QUEENS, N.Y.—This past month here in New York we were treated to the spectacle of the two heavyweights of the auction world, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, slugging it out in the ever-popular category of contemporary art. Money flew through the ether, records fell left, right, and center, and both organizations put their gloss on who came out on top. We can summarize things like this: Sotheby’s prize lot, Mark Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) (1950), went for $72,840,000 on May 15, setting the all-time auction record for a contemporary painting; then 24 hours later, at Christie’s, Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) (1963) came pretty close to matching it at $71,720,000. These are phenomenal prices by anybody’s standards, and they have given rise to a whole string of questions—such as, most obviously, how long can this market sustain itself? But the question that I keep wondering is, “What difference do these prices make to ordinary working artists?” And that’s precisely what I asked several people in the studio buildings of Queens, N.Y.

Last weekend I visited a couple of Long Island City open-studio events at Crane Street (the graffiti-adorned building just over from P.S.1) and the Juvenal Reis Studios (rather more anonymously housed in an industrial building right under the 7 train line). Though the attitudes I encountered among the artists were pretty varied, there was near universal agreement that those auction records had “nothing to do with us.”

“I can’t even think how they could have anything to do with us,” Lisa C Soto, a painter of maps and abstractions, told me. When I rehearsed the familiar “trickle-down” argument—that increased money at the top of the market inevitably benefits everyone else on the way down—she snorted her derision: “I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just hype. When people come here they expect to pay a few hundred.”

Abstract painter Martie Holmer considers the “trickle-down myth,” as she put it, to be damaging for artists trying to make a living. “It makes no difference to artists per se, but it makes a difference to the expectations of the uninitiated viewer, who imagines that all artists benefit from higher prices, that it trickles down, and that everyone’s enjoying that,” she said.

Although few of the artists that I spoke to are currently represented by a dealer (some had been in the past) and they all do some kind of other work to support themselves, they are definitely part of the arts economy. Each has made the hundreds-of-dollars-a-month commitment to rent a studio, and all but one are selling work on a more or less regular basis. Soto gets between $2,500 and $6,500 for her paintings, and Holmer said her 22-by-30-inch acrylics on watercolor paper go for $2,000. And they stress the importance of their decision to work as a professional artist: “It’s a profession,” said Soto. “It’s not a craft, it’s not a hobby, it’s a profession.” Christopher Milne, who sells his paintings for between $1,000 and $10,000, explained that “compared to gallery pricing of emerging artists I think [my works] are priced fairly. I’ve been very thoughtful about it, because I’m certainly interested in having a career and making a living, but I’m also very interested in being a fair and proper business person at the same time.”  

The one artist I spoke to who doesn’t sell his work simply chooses not to. Matt Broach posts his video art, based on his own pencil drawings, on the Internet. “It doesn’t make it particularly profitable,” he told me, “but I’m more concerned about getting it out there.” In fact Broach’s attitude to the auction results was the most hostile that I heard: “It makes me want to run as far away as I can from the art market! Work is going for millions of dollars, and it’s gotten to the point where art is seen only as a commodity. People aren’t judging the work on artistic merits any more; it’s just about investment. I want to remove myself.”

If Broach’s radical impatience was unique, he wasn’t alone in being genuinely horrified at a perceived wasted opportunity (“That money could have rebuilt a whole African village,” was a typical comment). But this sentiment also reflects the fact that for a number of working artists what happens in the auction houses and what happens in their studios exist in two different realities. For them, the art market is a forced pairing between two quite separate components: the art and the market. Judith Solomon, a maker of painterly abstractions, put it like this: “People buy art for two different reasons—one is for investment and the other is on the basis of a strictly visceral experience.”

If these artists don’t benefit from the burgeoning art market, they also aren’t remotely concerned about the market bubble bursting. “Whatever the market is doing—going up, down, or around—people are always going to buy art,” is Solomon’s simple analysis. And it seems to sum up the view from Queens.