Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hello, this is the Pearl Lam Podcast. I’m here in New York again. I’m sitting besides Josh Baer. Josh can you tell us and give yourself, give briefly about your journey to become who today Josh Baer is to the audience.

Josh Baer: You mean my 30 second elevator speech?

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes.

Josh Baer: It may take 45 seconds. So I’m a child of artists, so I come to the art world from the inside. Growing up with, like, there’s Clement Greenberg in the house. Would he leave? Can I have dinner? Hanging out with Robert Smithson. Or there’s Andy Warhol playing with my stuff. And I never thought I wanted to have anything to do with the art business. But in my early twenties, I went, wait a second, I don’t want to do all this math and computer stuff. I moved back to New York to live.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Where were you?

Josh Baer: I was in grad school in the midwest. Masters in Computer Science. I know, I’m such a techie. And I was fortunate enough to get a job running a nonprofit space called White Columns, which used to be called something else. And I guess I was dumb enough to take the job because they had no money. So I did that for four years, doing all these big shows. And as a 23 year old, it’s like, okay, try this, try that, try this. And it was a golden age in New York. So you’d go to a studio, and there’s this Jeff Koons guy. You go to a show at the Guggenheim, who’s Joseph Boyce? You’d run off to Europe to see a show. It’s like, who’s this polka guy? So it was a great moment to be a young person in New York. The bars, the music, the film, everything. Great. And then I wound up broke for the first time. So my dad said to me, what if you open an art gallery? And I went, well, that’s a good idea. Not realising that maybe you should know collectors when you open a gallery. Which I didn’t but I knew artists. So I ran a gallery that started really small, that became very big by the nineties with artists like Chris Burton, Annette Messager.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): And that was in the range of how many years?

Josh Baer: 1985 to 94.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Nine years. Wow.

Josh Baer: Nine years. Which is, in retrospect, kind of a typical period that galleries operate before they close as we get to recently. So I built a very big gallery. I expanded right when the art market went into the biggest recession of all time, 1990. And I wound up broke again. So I’m sitting there going, well, I want all this money. I have no money. What am I going to do? And I’m sitting in the shower basically one day and I have this idea to do a newsletter. I’m thinking, okay, well, there’s no way of getting news out quickly because it would take months for Art in America to write something. So I had a meeting. Do you remember a restaurant in New York called Jerry’s?

Pearl Lam (林明珠): No, I don’t know.

Josh Baer: So there was a restaurant in Soho called Jerry’s. It was like the commissary of the movie studios. You’d have the big stars, the extras, all that. I went there for lunch and I met with this guy and I said, I have this idea, but I want you to write it. And we were at Jerry’s and I was talking to a guy named Jerry. It was Jerry Saltz at that time. I said, Jerry, why don’t you write it? He said, this is a great idea, but you should do it yourself. So I started the Baer Faxt which had a fax machine which maybe half your audience doesn’t know.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): That’s why it’s called Baer Faxt.

Josh Baer: It’s a play on words. So a fact versus a fax. So used to be, you know, we get around. It was a man on a fax machine. We had subscribers. First subscriber was this young kid who was used to be an intern near me opening a gallery near where we were. And he’s subscriber number one was this guy, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, called David Zwirner.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Of course.

Josh Baer: So David was subscriber number one. It would be me.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Subscriber number one.

Josh Baer: Yes, $99. 1st cheque came from David Zwirner. Like $99. It’s like, wow, I can eat this week. It was great. And I would stand there with the fax machine and I’d send them out one by one. And we had a couple hundred and a few more. And it became kind of a big deal.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): In a range of how long did you have like 1000 subscribers?

Josh Baer: But we only have 1000 subscribers now. So I would say it was in the hundreds.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hundreds.

Josh Baer: And then it would grow and the price would go up. And I think by this point, a lot of people don’t know that I had a gallery or that I’ve been an art advisor at the same time for the last 30 years. So by being in the market, I’m sure you can tell when you read the art press about what they’re talking about, the art business, and you’re going, well, that’s not exactly it. So by being in the art market, I like to say I can write about the art market in a completely different way because I’ve done the deals and I work with the major dealers and collectors and all that. So that was that 30 seconds,

Pearl Lam (林明珠): A little bit more. You know, I’m very curious about your, and your experience as a galleries at the time, between eighties to nineties, how was, I mean, how was America like and how, and you nine years, you actually represent a lot of great artists.

Josh Baer: They weren’t very commercial at the time, and there were other artists that were very popular with waiting lists of 100 people you probably don’t even know. So it was a much smaller art world.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, yeah, the art world really grown, and has grown enormously is during the two thousands, right?

Josh Baer: Exactly. It’s like we knew all the collectors, either personally or by reputation at that point. So it was, I don’t know, 5% the size.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): At that .5% the size. Wow.

Josh Baer: And I would say that come around 1990, that two of the biggest collectors in the world, and for Soho and people my generation, their two big, best clients, both died in the same year. One was Thomas Aman, and he was a huge supporter of many galleries and younger artists, aside from doing his masterpieces. And there’s a Swedish guy named Fredrick Roos, who was everybody’s biggest client, including mine. And so you had both of them out of the scene at the same time. It’d be like, imagine that Steve Cohen and Mitch Rales were two of the only ten collectors in the world, and they both stopped collecting art. Now, that would be catastrophic. But right now there’s hundreds of people. Back then it was much smaller. In my OG days.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Wow. This is really pretty amazing experience. So you actually witnessed the growth of the American art market?

Josh Baer: Completely. With other recessions and with a different sense of the market becoming more dominant than the art.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Did you ever expect Baer Faxt become to be an industry must read newsletter?

Josh Baer: No. And in a sense, I compare, like, representing Chris Burton, a great artist, and getting shows from around the world, placing pieces in museums was much more important than writing a newsletter that says, you know, Pearl Lam is now represented by Josh Baer:, or who bought this or that. But it’s become an important thing that I have to recognise at the same time. So it’s a little bit embarrassing because it gets a lot of attention.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes. But it’s a must read newspaper. I said, it’s the industry. I mean, in this industry, everybody knows about your newsletter.

Josh Baer: Which is great, because then it becomes. It has a certain amount of credibility and power. And we’ll get to it later, I hope. And we’re leveraging the core newsletter into other products. We’re on this podcast. We have a pretty good podcast ourselves. We like to think, oh, I have to subscribe to your podcast, the Baer Faxt Podcast. It’s been going a year and all those things grow out of what we do as a newsletter and what I do as a art advisor. Reformed art dealer.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah. Tell us more about your Baer Faxt’s collectors circle?

Josh Baer: So it starts a little bit with, remember when Sotheby’s bought the art agency partners Amy Caplozzo, Alan Schwartzman, and they paid them 85 million?

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes, yes.

Josh Baer: Which was a crazy amount.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Crazy amount. Crazy, crazy amount.

Josh Baer: But they recognised something that was interesting. They recognised that all their, many of their clients at Sotheby’s had need.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Christie’s. No, Sotheby’s.

Josh Baer: Sotheby’s. Sotheby’s had a need for advisory service that went beyond just, should I buy this at Sotheby’s? Should I buy that at Sotheby’s? They recognise the demand for knowledge and access, which is what we do around the world. Their only problem was they had no independence. So a while back, I realised that there was an opportunity to create a little bit of a different model of art advisory that’s different than my personal clients with some of whom buy things for eight figures. That needs sort of like art advisor on demand. It started with, same way if you’re wealthy, you might have concierge medical service, where you’ve got access to a team. And I was like, what if we created a product that was a membership that gave access to me as an advisor and information? And I realised after a while that there’s that. First I thought, well, let’s make this for young collectors. And I thought, well, wait a second, what does young mean? And especially spending a lot of time in Asia, a lot of new collectors aren’t necessarily young, but they’re young at spirit. I said, well, let’s expand that to like, can we provide them access and knowledge to transactions through us or on their own? And then we’ve got, even so far, it’s like, can we create a community for them to relate to each other as they’re travelling? And that’s sort of why we call it a circle. And we launched it, I don’t know, officially four or five months ago. And I think it’s a scalable product. In the same way that Sotheby’s had this idea that there are a lot of people that could benefit from this service. And the more we have, actually, the better it gets.

Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes, because people like social life and they like to meet each other. They like community.

Josh Baer: Well, it’s beyond that. It’s like I was comparing the social community of like, the young patrons groups and my gallery. I did the, I organised the Young Patrons of the Israel Museum. I worked with the young patrons of the new museum. And they were great. They were great for me to meet people, but they were localised to one place. And at MoMA particularly, it’s a social thing. And I realised, in fact, that the people I was trying to reach weren’t interested so much in the social as learning. So we’ve always seen it as an educational platform and the way to grow it is by teaching people. So it’s a community, yes, but not a community to go have a cocktail and meet your future husband. It’s a community of like-minded people.

Pearl Lam: And how about your Baer Faxt Podcast? What is it about? Who do you interview?

Josh Baer: What’s interesting lately is that we’ve been interviewing artists and we’ve been able to talk to them about the business, because a lot of artists shy away from that. Next week, or is with Takashi Murakami. And then we did one with Alicia Quadra, who was like, very interesting artist. But we’ve had. I’m blanking on all the podcasts we’ve done. We did Jerry Saltz, Jeff Poe gave, probably the most popular one we did was immediately after he stepped out of Lemon Poe. He did a podcast with us.

Pearl Lam: Oh, Jeff, Jeff.

Josh Baer: And he was great. And we’ve done about a dozen of them. We did UC Bill Cannon when he left Christie’s, his first interview. And it’s a way, in the same way as you’re able to get people to be comfortable with you, because they’re not live streamed. There’s a chance to rephrase.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, you can do the possible.

Josh Baer: Yeah, like, oops, I did something stupid. Can we redo it? And I think I’m able to get people to be more comfortable talking than they might with a normal journalist.

Pearl Lam: So now, I mean, you have been in the art world for so many years and you’ve been in Asia and globally. What are you seeing? What is the dynamic changes since 2000?

Josh Baer: Well, I’ll go back further. It’s like the first time I went to Asia on business was around 199–0, and one of my artists had a show in Tokyo sponsored by the family of a famous fashion assignment. And back then, the idea of being an art dealer was kind of the lowest form of human life.

Pearl Lam: Oh, really?

Josh Baer: Not well respected in 1990s. In 1990 was like, artists were respected. But the notion of a gallerist, it’s like, oh, man, like, you know, garbage collector, gallerist. And I remember being there. It was the opening night of the show, and I travelled from America and like, it’s a big deal and I paid my own way, and the artist is doing big show, 20 works and being super nice. And I asked them if there was somebody I knew, a big art dealer up to Meantown, if they could come to the dinner. And they go, oh, no, no art dealers allowed at opening dinner. None. They can’t go, no art dealers bad. So I went, okay. I remember, I thought, well, that meant me. So I remember going back to my hotel room and I was shedding a tear or two. You know, you fly 7000 miles at your expense, and, like, you go out and buy Kentucky Fried Chicken or something, you’re sitting there and the next day at the festinger and they go, where were you, Josh? And I’m like, but you told me no art dealers are allowed. And they said, we didn’t mean you. So that was, they meant like anybody else. So my view was not a very well respected community back then. So now it’s.

Pearl Lam: Has it been changed now?

Josh Baer: 30 years later, I would say certainly art dealers are probably more respected in the west than artists even. I mean, they’re almost at the top of the chain. It’s like art dealer, collector, artist.

Pearl Lam: And then depending on how big the artist is, if the artist is big.

Josh Baer: Then, you know, yeah, but still, Larry Gagosian is kind of on top, and even all his others are sort of below him. And it’s certainly in the west highly respected. And even in 30 years ago, it was very respected in the west. So that sort of changed. I would say in Japan, a little less so. But, and just to finish this thought, I would say art advisory is a very new thing in Asia.

Pearl Lam: Oh, completely new. Oh, yes. Let’s talk about your art advisory surface, because you have, you started with a gallery, and then you maintain your art advisory. Right?

Josh Baer: So art advisory. When I started in the gallery, there were two art advisors kind of in the world, at least in New York. So two. And now everybody who’s got a pair of high heels or knows a rich person is an art advisor. It’s like there’s no licencing. And there’s somebody, I think it was maybe Jerry Gagosian came up with the term gmail.com. art advisor. And there’s a lot of truth to that. So, listen, there’s a zillion of us there, and there are about 20 or 40 of them in the West that are really, we do 90% of the business that are really well respected, and we can come back to that. But in Asia, it’s still a very new.

Pearl Lam: Very new, very new. And a lot of advisors, they don’t even know what they’re talking about.

Josh Baer: Right?

Pearl Lam: They have no knowledge. They have no experience.

Josh Baer: And there’s a couple of them that are quite good. Yes, of course they have, but not many. And I think it’s an impediment to the growth of the business on a more rigorous scale. And that’s something that even the billionaires there think, well, they can have ten of them, 20 of them, and it’s kind of like it’s not helping them. So that’s something that we’ve recognised that we think is a growth opportunity for us, is to provide advisory for people there. For instance, when I was there in March, we ran into somebody through one of my colleagues, and half my team is Asian and somebody that she knew and a banker from Beijing. And we ran into her. She came to one of our events, and she said, well, she was thinking of buying a Louise Bourgeoisie from Hauser and Wirth. What do we think? And it came out that as of two weeks before, she’d never heard of Louise Bourgeois, nor had she ever heard of Hauser and Wirth.

Pearl Lam: So how did she.

Josh Baer: And she bought this drawing for $400,000. So she’s a very intelligent woman, educated in the West. But it’s like, this is new. So that’s a pretty great opportunity to try to have a conversation with, like, which Louise Bourgeois. Have you seen all the ones they have at all their galleries? So I think we’re only at the beginning of developing more sophisticated marketing.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely. Absolutely. So when did you enter the Chinese market, then?

Josh Baer: Well, I don’t think of it as the Chinese market. I think of it as Asia, as a whole. And I think of it in global terms, not just local terms.

Pearl Lam: But the thing is, it was very different from. I mean, a Korean is much more sophisticated market than the Chinese market, or even Japan is really, really very different.

Josh Baer: And we recognise that. But I was, you know, listen, I’m older, I’m a little late to the game. I always thought, like, well, I could just show up at Art Basel Hong Kong and say, here I am, you know, this white haired guy from New York, you know, all this Jewish guy with an art advisory and like, hey, Chinese billionaire, here I am, let’s start working. I kind of recognise that’s not how things work, okay? So I sort of on the sideline, and then what happened was that I hired somebody who’s quite experienced to work with us and she’s a partner in it. And she’d been. She was born in Mainland China. She’d been at 18, she had her own TV show on national TV as a business show. She went to Berkeley. She became an investment banker. She helped start to Christie’s in Hong Kong when Hauser and Wirth and Ghosh and came to Hong Kong, she introduced them around Asia. And then she sort of had a kid and stepped back from business. And I met her actually for somebody in Hong Kong and we hit it off and she decided to go back in a put on why I into work. So now I have this powerhouse person and through her, another teammate in Shanghai. It’s like, now I can come because she knows who’s who and what’s what. So I like to say, you know, if you’ve got a, you know, the round peg, square hole thing.

Pearl Lam: Yeah.

Josh Baer: So if you got a square hole and you go out in the world looking for a square peg, it’s not going to work. And you find a round peg that doesn’t work. It’s like, I found the peg, now create the hole. So now we have great opportunity to understand what’s going on because, listen, it’s presumptuous for me to understand all these histories and walk in like, I know better. You should do it my way. And people don’t react well to that. And I realised, well, I have to come in with a little bit more humility. Even though I’ve spent 45 years professionally and since age four being around it, I know a lot. But if I come in with that attitude, that’s not a good way. People don’t like that. And it’s presumptuous and it’s xenophobic, that west beast east. So it’s like I waited, and now the opportunity did present itself.

Pearl Lam: You waited for how long?

Josh Baer: Until two years ago. Okay, so I waited till I had, I waited for the square peg. And if I was 25, I would have started like, I’ll just come and try to do it. And if I was 25 now, I’d be going to India saying like, that’s an open, you know, that’s going to be the second richest, you know, country in the world by the end of the century. And it’s billion plus people and they don’t know squat, most of them. That’s the greatest opportunity if you’ve got 10, 20, 30 years to wait for that to happen. I’m 68. I don’t have that time.

Pearl Lam: But so you actually see opportunities at a very early time that you actually have a lot of strategy to build, to build your business.

Josh Baer: We have a lot of strategy. I tell everybody, it’s like everything we have to do, all of this is, you have to be really deliberate. Why am I sending that email? Why are we choosing this guest? By presenting this work of art, it’s like we move fast because we have all this experience, but you have to move carefully.

Pearl Lam: So how do you see digital, I mean, digital social media technology? You know, you study computer science, right? How does that, how do you see technology impact this art, this art market?

Josh Baer: Well, that’s a mini part question. So back in the OG days, to sell art, you had to have a photographer come in for thousands of dollars, and then you’d have these little slides, and if you had money, you’d have these big positive. Yes. And it’s like. And when you sent one out to a collector in California, it’s like, it’s going to take time for them to get there. I hope they return it. Are they going to like it? It looks good there. Wait for them to phone you. Things move very slowly. So right now with digital imagery, the communication process is virtually instantaneous. So it’s a huge business advantage for putting information out. Imagine waiting for, do I have a. It’s my last slide of that painting. Do I send it to this guy, Cincinnati? He may not buy the painting and I don’t get the slide back. How do I show that? It was a huge expense. Now you have a digital camera and, and everything. Just that technology is really highly efficient for business and email and all that. I mean, it’s not the same as looking at art, but you have that now. I guess you were getting at NFTs and it’s like, okay, that’s a new medium. It’s like video. And I remember in 1986 I sold a video installation. I think it might have been the first one ever sold, almost to a museum in the whole country. I mean, it’s like, oh, my God. We sold Adaira Birnbaum since Sf MoMA and went to the Israel Museum for like $5,000.

Pearl Lam: Wow. At that time?

Josh Baer: That was a miracle. Now, to some degree, we have Nam June Paek. Oh, Nam June Pak was also, you know, I wouldn’t think of him exactly the same way, but it was really radical. So we’re now well past that, video installations and all that. So NFTs, it’s like, it’s not interesting when it’s just a JPeg on your phone, but there’s something there. We’re not quite there, but it’s like.

Pearl Lam: Do you think NFT would resurrect? NFT is completely gone.

Josh Baer: Well, I think we’re at the reboot. So today we just, we do these city guides. It’s another product we did. We’ve done them on Hong Kong last year, Tokyo. We just released one on the metaverse. And people kind of shocked even in the.

Pearl Lam: I love that metaverse.

Josh Baer: So we’ve done them on cities. So, you know, Seoul, Hong Kong, we’re going to do more. And I said to my team a few months ago, when we’re planning, I said, I want to do one on the metaverse as a location. And I said, and I’ve already seen it today. It just came out a few hours ago. People are going to be the Baer Faxt is interested in NFTs and we have all these people from these different platforms. I thought, yeah, we should show that we’re open to that as a possibility and sort of framed it. I think it’s NFT 2.0. So 1.0 was what was going. And 1.1 became NFT as Beanie baby. Remember Swatches, wherever Beanie baby the right one could be, or board ape for a million dollars. I mean, that’s just. Yeah, I mean, I’ve got friends who’ve paid that, but they’re fools on this one. And, you know, fortunately.

Pearl Lam: But you did border apes that wouldn’t worth anything.

Josh Baer: Right? And they’re still trading at over a million dollars. So it’s crazy. So that’s just an avatar on your phone. I mean, it’s like, it’s kind of ridiculous.

Pearl Lam: But I thought there’s something that you use to just trading, making money.

Josh Baer: But it was only about money.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, exactly. It’s only about money.

Josh Baer: And that crashed. So what’s left after that are people who are serious about doing them, and that could become interesting again.

Pearl Lam: I think metaverse will always last. I mean, NFT is another story.

Josh Baer: I just see it as part of that whole thing. I think the blockchain is ridiculous for art, and no one really collects art in a serious way, wants their information on the cloud and they want to hold back on that. But it’s like, at the same time, I wrote, I happen to be a fan of Beeple now, and I’ve gone to his museum and I know him. And yes, it’s juvenile, but there’s something there. So when I said that, I’m like, I buy into beeple as sort of a later day Jeff Koons. And people said, oh, you drank the NFT kool aid? I said, no, I drank the Beeple Kool Aid. Not the whole world of that. I mean, are your artists making NFTs?

Pearl Lam: Yes, one artist, I did two NFT, but my I, but I realised after I did two NFT, I really doesn’t really understand the crypto market and how to market it. So the third one, we were working with an NFT platform, a complete different platform that they can sell and everything in LA. Unfortunately, the market crashed, so it’s nothing. You know, at one point, all artists wanted to make NFT.

Josh Baer: But the critical question that you have to ask yourself was, well, was it good? And I’ve always, I’m not very commercial, so I can never figure out what will be commercial, but I can tell what’s good, and that’s all I care about.

Pearl Lam: For me, it was just a learning process, something new, I want to learn about it. And so we did it. And I realised that, no, I don’t know how to market this to all those crypto, crypto guys. And you need to have someone, you know, some platform who’s professional enough, they understand the crypto market and how you talk to these guys, not us. So we were, at one point, we.

Josh Baer: Were working with other people, but there’s interesting people doing things that are sort of related, like, do you know TR lab?

Pearl Lam: Oh, yes, of course.

Josh Baer: So they do, yeah, they do sophisticated things. Audrey is like, she’s a kid, but she’s like, she knows what she’s doing. And Zinli, Cohen, they know what they’re doing. So I’m more interested in companies like that that aren’t just like putting jpegs into phones that are doing something. They have these learning things. It’s crazy what they do. And it’s really thoughtful. So I think of NFTs not so directly, the metaverse not so directly. I think about, like, who’s doing stuff that’s really bright. So I’m like, okay, I’ll look at what they do.

Pearl Lam: Let’s talk back. I mean, let’s talk about your advisory. Okay, your advisory. Now, have you done beside Asia? Do you go to Middle East?

Josh Baer: I was just talking to some people about that in the way that we reached out to Asia. That’s the next place to go.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, I thought Saudi is a very interesting.

Josh Baer: Everybody’s going to Saudi. I saw that when I saw Michael Govin from a distance in Seoul. They just arrived from Saudi Arabia.

Pearl Lam: I saw Michael there as well.

Josh Baer: And Alan Schwartzman was an old, dear friend, is doing big things there. I’m a little bit cautious politically of understanding is everything, you know, what’s going on. So I would need to get my learning curve up before doing that. I was in the Emirates last summer. I’ve been there a few times. It’s complex. Well, in the same way, it’s like the cultures, the culture of Korea and the culture of Japan versus the culture of Thailand. I mean, even the culture of Dubai versus Abu Dhabi versus Qatar, they’re completely different cultures.

Pearl Lam: Completely different. Qatar is great as well.

Josh Baer: But it’s like their history. I forget Abu Dhabi, then Qatar, one of them had like 3000 citizens 50 years ago and one had 400,000. I forget who’s who’s. But that’s completely different. And Charja versus.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, charge of, you know, the BNU is great charger.

Josh Baer: And I was there, I don’t know, 15 years ago or something when they first started.

Pearl Lam: Wow. It’s very different now.

Josh Baer: And it’s, again, it’s complex. And if we don’t have a dialogue with them, things don’t change. And there’s troubling political things in America as much as there is in other parts of the world. I would say I’m being thoughtful here. It’s not. So I see that as a place to go. What’s different about the Middle East than Asia as a population? So when I was in Seoul, there were like a gazillion people at all the openings and at the art fairs, young on their phones, calling their parents, carrying $20,000 bags. I mean, there were thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, potentially hundreds of thousands. I mean, I’ve been to the Dubai Art Fair and they’re like 20 people came in and that’s a different thing. And I suspect in Saudi Arabia, they’re not gonna be 50,000 people going to Art Basel Riyadh with their Gucci bags. Maybe there will, but I don’t see that at the moment.

Pearl Lam: But the Saudi has a bigger population anyway.

Josh Baer: It has a bigger population, yeah, much bigger, for sure.

Pearl Lam: But the intensive, you know, Koreans really love art. They have been collecting since 1970s. And Saudi, the beginning. Everything is at the beginning.

Josh Baer: What’s interesting there, I assume, is one of the things that I found really interesting. Not so much in Asia in general. And Korea definitely has been on the contemporary modern market for 50 years.

Pearl Lam: Yes, for a long time.

Josh Baer: And each of those countries has their own cultural history that’s thousands of years. So it’s not like it’s a cultural void. It’s a 20th century, contemporary modern cultural void. But what I discovered, particularly from mainland China and to some degree Hong Kong, is how flat their knowledge is. So I was talking to somebody whose name I won’t tell you, but you would know in Hong Kong. And they said to me, well, and they’ve been collecting. They were talking about their Julie Moretzu and other stuff, and they said, and we were talking about Manet.

Pearl Lam: Oh, Manet, yeah.

Josh Baer: And the woman said, well, would it be okay if I had a Manet and a Julia Mauritius? I said, yes, it would be okay. So that also got me thinking that for, and she’s very sophisticated and went to school in America, but for new people. And I met some of them from mainland China. They found out about Manet the same day they found out about Basquiat. They don’t have the historical education that all of us in the west had, where we learned about Rembrandt, then we learned about Goya, then we learned about Cezanne, and then Picasso, then Jackson Pollock. And, and we got to Jeff Koons. They learned about it all the same day.

Pearl Lam: All the same day, yes.

Josh Baer: And that’s kind of fascinating. It’s a completely different way of experiencing.

Pearl Lam: History, but it’s different because in the west you have this chronological of the, I mean, of the historical. And you have museums that. Yeah.

Josh Baer: MoMA tells that story Step by step.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, you can go to the museums and look at it. China, you don’t have that.

Josh Baer: Right. It came all at once.

Pearl Lam: So you go to all the museum. Autumn museum has all these different things. And also they see all the things from auction previews.

Josh Baer: Right. But it’s flat. Flat to use Tom Freeminster, the world is flat for them. And it’s like, it’s not bad.

Pearl Lam: It’s just, it’s different. It’s different.

Josh Baer: Different. And so I started looking at that, and even from reading about it and meeting the people and what I realised in the learning things, they started to ask the right questions. And that’s a real game changer, too. It’s like, well, what’s the condition of this work? How does it fit into history? How does this work fit into all the other works of the artist? Not just like the price or what they’ll. Or that somebody else is bidding at auction so that the questions. And listen, intelligence is equal around the world. It’s just a matter of the luck of the draw. If you were born in the South Sudan or if you were born in, you know, in Paris, you’re just as intelligent, but you have different experiences. They have different experiences. But the learning curve, fast.

Pearl Lam: The learning curve is, I mean, is very brief. In this brief time, you have to absorb so many things. And then do you think politics does have a huge impact in the art market?

Josh Baer: Well, you’re talking about politics in the art. Yeah, politics in the art market.

Pearl Lam: No, politics. Like, now, anti China, right? There’s a very huge anti China sentiment. You look at the Chinese contemporary artwork. Order. Order. No, I mean, in general or the European market or the western. I mean, Western Europe. American market has no interest in mainland Chinese artists.

Josh Baer: Well, I would say there’s. I wouldn’t put all mainland Chinese artists in the same pool. What I would say is when I started seeing the art coming out of smiling communist workers, that wasn’t very interesting to me.

Pearl Lam: Those are not interesting. This is what we call the western definition of contemporary art, which is political pop.

Josh Baer: Yes. And when we saw that, I went.

Pearl Lam: I didn’t even know.

Josh Baer: I was like, okay, bye.

Pearl Lam: It’s like, no, those are political pop. This is western definition of Chinese work. But in general, all the Chinese works is done.

Josh Baer: But I would say personally, I mean, I’m not there. I prefer to be expert in things and I’m not that expert. It’s like AI Weiwei, for me, as one of the top ten artists living in the world.

Pearl Lam: But AI Weiwei is a little different in the Chinese. We don’t really consider AI Weiwei as a chinese artist because AI Weiwei, art is China bashing. Right.

Josh Baer: He’s a great artist.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, he’s a great artist, but it’s not.

Josh Baer: I may like it because I have a preconceived notion, of course. See, and, like, there’s the Chinese people and then there’s the Chinese government, and they’re not the same. It’s like when Trump was president. I wouldn’t like to think all Americans were looked at in the rest of the world as we’re pro Trump. So I try to differentiate the politics of the government, and certainly China’s got a different system than we do. I think the issue that I see in the market is more that the money flow out of China has been repressed. And that’s the bigger problem than anything.

Pearl Lam: But isn’t that most collectors, they like to buy as an investment, and therefore they look at the auction market. If the auction market, the price has gone down or price hasn’t gone up or brought in, it will affect them from buying the work. And if in the west, they are not buying a like, say, Chinese contemporary, most of the work, if you look at the auction market, then it doesn’t encourage people to continue to pursue,

Josh Baer: Or it’s an opportunity.

Pearl Lam: Yes, exactly. You need to have people who has balls. Yeah.

Josh Baer: So you know the concept of watch, no one wants to catch a falling knife, right? You know that.

Pearl Lam: Yes, yes.

Josh Baer: Okay, well, I came up with something quite pride out of us. Watch out for the catching the rising knife, because that’s really the dangerous one. That’s like on the rise up and blah, blah, blah, and you catch it there and holy shit, it starts to crash and you’re sunk. So this is conceivably a buying opportunity to get the better examples at a lower price. And that takes guts, that takes a lot of guts to be the only one at auction to raise your hand. Yeah, you have to be, and you have to be playing the long game.

Pearl Lam: And you have to be confidence and everything. You have to believe.

Josh Baer: You have to not need the money out now.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, exactly. What do you think about, I mean, when we talk about art market sustainability, what’s your comments on it?

Josh Baer: I think you’re talking largely about different factions. So the auction houses will figure out how to survive. They’ll have good years, bad years. They’re pivoting in what they’re doing, but they’re okay. Galleries, I mean, if you look back 20 years in art form and see all those ads, a lot of those galleries are gone. It’s normal that galleries rotate out. Think about restaurants. I think 90% of restaurants that open are out of business within five years. So it doesnt mean that much. We make a big deal of somebody closing their gallery, or ten people closing. Its normal, its somewhat Darwinian. Theres hard to do that job 100 hours a week for a little pay. It’s like, it’s hard to be great at business and at creative. So that’s kind of. It’s normal. And then the other part is, like, sustainability of the artist, and it’s like, it’s tough to be an artist, and there’s millions of them. How do we expect to support millions of artists? There aren’t that many that are great, so they’re going to rotate even more quickly. I think someone did a study, they looked at the index of all the artists in Art Basel from one year to ten years later, and it was probably, the rotation was 90%. So this is all normal in general, but it’s. If you’re that artist, that gallery, it’s your whole life. So it’s powerful. At the same time as being, you know, you have one, one shot.

Pearl Lam: On this note, I would like to thank you. Josh, wonderful talking to you.

Josh Baer: It was a pleasure to be here. You asked great questions, and we hope that your audience loves it.

Pearl Lam: I think everybody will be running after you. Sign me as your new client. Sign me as your new client.

Josh Baer: Fight on.

Pearl Lam: Thank you.