THIS WEEK'S HOT TOPIC
Well, we did it. The NoReserve newsletter is officially one year old.
We set out with a goal of stewarding a new audience of art fans by making the often opaque art world accessible to all, and we’re happy to report that you, dear readers, have responded in kind. Since launching in September of 2025 as The Baer Faxt’s first free newsletter, our subscriber numbers have grown exponentially, the newsletter’s average open-rate has exceeded 75%, and our Instagram has amassed over 10,000 followers.
The results of our survey echo these numbers. Feedback was encouragingly positive, and the suggestions submitted were, by and large, thoughtful. “A trusted guide,” “a unique and valuable voice,” and “one of the best art related newsletters” were some of the kind descriptions you used for us.
We learned a lot, and plan to incorporate much of your input in the coming months as we continue to grow the newsletter. Expect fresh voices, new features, and the kind of takes and breakdowns you can’t get anywhere else.
However, one poll respondent offered a suggestion I’m afraid we can’t accommodate: “Get a professional writer, or hire an editor!”
Here’s to another year and more,
NoReserve
3…THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT LUCIEN SMITH
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Lucien Smith, who passed away at age 37 last week, was a unique talent and singular figure in the art world, with an equally distinct beginning to his career. In his early 20s, not long after graduating from the Cooper Union in 2011, many of New York’s dealers like Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Bill Powers took notice of the young artist’s work, just months after he delivered his senior thesis. The pieces that caught their attention were called “Rain Paintings,” canvases that Smith painted with pigment sprayed from fire extinguishers, giving them a dappled, dotted abstraction that looked like rain drops. One such painting from Smith’s thesis show was purchased for $10,000, then, only two years later, sold for $389,000 at Phillips. It was the beginning of a trend in intense, dogged speculation in the art market, and Smith’s career was both helped and hurt by this volatile market movement.
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Eventually, this movement got a name: Zombie Formalism. The label, coined by artist Walter Robinson, was used as a catch-all for works of this time that harkened back to mid-century formalist painting and fetched large sums on the secondary market. Fellow artists like Jacob Kassay and Oscar Murillo were included in the movement, but what was most similar about the three painters, beyond how their artwork looked, was their vertiginous rise to success. Back then, it was a unprecedented for an artist only two to three years removed from a bachelor’s program to have their work fetch six figure sums. Robinson’s essay was critical of the artwork, but today, the art world is catching up with the inherent cruelty of how a speculative market can impact an artist who is nascent in their career.
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Smith forged his own path away from Zombie Formalism, though he never stopped making his own artwork either. In recent years, Smith put his attention towards organizing for his community by creating lasting, impactful contributions in the form of the non-profit Serving The People and the Chinatown restaurant FOOD. Serving The People provides support to young artists and creatives by hosting meet-ups and free workshops and talks, and has spread beyond New York to cities like Paris, Los Angeles, and Milan. His restaurant project, FOOD, which opened in 2025, is a new take on Gordon Matta-Clark’s artist-run SoHo restaurant from the 1970s, building on that original vision of providing affordable food to the artist community and offering jobs as servers and line cooks to artists in need of work. Through his artwork and his community projects, Smith’s legacy in the art world will live on.
A NUMBER TO KNOW
1905-83
The time period that produced three-quarters of all paintings that have sold for more than $100 million to date, according to a Financial Times analysis. Given the centuries of art that have entered the market, it’s worth unpacking why so many of the priciest works hail from the 20th century’s first eight decades.
Of the theories offered by Jackie Wullschläger in the FT, two stand out. First, 1905-83 largely corresponds to the emergence of styles so bold and distinctive that contemporary viewers need little (if any) formal art education to recognize the artists. “Not everyone can tell one Old Master from another, but we know a Picasso when we see one,” she writes. It’s a perfect fit for the billionaire collectors who win these trophies: celebrations of rugged individualism that will still read as elite to a near-universal audience.
The second factor is the globalization of high-end taste. Although art and objects have been collected across geographical boundaries for millennia, it wasn’t until the post World War II era that the information, education, and commercial ecosystems of different regions merged into an intercontinental superstructure of shared reference points, values, desires, and marketplaces. Now, a world-spanning network of ultra-wealth not only recognizes the same distinctive 20th-century artistic styles but also wants to compete for them in the same channels. Hello, bidding wars!
Plenty of other elements have contributed to 1905-83 becoming the center of the market for $100+ million paintings, including that it’s still too soon for anything made later to go for so much cash. But the two points above explain an awful lot of the phenomenon. And while we wait to see which artworks will join the centimillion-dollar club next, we should remember that those factors won’t fade anytime soon.
—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market
ASK: ACCESS SOPHISTICATED KNOWLEDGE
NoReserve ASKed: When you launched NoReserve, what was the goal? In what ways has that goal evolved a year on, and what have you learned about the newsletter’s audience in the interim?
Josh Baer for NoReserve: When we launched NoReserve, we wanted to "walk the walk" of reaching out to new audiences of the art market. There are many more people who buy tickets to art fairs than just the VIPs, and they may not be well versed in the idiosyncrasies of the art market.
Yet we also recognize the curiosity of our legacy readers and certainly do want them to lean into newer ways of looking at art and the art market as well.
Personally, my biggest takeaway is that while we started with a tagline of “No gate keeping," it’s now clearer than ever that gate keeping is valuable and not just for the high-end, behind-the-ropes sectors of the market. In a world that often advocates for "Post Knowledge," we still strive to provide actual lived, human knowledge. So yes, sure, use AI, but we see that our audiences value what we do and even our spot as gate keepers.
Have your own question for the NoReserve team? Reply to this email or reach out to us on Instagram, @no.reserve. Readers whose submissions we choose get a special prize—six free months of our paid newsletter, The Baer Faxt.
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