“We were always careful about pricing and not being excessive,” says Gordon Veneklasen, the director of the Michael Werner gallery, citing the “reasonable” values (typically starting at about $500,000 per painting) the gallery sets for its star Sigmar Polke. “We’ve never been greedy in terms of the primary market.” This policy reflects lessons learned from past slowdowns. Pricing reasonably entails not being swayed by auction results. “If you have a long-term view, you totally ignore the auction houses,” says Veneklasen. “You price the primary market differently from the secondary market. Even if the secondary market starts to go wild, you’re still careful.” Pierre Levai, president of Marlborough galleries, agrees. “We have been always very careful not to adjust our prices according to auction prices,” he says. “But in a strange way, a lot of artists we’ve dealt with—Frank Auerbach, Fernando Botero, Red Grooms—sell very well but are not fashionable.” For that reason, their works have been less subject to price jumps in the salesroom.

At the first whiff of economic ills, some speculators may opt to unload their holdings quickly. “If there is anything that undermines the market during a recession, it is that there is a significant number of collectors who have nothing but a monetary attachment to the work,” says Glimcher. “It’s off to the auction house.” He adds, however, that even an ailing economy, like that in the ’90s, won’t bring buying to a complete halt. In fact, immediately following turmoil in the financial markets, people often take their money out of equities and invest in art instead. “ There was always something about the recession that drove an interest in art collecting with some people,” he says. “When everything looks like it’s meaning­less, it’s nice to see economic value tied to some deeper level of meaning. There were artists who achieved their record prices at auction throughout those years.” (That purchasing phase is usually brief—six to nine months—after which the slowdown hits artworks as well; this time gap is why financial analysts sometimes call art a lagging indicator.)

The effect of economic woes on art buying was discussed during an ADAA-sponsored panel discussion at the Museum of Modern Art in February. Panelist David Zwirner observed that “there are great collectors who have been frustrated by price developments and are waiting in the wings to make purchases as soon as things change a bit. I think that balance will keep things moving nicely.” (Zwirner should know—he opened his first space in SoHo in 1993, a market nadir.) Michael Findlay, of Acquavella, also on the panel, agreed with Zwirner, adding that collectors will become more selective, but “the good stuff will continue to sell.” Andrea Rosen, while pointing out that she wasn’t saying the current downturn was a recession, claimed to have learned a lot from launching her gallery during the last one, in 1990. Rosen noted that buying habits change during slower times, shifts that can help artists, such as Lynda Benglis and Robert Morris, who have been flying under the radar. Collectors gravitate toward the part of the market not driven by the auction houses, she explained, and “begin to look at things that have been overlooked by the market. It is not buying with your ears.” Or as another dealer, not on the panel, put it, in the early 1990s, “people stopped buying names.”

One strategy that has helped dealers through lean years is cooperation. If the ’80s were characterized by cutthroat competitiveness, the ’90s were a time when dealers often helped one another pull through. “There were people who fell on hard times,” notes Glimcher. “And artists, dealers and collectors said, ‘We can’t see that institution just go out like that.’  And we did things that were not necessarily market driven in order to support that institution.” The Chelsea gallerist Jack Shainman recalls that in SoHo, where he rode out the ’90s downturn, one dealer might buy an artwork from another to keep him or her in business.  “There was a comforting acceptance that many people were operating on a shoestring.”