Judd Tully, fifty years of making the art market explain itself

Judd Tully

Photo: Meenween / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 13, 1947 Chicago, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Art Critic, Journalist and Filmmaker

The art market does not like being watched. It prefers the language of rarity, of private sales, of discreet conversations in white-walled rooms. Judd Tully spent fifty years making it talk anyway.

He did not arrive at art criticism by the conventional route. Born Judd Goldstein on Chicago’s North Side, he first put his journalist’s instincts to work in a context far removed from galleries and auction houses: The Berkeley Barb, the underground newspaper where he covered the trials of the Soledad Brothers, George Jackson, and Angela Davis in the politically charged early 1970s. The subjects were different — civil rights, state power, contested justice — but the method was the same: find the thing the institution wants to keep quiet, and write about it precisely.

When he arrived in New York around 1972, the art world was entering one of its periodic manias, and Tully was positioned to document it. Freelancing for Flash Art, the New Art Examiner, and the SoHo Weekly News, he started building the kind of institutional knowledge that takes a decade to acquire and a lifetime to apply. By 1985, The Washington Post was using him as a stringer to cover the auction market — a beat that was about to become one of the defining stories of American cultural life.

The boom of the mid-1980s made art prices impossible to ignore. Tully was there for the first post-war works that crossed multi-million dollar thresholds, reporting figures that most journalists dismissed as aberrations and he recognized as a structural shift. His two-decade tenure as editor-at-large of Art & Auction magazine — through boom, bust, and the controversial new age of art funds and market speculation — gave him a platform that no other beat journalist in his field matched for continuity.

The critical layer in his work was never incidental. When the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director were indicted in 1990 over Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography retrospective, Tully covered it not as a culture-war skirmish but as a test of institutional nerve — who bends under pressure and who does not. When art dealer Larry Salander’s fraud operation unraveled, Tully’s reporting appeared in the CNBC documentary American Greed: The Art of the Steal. When the Knoedler Gallery’s eighty-million-dollar forgery scandal broke — a fraud that had passed undetected through the highest levels of the art establishment — he was part of the documentary record in Driven to Abstraction. The pattern was consistent: the institutions he wrote about were not corrupt from the outside. They corroded from within their own expertise.

The documentary he co-directed with Harold Crooks, The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art and Times of David Hammons, represents a different kind of work. Hammons is the artist the art world most wants to claim and least knows how to contain — his practice rooted in the Watts rebellion era, his market presence deliberately erratic, his relationship with the institutions that exhibit him a controlled act of distance. For Tully, who had spent decades documenting how the art market processes value, Hammons presented the logical limit of that project: what do you do with an artist who refuses to be processed? The film premiered at Sheffield DocFest in June 2022 and opened theatrically at Film Forum in New York in May 2023.

Alongside his journalism, Tully chairs the Reuben Kadish Art Foundation in New York, dedicated to the legacy of the muralist and Abstract Expressionist sculptor Reuben Kadish. The role is a measure of the distance he has traveled from The Berkeley Barb — he is now part of the institutional apparatus he once circled from the outside. He continues to report on the international auction and art fair markets for Artsy, The Art Newspaper, and The Robb Report, appearing regularly on BBC Radio, CNN, and MSNBC.

The art world’s relationship with its own history has always been ambivalent: it generates records and documentation that it simultaneously privileges and obscures. Tully has spent his career working against that tendency. At 79, he shows no sign of stopping.

Tags: documentary filmmakers, The Melt Goes On Forever, art journalism, art market, David Hammons, Judd Tully

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