Gallery Confidential: Confessions of an Art Dealer

Product Description

What’s really happening behind the scenes in the high-stakes art world?
Steven Maier shares his hair-raising and often hilarious stories from his 40+ years as an art dealer to the stars and to the not-so-starry. From Janet Jackson to Anthony Quinn, from Dali to Picasso, he’s seen it all and shares his true-life encounters and rollicking adventures in a no-holds-barred expose.
“Like One Thousand and One Nights, Maier’s 100 stories of the art world are part audacious expose, part memoir, and part history of four crazy decades filled with Hollywood stars, scoundrels, artistic geniuses, and hustlers. For a thrilling, sometimes sad, and always entertaining inside look at the art world, read Gallery Confidential.” –Charles Levin, Amazon Bestselling Author of the NOT SO DEAD Trilogy
How does a creative young man go from being a decorative house painter to becoming a successful art dealer traveling the world and then finding a third career as the artist Sonny Pops, Hawaii’s Ambassador of Nu’u Pop?
As Maier says, Gallery Confidential is a dog-eared survival manual. A must-read for anyone that buys, sells, or looks at art or just wants to hop on an irreverent roller coaster ride of a new age story.
What does it mean to be an artist and sell your work? What do you do when you face adversity, like opening your dream art gallery a week before 9/11, and fail? How do you pick yourself back up? How do you carry $200,000 in cash on an airplane? The answer to these questions and more resonate in the lively anecdotes that make up the life of a man well-lived.
Pick up your copy of Gallery Confidential today. Pour yourself a drink, sit back, and explore the art world most of us have never seen.

Review

Excerpt: 

Art is a funny business. If I taped a banana peel to this page you would visually slip on it and that would be funny. But if I tripped on it, that would be hilarious. We all probably do a double-take and quietly smirk when a banana, duct-taped to a wall in an art fair, sells for $120,000.00, thinking in the back of our minds that the buyer is monetarily tripping on that banana.

Titled “Comedian,” that duct-taped banana actually joined the art historical process by becoming a commodified conceptual art piece and is now part of the Guggenheim Museum’s collection. Along with a nice tax write-off, the donors clinched their place in art history. What a beautiful business. Not one for prat-falling monkeys.

There is a classic James Thurber cartoon of an erudite-looking man standing on a chair in an art gallery, head-cocked, intently inspecting a painting. Three figures are off to the side, looking at him, and one says: “He knows everything about art, but doesn’t know what he likes.”

Thurber defined the irony of expertise. It’s easy to squeeze the joy out of looking and seeing. To overthink the experience instead of reveling in it.

Let’s revel.

Kissing and telling is not nice, but at times I can’t help myself. I aim to titillate. To truthfully tantalize. Taken together, these sketches paint a portrait, sometimes two-faced, of highlights during the pinball trajectory of my topsy-turvy career.

These stories are meant to describe how both buying and selling art actually work. Instead of a tutorial, this is more of a TRUTH-TORIAL—nothing theoretical about it. This is how the mid market works. You can draw, or doodle, your own conclusions.

For me, the last half-century in the art business has been like a torrid romance in a cheap romance novel, and the moral of the story…ambiguous. These recollections pull the skirt up and the curtains back on the gallery business. But generally, the art business is just funny.

These vignettes are not varnished or censored, not chronological or apocryphal. Meant more to entertain than to educate. I hope you enjoy the stories and are amused at the decades-long professional pratfall that partly describes my art career. I am not convinced that we can learn from