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In “Trading Beauty,” Valentina Castellani Makes the Case That Markets and Masterpieces Have Always Been Inseparable

The former Gagosian director and Sotheby's veteran discusses her new book, what the Medicis have to do with Qatar and why galleries should stop acting like gatekeepers.

May is a major art month in the New York art world, with a host of fairs on the docket and one of the two most important auction seasons in the world. But it’s also a great season for art even if you aren’t looking to buy, because of the way the market and aesthetics tend to be intertwined, and this is the relationship explored by art historian Valentina Castellani in her new book Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery, which debuts May 1 (pre-order here). Castellani brings authority to the subject, having held leading roles at Sotheby's and Gagosian, and we caught up with her to hear more about the book and her thoughts on our curious market moment.

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Massimiliano Gioni‘s foreword frames the book as a map of the art world’s “operating system,” and the title pairs “trading” with “beauty”—two words many in the field still prefer to keep in separate rooms. What convinced you that the market isn’t a footnote to art history but the through-line of it?

What convinced me was, quite simply, the evidence of history itself. The more closely one examines how artworks are created, circulated and endured, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the notion that the market is merely a secondary layer—an afterthought appended to a purer, autonomous history of art. It is, rather, intrinsic to that history, woven into its very structure. Indeed, as Massimiliano Gioni writes in the foreword, every object we revere today has also been “a line item in a contract.” Art has never been produced in a vacuum, and in my book, I examine the different market models within which works of art have been created during different epochs. Each model was shaped by specific social, political, religious and cultural circumstances. As a result, the criteria by which art is valued have also varied across time.

If we think of the major turning points—from the Church as the primary patron in the Middle Ages, to the emergence of a more open market during the heyday of the Dutch Republic, to the decisive role of dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel, who was responsible for the critical and market acceptance of the Impressionists—it becomes clear that the question is not whether a market existed, but how it was structured and how it operated. To take a concrete example, the remarkable paintings in the exhibition dedicated to Raphael now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York were not created as expressions of the artist’s inspiration, but in response to commissions from patrons—popes, wealthy citizens, members of the aristocracy.

This is what I seek to explore in my book—not to reduce art to economics or to diminish its meaning, but to better understand the conditions within which it was made. Indeed, as I suggest in the conclusion, the true wonder lies in the fact that, even within the constraints imposed by patrons, the shifting demands of different publics or the exclusions of race and gender, artists in every epoch have always been able to create works that are sublime, moving and profoundly meaningful.

Chapter 11 draws most directly on your 11 years as a director at Gagosian in New York, using “Picasso: Mosqueteros” and the Manzoni retrospective as case studies. What does writing about those shows from the perspective of a historian reveal that wasn’t necessarily apparent to you from inside the gallery at the time?

Writing about those exhibitions from the perspective of a historian allowed me to grasp how flexible the art system truly is and how porous the boundaries between roles have become. When I was working on shows such as “Picasso: Mosqueteros” or the Manzoni retrospective, the focus........

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