https://www.vulture.com/article/art-market-black-portraiture-boom-burst.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

How the Black Portraiture Boom Went Bust The racial reckoning of 2020 sent prices soaring. Now, no one’s buying.

In October 2021, the artist Serge Attukwei Clottey watched anxiously as a painting he had made just a few months earlier went up for sale at the Phillips auction house in London. The portrait — of a stylish Black couple whose clothes were rendered in colorful strips of duct tape — was his first ever to go to auction.

It was “really, really scary,” Clottey, now 39, tells me. He wouldn’t profit directly from the sale — he had already sold the piece to a collector, who had brought it to Phillips — but a low auction price could devalue all his other work. A high price could set off a speculative furor. For years, Clottey had been known mostly for his tapestries, made from tilelike pieces of discarded plastic bottles. One had sold for $6,875 in 2019. But portraiture was a fresh experiment.

The auction house had estimated the value of the painting, titled Fashion Icons, to be between £30,000 and £40,000 — on par with Clottey’s other prices at the time. But in the end it went for ten times that range: £340,000. Over the next few months, Clottey’s paintings were quickly brought to auction, where many sold for six figures.

That’s when the “craze” began, Clottey tells me. In late 2021, strangers from around the world started flooding his Instagram, his galleries, and his studio with requests to buy his art. Some showed up in Accra in person. And he wasn’t alone in this surreal experience: The same thing was happening to dozens of other young Black artists, especially those from Africa and those who painted portraits of Black people. A month after the sale of Fashion Icons, Kwesi Botchway, a friend of Clottey’s in Ghana, saw one of his own paintings, a portrait of a red-eyed, indigo-skinned woman, go to auction with an estimated price range of $30,000 to $50,000 and then sell for $214,200. A month after that, another friend in the Accra scene, Isshaq Ismail, watched one of his acrylic-and-collage paintings — part of a series of faces resembling African masks — go up for an estimated $15,000 to $20,000. It sold for $275,000.

Two forces had come together to create a perfect speculative storm. The Black Lives Matter movement had provoked museums to fill racial gaps in their collections and canons; gallerists who realized they didn’t represent a single Black artist suddenly went to recruit them. And collectors — including many Black newcomers to the market — wanted in on the action. At the same time, thanks to falling interest rates, the greater art market was flooded with cash. The economist Clare McAndrew has found that the global art market grew $3.7 billion between 2019 and 2022, ultimately reaching a high of $67.8 billion.

Some saw the fresh enthusiasm for Black artists as a sign of meaningful change. It filled the air with “this optimism, this hope,” says Destinee Ross-Sutton, the New York–and–Stockholm–based adviser and dealer: “Maybe things are finally different. Maybe things are gonna get better. Maybe people are ready to listen and to take us seriously.” But portraiture also offered a shortcut to signaling virtue. There was a direct correlation between the visible content of a painting and the identity of its creator. “Black guy on the wall: Boom. ‘I’m not a racist,’” says the dealer Stefan Simchowitz. Simchowitz was the seller of Clottey’s painting at Phillips but does not consider himself a part of the group in question. “‘I don’t have a Black friend,’” he goes on, impersonating the buyers, “‘but a Kwesi Botchway is in my living room.’”

Seasoned operators saw the opportunity for a quick return and bought in, inflating the bubble. African artists, such as the Ghanaians, were especially vulnerable to speculation: Without being signed to international galleries, which could screen far-flung buyers and sort the true collectors from the flippers, they were at a loss. As Clottey puts it, “Most of us, we didn’t even know who we sold to. You had people just flying down to any African country and finding artists.”

Then, in 2024, the wider art market cooled — notching about $10 billion less in sales than its pandemic high — and younger artists were hit particularly hard. In the first half of the year, sales of work by artists under 40 fell by 39 percent from 2023. By this time, anti-woke sentiment had infected the mainstream and interest in showy egalitarianism and visible diversity was noticeably lower. The fervor for Black portraiture peaked and plummeted in just four years.

Latecoming collectors are now stuck holding pricey paintings they can sell only at a loss. Many artists are left with bodies of work they’ll be lucky to sell at all.

“A lot of people exploited us,” says Botchway, whose paintings were subject to a buying spree until late 2023, after which several publicly flopped: One sold for roughly a third of its presale estimate and one failed to sell at all. Botchway grew up in an Accra slum, where he used to know people who bleached their skin. As a painter, he wanted to show the beauty of Blackness, so he began infusing skin tones with purple, a color signifying royalty and, he says, strength. “There were collectors who didn’t want to even understand what the artist was talking about,” he says.

Like Botchway’s work, Clottey’s paintings were about more than what was apparent at first glance. The duct tape used in Fashion Icons was a reference to Marcus Omofuma, a 25-year-old Nigerian man who died on a 1999 deportation flight after Austrian police gagged and bound him with tape. Simchowitz declined to say how much he had paid Clottey for the painting, but by the artist’s recollection of the price, the dealer would have made about six times what he paid for it at auction. “Serge is a great artist,” Simchowitz says. “I miss the work.” But that’s business, he says: “I realized the market was strong.” He knew it would do very well at Phillips.

Simchowitz had actually kicked off the craze the year before. In 2019, he’d bought a painting of a Black woman in a lemon-printed bathing suit, by the Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo, for $22,500. In 2020, he auctioned it off for £675,000, an incredible price — unheard of for an artist’s auction debut — setting off a battle for Boafo’s inventory. Before the year was out, dozens of the artist’s paintings — of Black figures in wavering, Egon Schiele–inspired lines — passed through the auction houses and in most cases garnered six figures.

Ross-Sutton knew a crash had to be coming. In 2020, when she organized an online sale for Christie’s of work by artists from Africa and the diaspora, called “Say It Loud,” she decided to build in safeguards: The artists would receive the majority of the proceeds, and buyers signed contracts agreeing not to resell the work for at least five years. If they sold after that period, they would need to first offer to sell the work back to the artist. If the piece was sold to another party, the artist would get 15 percent of the profit.

“Say It Loud” was a runaway success — as was its second iteration in 2021 — and the profile of Black portraiture was raised even higher. People started streaming into Ross-Sutton’s gallery in New York “like it was a car dealership,” she says. “They walked in like, ‘Oh, if I give cash, can I get a deal?’” She tried to separate collectors who genuinely appreciated the art from opportunists, telling them, “I want to know why you decided to collect. This isn’t just some sort of negotiation over numbers. This is a piece of the culture you’re trying to invest in.”

Artists, too, saw the danger of the surge and tried to get ahead of it. At “Say It Loud,” one of the top prices went to a work by Ismail; it was a portrait of a man with orange-and-blue lips, sold for $110,000. Ismail had up to that point been selling his flat, cartoonish portraits of Black faces — done in impastoed acrylic — out of his studio for as low as $4,000. Within months, another of his paintings sold for more than $200,000, and soon another for $275,000.

Ismail calls the prices ridiculous. To wrest control of the value of his work, he began asking buyers to sign contracts like those devised by Ross-Sutton. But many collectors ignored the terms, and he found they were impossible to enforce. In some cases, Ismail called consignors to remind them of their agreements, but he tells me they all had the same response, saying there was nothing they could do; they all, somehow, had sudden personal emergencies and needed to sell.

On other occasions, Ismail asked auction houses to withdraw his work from sales. But he says he was told his contracts had no real power: The companies were beholden solely to their agreements with sellers. “I’m just the artist,” he says. “And these are people controlling everything.” His sale price seems to have peaked in 2022 at £277,200. This year, it dropped to under $10,000. He has given up on using a contract. “It’s meaningless,” he says.

Some of the artists who were subject to the boom are happy to have had the windfall, however brief. Others begrudge the collectors who sold while the market was hot and gained at their expense. A good number of the painters had known little of the art market when the frenzy began. As Clottey puts it: “We just gave it away.”

A few of the dozens of artists swept up in the trend have now recovered. Boafo, for one, is represented by Gagosian, which is currently showing his work in London, and earlier this year he had a show at Austria’s Belvedere Museum, home to paintings by Klimt, Schiele, and other Vienna Secession artists who influenced his own work. His prices have still fallen in recent years — from a high of $3.4 million in 2021 — but the correction may ultimately be a blessing: In the long run, stability is worth more than a sky-high sale.

Many of the artists I spoke with have moved on from the style of portraiture that fed the boom. All say they are ignoring the auctions to protect their own creative processes. Ismail, via Zoom from his studio in Accra, showed me the still lifes he’s now painting and his new experiments with ceramics and iPad drawings. He was lucky to have invested 80 percent of his boom-time earnings in buying a studio. Others were harder hit, though no one I spoke with was eager to discuss the dip in their finances. Ismail plans to steer clear of market demands. “Value sometimes can be make-believe,” he says. He and his peers have ridden the Zeitgeist once. “For me, that is enough for history.”

Botchway hasn’t changed his style dramatically, but the bust has still redirected his efforts. He and several other artists have been working to develop an infrastructure in Ghana that will make them less reliant on the West. Botchway runs WorldFaze Art Practice, a residency program and cultural center for emerging Ghanaian artists. Boafo now hosts a residency in Accra.

Clottey, like Ismail, has abandoned portraiture, at least for now. “I realized that people got tired of it,” he says. He sent photos of his home in Labadi, Ghana, where his 5-year-old son had covered the walls in drawings. He sees traces of great artists from the past in the scribbles — Basquiat, Pollock, Picasso. Now, the two collaborate on drawings, and Clottey develops them into large canvas works.

“It’s very therapeutic,” he says. “This is like a new me. This is how I’m able to rethink as an artist.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5730646&forum_id=2...id.#48967599)

Haha can’t make this up.

Co-sign that you really need to click through and look at the art.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5730646&forum_id=2...id.#48967628)

https://youtu.be/dK5zh8ZTKO0?si=42dGlp8vb5pqD702

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5730646&forum_id=2...id.#48970640)

all it is is money laundering and spiking the football that they can claim unintelligible pieces of shit are worth millions

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5730646&forum_id=2...id.#48970319)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5730646&forum_id=2...id.#48967655)

yeah this is gonna be a gem of a thread

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5730646&forum_id=2...id.#48968814)

https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/668/13e/82ffe570f7a2e7e65b161d6139cf75cb9e-black-art-market-01-015.rsquare.w570.jpg

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5730646&forum_id=2...id.#48970595)