what is and is not good art. They’ll tell you whatever they have decided to sell is good art. The point at which you become a real collector is the point at which you find yourself not invariably agreeing with them. Taste-making is an imperfect process. A high-rent gallery sells a piece of bad art to a high roller. In a few years he donates it to a museum at his alma mater. Now the bad art is canonized because it has found its way into a museum. The museum is reluctant to turn it down because it has either been the beneficiary of the buyer or it hopes to be. It works the same way, only much more happily, for good art. The system is imperfect.

So, if you have the time, the money, the curiosity, love of learning, and you like the smell of turpentine and paint, you can’t make a better art investment than patronizing those less-than-famous galleries that are very often selling better art than their high-flying city counterparts. You just have to be the sort of person who doesn’t require the other guy’s word for it. Chances are if you’re self-made, that’s exactly the sort of person you already are.

I could direct you to some classy galleries, but that would spoil the fun, and who’s to say this old gas bag knows what he’s talking about? But the homework is there for you to do. Just read The Country and Abroad magazine, which covers the entire tri-state region, or a more local authority, such as Ellen Thurston’s Much to Do About Hudson, for starters.—DM