Sean Tatol at The Point:
I sometimes half-joke that the art world died in 2003. In that account, the two signal events from that year are the death of the art dealer Colin de Land and Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), a video work that consists of footage of the artist having sex with a collector who had agreed to buy an edition of the work beforehand. To my knowledge neither had a tangible effect on the art world at large beyond New York, but both represented an inflection point for the late-avant-garde framework that had sustained that world since the early Nineties.
De Land was a late, DIY version of Leo Castelli, someone whose respected position and informal panache—holding art fairs in the rooms of the Gramercy Park Hotel, teaching art history to prospective collectors, wearing a modified trucker hat that read “Don’t bother me unless you’re buyin’”—allowed him to mediate between radical, uncommercial artists and an active collector base. His death marked the end of the “gentleman dealer.”
more here.
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