A new documentary lays bare the idiosyncrasies of the art market

By I.W.

“YOU NEED to send me flowers,” says Robert Rauschenberg, a pop artist, as he smacks Robert Scull on the shoulder. “I’ve been working my ass off for you to make that profit.” It is 1973 and Scull, a taxi-fleet owner from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has just made $2.2m ($12.5m today) selling 50 paintings from his collection of post-war American art at Sotheby’s, an auction house. Rauschenberg is peeved, and understandably so. Scull and his wife, Ethel, had paid him $900 for “Thaw” in the late 1950s; that night it went for $85,000. The painting had suddenly accrued value like an apartment in a once-dodgy, now “up-and-coming”, neighbourhood.

“The Price of Everything”, Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary about the art world and the money sloshing around in it, points to this sale as the moment the market as it exists today was born. In the 20th century auction houses began to realise they were running out of Old Masters to offer, says Ed Dolman of Phillips, but art itself did not cease to be cultural capital. A new generation of artists like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg emerged, who were both exciting and relentlessly productive. Dealers, gallerists and collectors were in luck: if they could create demand there was plenty of supply. They succeeded. Soon, expensive art no longer had to be centuries old.