“Student Princes”
Art + Auction
By SARAH DOUGLAS

It all came together quickly. In December, New York dealer Jack Tilton toured students’ studios at Yale and Columbia universities and Hunter College, which have some of the top MFA programs in the country, and by January, he and his director, Janine Cirincione, had assembled 30 works by 19 artists for an exhibition, “School Days.” The opening at Tilton’s Upper East Side gallery was packed, as the students rubbed shoulders with the likes of collector A. G. Rosen, New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins and New York Times reporter Carol Vogel. By the third day, Tilton had sold about 70 percent of the show to Los Angeles collectors Michael Ovitz and Blake Byrne and Miami collector Craig Robins, among others. As Art&Auction went to press, Tilton was planning to invite the student artists to submit works for his booth at the Armory Show in March, and to mount an exhibition of art drawn from West Coast schools next year.

Showing student works in galleries isn’t new, nor is prowling the studios for early works to collect. Such galleries as Zach Feuer, Kravets Wehby, Marvelli and Guild & Greyshkul in New York and the Black Dragon Society in Los Angeles have been mining the universities for young talent for some time. “We’ve been at it for 10 years and have always looked at schools,” says Marc Wehby of Kravets Wehby, who works with some Hunter College MFAs. But what has changed in recent years, he points out, is the proliferation of graduate art programs.

And along with those, there has been a steep rise in the number of galleries – hundreds in New York’s Chelsea alone – showing emerging artists and hungry for the next big thing. Tilton’s show, with its frank title and rather aggressively priced work, is a good indication that interest has ramped up.

Even established blue-chip dealers are visiting the art schools’ twice-yearly open studios. “The difference now is that you see dealers from galleries who don’t necessarily show emerging work looking at the emerging scene – big international megadealers,” says Wehby. “Now everyone wants to show young painters.”

Collectors have also been keen to spot new talent, in a frenzied contemporary art market ravenous for young blood. New York collector Norman Dubrow says, “Dealers are in a mad scramble for new talent these days. They may be looking around at the kindergartens now!”

Michael Hort, who along with his wife, Susan, has amassed an impressive collection of international contemporary and emerging art in his New York apartment, is a regular at the studios. Collectors Michael Lynne and Jerry Speyer have made appearances at Columbia. And New York venture capitalist and collector John Friedman brought Tilton to the studios at Yale, his alma mater, and introduced him to a young painter named Titus Kaphar, from whom Friedman had already brought work. Kaphar, in turn, introduced the dealer to the work of his fellow students, and that was the genesis of Tilton’s show. “There are collectors who are happy to have the filtering process done for them rather than spend hours going to all the different studios,” says Cirincione.

But the question is, are collectors buying these artists for the long term? Is it wise to throw money at student work that an artist might later disown? Collectors have to make splitsecond decisions these days. Take the case of painter Ashley Hope, who will receive her MFA from Hunter in May. When Dubrow visited her studio last year, he wasn’t totally convinced. When he went to see her work in Tilton’s show, he changed his mind, but it was too late. Two of her paintings had already sold, for $3,000 and $6,000.

Dubrow was also taken aback by the $16,000 price tag on a work by second year Columbia student Natalie Frank. Other collectors didn’t share his skepticism, though. Frank’s first-ever solo exhibition, at Briggs Robinson Gallery in Chelsea, which ran concurrently with the Tilton show, sold out before opening night, with paintings priced from $8,000 to $16,000. Last fall, as the gallery was beginning to work with Frank, collector Richard Massey, according to a report published on Artnet.com, went to Frank’s studio and bought its entire contents.

Today’s MFAs are getting their schooling during a boom time in the art world, which gives them more options than some of their predecessors had. But some say that premature commercial success can lead to artistic conservatism, stagnation, and, ultimately, derivative work that will be worthless a few years hence. One New York collector opines that students probably shouldn’t show with galleries for a few years, because they will get used to the lifestyle that comes with success and be unwilling to change their work. “You go from a situation where you are pleasing your professors to a situation where you are pleasing collectors and dealers,” he says. “You don’t have that time to really work on your own.”

If there is one artist who has brought attention to the recent student phenomenon – and whose success may in part be a cause of the pressure students feel – It’s painter Dana Schutz. In 2002, she had her first solo show – at Feuer – while still an MFA candidate at Columbia. Today a large painting hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, a promised gift from Ovitz, and her work is said to sell in the mid-five figures and up.

Feuer’s gallery in Chelsea has become associated with a number of grad-school artists. “When we showed students, it was because they were my peers,” says Feuer. “I think we had some influence on the trend, since a few of the students we showed developed into serious artists. I am shying away from it now, and trying to show more mature artists. It’s messed up that work by half the graduating class at Columbia will cost more than a Haim Steinbach in 12 months.”

While some schools are uncomfortable with the phenomenon of student sales, others accept it as a fact of life. Peter Halley, dean of the painting department at Yale, says, “If a student has a private appointment with a collector or a dealer, I won’t prevent it, but the way I’ve handled it is to discourage such visitors.” On the other hand, former Columbia visual arts chair Jon Kessler says, “more than half our students come to us with an exhibition record. We are addressing a much more holistic idea of what graduate education is – not a pure arts education, but a place to launch a career. These students go $70,000 into debt. If we can help them get money in pocket, it’s our duty.”

Bruce Ferguson, dean of Columbia’s School of the Arts, is similarly realistic about the school’s relationship to dealers and collectors. “A general professionalization of the art world has taken place over the past decade, in training artists, with arts administrators – the whole cultural field,” he says. “Schools, including outs, are complicit with that. Our students are not isolated from the world, and rather than ignore that, we should take it seriously.”

How do the students in Tilton’s show feel about all this early attention? Kaphar, who returned to grad school after several years, is amenable to showing while still a student partly because of the sobering reality of tuition. “Yale is $40,000 a year,” he points out. “I don’t want to have a McJob when I get out.”

Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz, who currently teaches at New York’s School of Visual Arts, Columbia and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, doesn’t condemn students for selling their work. But he points out that, despite the pressure on students and young artists in today’s hyper-charged market for emerging talent, one shouldn’t forget longevity. “There’s nothing wrong with the electricity of having a 30-month career. However, artists are in this to have 30-year careers.”

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