Christopher Wool’s current exhibition in New York, “See Stop Run,” is an “off market” event, to use the real estate term. Of the 72 objects on view, not a single painting, sculpture, mosaic, or work on paper is for sale. Instead of being in a blue-chip art gallery, it occupies the unfinished 19th floor of an office tower in the Financial District, complete with hanging wires, cracked pink walls, and spectacular views.

That Wool chose this non-commercial context to stage his most significant exhibition since his acclaimed retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2013 says a lot about where the star artist’s career and market stand, and where they might be headed. Wanting to do things on his own terms, he has financed the project himself, without help from either his primary gallery, Luhring Augustine, or European dealers in his orbit, like Max Hetzler and Xavier Hufkens.

“He’s helping his audience see his vision and his values,” a person familiar with his thinking told me. “It’s a long game.”

Changing the Conversation

Wool’s prices, which have reached $30 million at auction, have become a major part of the conversation about his work.

Covering the art market beat since 2006, I’ve seen his prices soar ever higher and, in recent years, slump. I’ve heard collectors crow about his significance in the history of 20th-century painting, as a bridge between Andy Warhol, on one side, and Wade Guyton, on the other. I’ve seen some of those same collectors trade his works like stocks.

After encountering so many paintings by Wool at auctions and art fairs they started to seem to me less like works of art and more like interchangeable products, investment vehicles churned out in great numbers to feed the beast.

Which is why “See Stop Run” felt, for me, like a palate cleanser, an urgent attempt by the artist to change the narrative, to disconnect from commerce and focus on art. I walked in a skeptic and walked out a convert.

“People seem eager to see something different,” Wool, 68, said during my recent visit to the exhibition. He was milling around after hosting a group from the Guggenheim. He seemed relaxed and content, his hair long, wavy, and silver, tied in a ponytail. Moving to the great, wide open of Marfa, Texas, where he began making outdoor sculpture about 10 years ago, inspired Wool to think more about the setting of his work, he said.

“With painting, you rarely are faced with that because it’s always on a white wall somewhere,” Wool said. “This place was perfect when we found it and it really stimulated us. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a building with windows on six sides. I stopped going to my studio and just came here. I feel quite at home here.”

I was impressed by the intimacy that Wool’s art brings to this raw, 18,000-square-foot space—the way his wiry sculptures echo the wires hanging from the ceiling, and how the cracked plaster walls resonate with the abstract gestures of his paintings and drawings.  The unfinished space humanizes the work, while the work elevates the space in a way that only art can.

Here, high above the bustle of Lower Manhattan, where the East River meets the Hudson, I found Wool’s works breathing again, freed from the market’s golden shackles.

And I am not alone. The show has been the talk of the art world since it opened in March. I’ve been told that collectors are angling for access, but that his galleries have gotten the memo and remained respectful of Wool’s experiment in de-commercialization—while still, perhaps, hoping that there will be something to sell after the show closes on July 28.

“People will remember exactly when they saw it and how they felt about it,” art advisor Wendy Cromwell said. “There are so few shows like that. The Rothko show in Paris at Fondation Louis Vuitton was a show like that. People will remember it for the rest of their lives. And I think art collectors who were able to see Wool’s show will remember it for the rest of their lives.”

Will the exhibition help revitalize the market for an artist whose secondary prices have slipped 75 percent since their peak in 2015? I’ll get to that later.

Intense Commodification

Ten years ago, Wool’s text-based and abstract paintings became synonymous with the art market’s astronomical rise. Hedge fund managers like David Ganek, Dan Loeb, and Tom Hill snapped them up for ever-increasing prices. In 2015, a large-scale white canvas with the word “RIOT” in a chunky black font fetched $29.9 million at Sotheby’s, still the auction record for the artist.

“Maybe it’s naivete, but I was kind of unaware that I had become known for auction prices because it isn’t really my world,” Wool told me. “Things have gotten out of hand.”

Wool has become increasingly frustrated with the commodification of his work.

“I remember when I was in school, everyone knew that, aside from Rauschenberg and Johns, no one made a living doing art,” he said, “and the money thing just became the focus relatively recently. It was not good for the art world.”

That focus on money has been intense. Wool’s total annual auction sales peaked at $114.3 million in 2015, but they have cooled off substantially since then, according to the Artnet Price Database. Last year, his works generated $27.7 million at auction.

(However, that is an increase from the $17 million in auction sales he had in 2020. In 2023, Wool ranked 75th on a list of the top 500 artists in the Artnet Price Database in terms of market size, just behind Jeff Koons, just ahead of Donald Judd, and up 16 slots from 2022.)

There has also been a string of disappointing auction results.

In 2017, Canadian collector Guy Laliberté paid $17.2 million for Wool’s painting of the word “PLEASE” repeated six times; he sold it for $8 million in May 2023, a $9.2 million drop in value. Another painting, spelling out “HA AH,” resold for $7 million in 2021, down from the $10.7 million it fetched in 2014. Then there was “OH OH,” a silkscreen painting estimated between $8 million to $12 million, which flopped at Christie’s in 2021.

“When you say Christopher Wool, what everyone cares about is his market,” the person who has known the artist for many years told me. “It’s never a conversation about conceptual and formal motivations of the work. And that’s what he cares about.”

Perhaps this is why, over the past decade, Wool’s scaled back on releasing new paintings, the medium most coveted by his collectors, and focused instead on making drawings, prints, and sculpture, which don’t fetch nearly as much. Tellingly, the Artnet Price Database doesn’t list a single sculpture by Wool.

Beyond the Churn

While Wool’s new show reaffirms him as a major artist, the jury is still out on whether it will boost his market, especially given the ongoing worldwide downturn and broader shifts in taste. Since Wool is not releasing new works for sale, will buyers jump on whatever auction houses manage to procure in coming months? Will desire for the unavailable new works reignite demand for older works?

“He’s on everyone’s radar, and there have been auctions since the show, and nada,” a dealer told me. “The art market is dead across the board. Wool isn’t going to come back while everything else is dead.”

In May, a large abstract painting from Rosa de la Cruz’s collection hammered at Christie’s for $970,000. That was above its high estimate of $800,000, and was close to what the late collector paid for it years earlier, according to a person familiar with the gallery’s business. (The work debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and Luhring Augustine had just eight paintings like it for sale at the time; most went to institutions that the gallery had been carefully vetted, the person said.)

Some think that Wool’s will come back into market favor—but it may take time. White male artists have been out of fashion since racial-justice reckoning amid the pandemic, and many private buyers and institutions are focused on those who have historically been overlooked, including female artists and artists of color.

“My strong belief is that the market will validate those prices one day again,” Cromwell said of Wool’s eight-figure highs. “Not now, not in the next 10 years. In the next cycle.”

And that may be A-OK with Wool, who could afford organizing a five-month-long DYI exhibition without any support from his galleries and without having to sell a single work. 

Instead of being at the whims of the market, he’s aiming to remain culturally significant — beyond the small slice of the mega-rich who can make and break careers, beyond the white cubes of mega-galleries, and beyond the churn of the entire art machine.