By Invitation Only: Tim Schneider on his New York Times print debut, 12 fairs in 74 hours, and other art world hot takes
This ones on the house! This edition of 'by invitation only' is free for all our readers.
Welcome to by invitation only, a series of exclusive Q&As offering readers a rare behind-the-curtain look into the lives, interests, and perspectives of creative professionals shaping the art world today.
Introducing our next guest: Tim Schneider
From reviving his blogging roots on Substack to unpacking the art world with insight and humour, this week on by invitation only, Tim Schneider shares his thoughts on creative freedom, top exhibition recommendations, and his camera roll after a crazy auction week.
bio:
Based in New York, Tim Schneider is the founder of The Gray Market, a bi-weekly newsletter that brilliantly decodes the complexities of the contemporary art market. With nearly a decade of gallery experience culminating as Director of Research at Kayne Griffin Corcoran (now Pace Gallery, Los Angeles), Tim was also previously a staff writer for both Artnet News and The Art Newspaper.
His writing blends sharp market insight with natural wit, making his updates both authoritative and refreshingly unpretentious. Recently, he took centre stage moderating a high-profile panel on Clare McAndrew’s widely discussed Art Basel x UBS Art Market Report and also made his New York Times print debut with three co-authored articles, and his first solo byline — a feature on the $70 million Alberto Giacometti that failed to sell at Sotheby’s during New York’s spring auction season.
You can find Tim in all of the following places:
Read The Gray Market on Substack
Follow Tim on Instagram @the_graymarket
Watch Tim chair the Art Basel x UBS Art Market Report Panel Discussion
Read Tim’s recent auction coverage for the NYT
We are beyond grateful to Tim for contributing after such a whirlwind month!
Let’s dive in…
You started writing on Substack in September 2024. How has the experience been so far?
It’s been both a step into the past and a step into the future. The Gray Market started off as a blog in 2013, when blogging and Tumblr were a whole ecosystem unto themselves. Substack today reminds me a lot of Tumblr at its apex, with people being looser and freer and more creative with their work than what you see in most stories in mainstream publications.
That shouldn’t be surprising—posting vs. journalism/magazine writing are very different disciplines with very different standards and processes. But for me, Substack does have a kind of life and interactive element that I’ve found rejuvenating after seven-ish years in staff journalism. And so far people have responded pretty well to me indulging some of my more impish/shitpost-y impulses again, which is cool (and wouldn’t have been doable if I was still on staff somewhere).
None of this is to suggest that Substack is some creative Valhalla or readymade salvation for talented, hardworking people struggling to get by in an increasingly dysfunctional media industry. It’s still a venture capital-backed platform, meaning every writer is constantly in a tug-of-war to see whether they can extract more value from Substack than Substack can extract from them. But that’s not different from what’s happening in legacy media either. At least here there’s more upside and fewer rules.
I’m a big proponent of the idea that we’ve moved into an age where the audience cares way more about the talent or personality outputting the work they like than they care about which masthead (if any) that person works under. So I also think it’s no coincidence that a lot of my favorite writers and thinkers have either pivoted to Substack instead of (or in addition to) trying to keep doing things the old way.
Looking back, what career advice would you give your younger self?
Let excitement lead you, even (maybe especially) if it’s somewhere that scares you a little bit.
Expanding on that: I went through a period of my professional/creative life where I was probably trying too hard to anticipate what the marketplace wanted and then retrofitting my choices in response. Unless you’re an absolutely incredible liar—in which case you’re probably better off just becoming a professional scammer anyway—the audience can tell when you don’t fully believe in what you’re doing. And living any kind of creative life is too damn hard to be worth it unless you care on a deep, personal level about what it is that you’re putting all this time and effort into.
As someone who sees a lot of art, what are your current top recommendations?
This is always a little bit of a struggle when it comes to new art because gallery shows in New York (where I live) rotate so fast. By the time I find something I’m really excited about, it’s often too late to be able to recommend it to anyone else because it’s scheduled to close in 24 to 48 hours or whatever. Justice for longer exhibition runs!
That said, there are two shows (both of which I’ve written about on TGM) still up through almost the end of June that I really dug. The first is Open Group at 601 Artspace on the LES. The main piece, Repeat After Me, is a re-presentation of their installation at the Polish Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale (which I missed). Open Group calls it a “military karaoke bar” of the future. Hopefully that’s a strong enough teaser to get people interested!
The other is Robert Morris: Seeing and Space at Castelli Gallery’s space on West 40th. I had no idea that back in the ‘70s he was making what we can only today call immersive installations. Seeing this show gave me a lot to think about in terms of what that phrase can (and should) mean.
Do you collect art yourself? If so, could you share what’s in your collection?
Technically my wife and I do collect a little bit, though using that term always feels a little self-important relative to the reality of what it is we’re doing. We mainly buy prints and photos from benefit sales or nonprofit orgs. We’ve never spent more than a few hundred bucks on anything to my memory, but it turns out that you can get some really great things even with that limitation.
Here are three favorites:
Christine Sun Kim, Glove Plenitude (2021) – We bought this from Gyopo, an LA nonprofit for cultural producers of the Korean diaspora. (My wife was born/partly grew up in Seoul.) It was a case where we could afford something from a successful artist we love, mainly because the purchase supported an organization whose cause we also feel connected to. The work itself expands on an idea from Viet Thanh Nguyen about how Asian American narratives tend to get crowded out of the marketplace of ideas, only this time with the added layer of how people in the Deaf community get crowded out by narratives from those who can hear.
William Powhida, LA Makeover Chart (2011) – This is basically a 2010s BuzzFeed quiz transmuted onto the art world, where choosing your favorite car, house, body type, celebrity girlfriend, and movie star BFF tells you which LA gallery you should have been represented by at the time.
I got this right before the pandemic shutdowns as part of Powhida’s “Store to Own” initiative, in which he made available—at no cost—a bunch of work he no longer had room to hold onto himself, on the condition that anyone picking it up would keep it safe for at least five years and redistribute part of the sale proceeds to him if they ever sold it. A few years later the concept (and corresponding contract) became the basis for the Zero Art Fair, which he co-founded with the artist Jennifer Dalton in 2024.
Carla Gannis, from The Garden of Emoji Delights (2014) – Yes, Carla (who is a really forward-thinking multimedia artist on all kinds of levels) remade Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (almost) entirely using emoji. What else needs to be said?
Back in January, you made some predictions about the art market for the year ahead. Now that we’re nearing the halfway point, are there any you’d like to revisit or update?
Well, I was right about Frieze being bought by a group led by Ari Emanuel, so I feel good about that! I’m going to leave the rest as they are for now—it feels like cheating to revisit any of them less than six months in. I am a little surprised we haven’t seen more chatbots rolled out yet, but I’ve still got another month before I’m wrong about how fast those would proliferate in the art industry.
What’s in your camera roll?
A selfie I shot at the Other Art Fair, the last stop on my New York
Spring Art Fair Mukbang, where I went to all 12 fairs in the city in 74 hours. An absolutely ludicrous stunt that I am still paying for today lol.
I shot this in the galleries at Sotheby’s just before the big May auctions started. I kept running across this same dude wearing a white linen shirt and pants with a black sweater around his waist, and every time I saw him out of the corner of my eye, I thought he was wearing full karate gear. It’s a wild feeling to be checking out a multimillion-dollar Frank Stella painting while simultaneously wondering if you might become collateral damage in a surprise assault by the Cobra Kai.
The collector Ding Yixiao went on an absolute tear on May 9, posting
IG Story after IG Story showing in real time how much money he was (allegedly) losing on works by ultra-contemporary artists that he had bought from galleries during the post-pandemic boom and was reselling in Christie’s post-war and contemporary day auction. He was even reposting the original invoices for comparison to the sale prices in the
room, taking shots at Christie’s the whole way through. Simultaneously brutal and hilarious. I screencapped a bunch and I know I wasn’t the only one doing it.
This beautifully art directed shot is by my wife (photo credit: Cabelle Ahn) holding up my debut in the print edition of The New York Times on the Monday of auction week. She tells me there are loads of outtakes on the cutting room floor and I believe her—she’s as much of a perfectionist as I am.
Who do you think we should speak to next?
Alexis Hyde, an LA-based advisor who also runs the artist residency at the law firm Quinn Emmanuel (yes, you read that right) after several years managing Doug Aitken’s studio.
A huge thank you to Tim!
Who would you like to see on by invitation only? Leave a comment, send a message or reply to this email.