Richard Polsky
I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)
(Other Press, September 2009)
Read The 2023 Artnet News Article That Features I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)
Richard Polsky bought Andy Warhol’s self-portrait (Fright Wig) for $47,500 and sold it for almost $400,000. But incredibly, the painting’s value continued to climb. This book chronicles the 12 months in which Polsky tries to reinvest the money from his sale in a raging art market. Meanwhile, his (sold) Warhol’s price goes up, and up, and up — to $2.5 million as Polsky watches from the trenches of the art world. Polsky is the author of I Bought Andy Warhol (Abrams 2005).
Praise for I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)
“An exciting, engaging, and marvelously candid view of the art world. For anyone even faintly curious about art this is a must.”
–Thomas Hoving, former Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Richard Polsky’s memoir of the highly loopy and irrational culture of collectors and dealers is a dishy debunking of some of the scene’s more prominent figures. His good humor and sense of sheer wonder at the lunacy of his chosen profession gives the book a lost-in-the-funhouse giddiness.”
–The New York Observer
“[Richard Polsky] weaves his personal story into the story of a business culture that has grown more venal and volatile in recent years…. Art dealers have played a pivotal role in this pricey shuffle, and Mr. Polsky paints them as an entertainingly infantile, manipulative bunch… That Mr. Polsky operates at the periphery of the art world, and knows it, is an appealing aspect of I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon).”
—Wall Street Journal
“An account of the runaway market of the mid-2000s—where auction houses sold close to $400 million of art in a night, and the value of a Warhol might quadruple in a month—and one private dealer’s attempt to adjust….Polsky’s prose is as unpolished as his persona, but that only adds to the rare candor that animates his riveting account of behind-the-scenes trading. Now that the market has plummeted, we can only hope he’ll be able to buy back his Warhol and complete the trilogy.”
—San Francisco Magazine
“[A] breezy memoir of the art market before the economic crash.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Entertaining…[Polsky’s] memoir takes the reader on a wild ride about the business of buying and selling this real estate, where one must learn how to play it cool, even when millions of dollars are at stake.”
—Carol Hoenig, The Huffington Post
“In this instructive, irreverent and often uproarious memoir, Polsky explains the capricious functioning of the art market and the economic and cultural forces that have transformed it from the 1980s… A highly enjoyable and informative insider’s guide to a milieu to which few are privy, this will be of interest to the general reader seeking to understand the art world’s economic evolution and cultural impact, told through a delightfully vital mixture of memoir, reportage and social satire.”
—Publishers Weekly
Richard Polsky is the author of I Bought Andy Warhol and The Art Market Guide (1995–1998). He began his professional career in the art world thirty-one years ago and in 1984 cofounded Acme Art, where he showed the work of such artists as Joseph Cornell, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Bill Traylor. Since 1989 he has been a private dealer specializing in works by postwar artists, with an emphasis on Pop art. He is currently a contributor to artnet magazine online and lives in Sausalito, California.