Peter Svarzbein

Asher Edelman poses beside "The End of the World," by U.K. artist Christopher Winters, whom Edelman represents through his Manhattan gallery.

The Wise Men

Robert Mnuchin

Jasper Johns Dennis Oppenheim Jean-Michel Basquiat Robert Mapplethorpe Richard Prince Design Discontent The Block and the Booth Street Art, Street Life

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Those outside the art world may remember Asher Edelman as the cutthroat 1980s corporate raider who served as a model—with Carl Icahn—for the ruthless Gordon Gecko character in the film Wall Street. Inside the art world, Edelman is best known for his shrewd collecting instincts. He began buying art in his late teens, then backed such galleries as Mary Boone and Leo Castelli in the ‘80s and, for five years in the ‘90s, ran a museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he mounted retrospectives of Basquiat and Mapplethorpe, among others, before returning to New York to launch his career as a private dealer. This past June, he opened Edelman Arts Inc. in an elegant town house on East 63rd Street with an inaugural show of the conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim. While exhibiting contemporary talents like Oppenheim and the painter Christopher Winters in the front room, Edelman continues to do backroom secondary-market deals involving blue-chip postwar works. During his financier days, Edelman taught a course at Columbia’s business school called Corporate Raiding: The Art of War, in which, until the university intervened, he offered students a $100,000 finder’s fee for spotting takeover targets. Edelman the art dealer may be less brash, but he’s no less ambitious. He says that while his gallery isn’t a carbon copy of anyone else’s, figures like Castelli and Ileanna Sonnabend are role models.

You’ve said that the market is showing scattered signs of weakness. How so?

The amount of time people taketo make decisions about paintings has expanded immensely. I have a very major Basquiat now, and there are three interested buyers. I’m not trying to close on them; they’ll close on themselves, one or another of them. But people are much less worried that the piece might go away. They think, “I’ll find another one. “

You’ve also stated that you don’t mind opening your new gallery now, at the top of the market. What’s your strategy?

If you think the market is going down, and I do, then your next sale should probably be at some percentage under the last auction sale. Or you want to put the piece up at auction not at the last estimate and reserve but at something lower. And if the market isn’t going against you, you will get the old price. I use the auction houses a lot, and they use me a lot. I think the houses are very useful. I don’t think they do the research or the tastemaking we do, but as a market vehicle, it’s terrific that they are there.

Buyers from the world’s growing markets—Russia, China—seem to be propping up the market at the auctions.

In 1989 I sold 30 percent of my collection, by value, because I was going to need money and was opening a museum, and I thought it was the top of the market. At the time everyone talked about the new world: The Japanese were there, and the Europeans were collecting contemporary art.

But it can’t be the same now as it was with the Japanese in the ’80s.

Why? We are in exactly the situation we were in in the 1970s—which was totally predictable two years in advance, economically. The dollar is going to strengthen. It will go up 20 percent in the next 18 months, in my opinion. And if there’s been one support for the art market, it’s the reluctance of non-Americans to sell and the willingness of Europeans and others to buy, because in their currencies the prices don’t look as inflated.

But that’s an illusion, isn’t it?

Of course. People have that illusion. But it will go away, sooner rather than later. The auction houses are going to give far fewer guarantees and purchase far fewer pictures for November’s sales.

Guarantees have been their major strategy recently.

There is a new paradigm. For centuries, dealers established pricing in the art market, and auction houses related to those established prices. As new people like the Russians and the Chinese came into the market and, maybe rightly, didn’t feel comfortable in the hands of dealers and, wrongly, felt very comfortable in the hands of auction houses, people like Mitchell Zuckerman, at Sotheby’s [now chairman of financial services], who is very smart and whom I like, understood that essentially if they put their stamp on a picture, on an artist, they could then set the price.