In December the director of my New York gallery, Blaize Lehane, received an e-mail canceling the sale he had made the previous month at Artissima, the contemporary-art fair in Turin, of a black-and-white charcoal drawing by Scott Hunt.

The e-mail sender, a young Spaniard who had come to the fair with a curator and “advisers” in tow, wrote the following to explain his action:

“Coming back to Madrid, we analyzed the pieces that we bought and we realized that Scott wasn’t born in 1981; that is the year when he got his bachelor’s degree. You should be more clear about Scott’s birth year.”

Despite effusive praise of Scott’s talent elsewhere in the e-mail—describing him, for example, as a “master of charcoal,” which, incidentally, he is—Young Spanish Buyer (let’s not call him a collector) couldn’t get over the fact that Scott is almost 50 years old. Indirectly, YSB even accused us of covering up the artist’s true age. To his mind we had violated some secret principle defining what constitutes an “emerging” artist.

When my business partner, Cassie, and I met Scott—in 2005 through a dealer at Gagosianwe were pretty certain he wasn’t 22, but we also did not think to ask his age. In fact, after seeing a sheaf of his drawings, we didn’t ask him much of anything apart from whether he’d like to show with us. We didn’t care whether he’d gone to Yale or got drunk with trendy young curators on the weekends. We gave him two shows, one in New York and one in Berlin, and both sold pieces to very good contemporary collectors. The Israel Museum just acquired two of his works. Scott was thrilled to show and to sell, and no one mentioned his age or his career trajectory. He made his living as a commercial illustrator, and around the time we met him, he had decided to take his fine-art creation, always a personal and private endeavor, into the public realm. I think he still may not consider being an artist a career but something he fundamentally is. Regardless, now that he has had some success, we are talking to other curators and dealers who love the work. Whether he wants a career or not, he’s got the beginning of one at age 50.

The question then is, Can an emerging artist be middle-aged? YSB says no. But if you delve into this issue, what does anyone even mean by the phrase? Who is considered emerging? Banks Violette? Elizabeth Peyton? That kid over at Zach Feuer Gallery who’s having his second show? How about the great Mary Heilmann, who is emerging from undeserved obscurity only now, with a retrospective at the New Museum on the horizon? She’s 70. If you suggest that emerging has something to do with money or the market, you really get into a bind: A typical painting from the 1970s by Kenneth Noland, who was born in 1924 and is definitely past the emerging stage, sells for a fraction of one by Mark Grotjahn, born in 1968.

My inclination is to conclude that the Young Spanish Buyer is like so many fairgoers today, acquiring art for reasons other than what it depicts, what it represents, how it affects him. If those were his criteria, the drawing would have to be his. I’m guessing that he sees his purchases as monetary investments, somehow linking youthful genius now to a windfall later. The idea is that if you buy immature talent in bulk, a few of the artists are bound to have long careers, and you’ll have a fortune on paper and canvas. It’s the art world equivalent of penny-stock investing.

The contemporary-art market is getting choppy, $34 million Lucian Freuds notwithstanding. Many recently opened galleries are having a tough time. If it gets a bit rougher than it is now—and signs are that it may—many art investors of YSB’s ilk are going to be sitting on some seriously illiquid assets. It’s not wrong to ask questions pertaining to value and price where contemporary art is concerned. At these prices you’d be crazy not to. And the recent auctions have already started to show a flight to quality and value—you don’t want to be the guy buying a Mark Grotjahn for $1 million. But savvy collectors know that over time, quality works bought at primary-market prices hold their value and that the criteria for judging art are complex. One thing that shouldn’t matter, however, is the artist’s age.

"Age Appropriate?" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.