Spring has officially sprung, and with it I will be leaning heavily on metaphor. Seasoned readers of this Substack will know I have a long and committed relationship with water metaphors, particularly when explaining the complicated mechanics of how art moves as an economic good. This piece will be a bit different but similar in metaphor reliance.

Today we’re borrowing from game theory. Specifically, what game theorists call a non-zero-sum game. A zero-sum game has a loser for every winner. A non-zero-sum game is a system where the value created together exceeds what either party could generate alone. Where both sides leave with more than they arrived with. This is my last public assessment of game theory in relation to the art market, that conversation continues exclusively in the Salon, you can sign up here if that is of interest.

The entire argument I am making, about the dealer-artist relationship, about my career and philosophy of dealing, and about what Lion & Lamb is built to be is a case against the way most people misread this dynamic. Which is as zero-sum. Artist versus dealer. Commission as extraction. Belief as the only currency. Win-lose.

What I am describing in this essay is the opposite. When it works, both the artist and the dealer win in ways neither could have achieved separately. It is a misunderstood one.

Zero-sum thinking assumes value is fixed, that there is only so much to go around and the game is about who captures it. But value in this world, real value, the kind that compounds over decades, is created not captured. The gardener doesn’t take value from the flower. They create conditions in which value that didn’t exist before comes into being. The collector who buys with genuine conviction doesn’t extract from the market. They participate in building it. The artist who makes extraordinary work doesn’t win at someone else’s expense. They expand what’s possible for everyone who comes after.

This is not a new idea. It is how the great dealer-artist relationships of history operated before mass commercialization flattened the model into something transactional. Vollard and Cézanne. Kahnweiler and Picasso. Castelli and Rauschenberg. These were not extraction relationships. They were ecosystems. Gardens, if you will.

We’ll get to the garden shortly.

What Does Success Mean to You?

I recently came across an essay by Matthew Burrows called The Conditions of Success. Not because it told me anything I didn’t already know, but because it articulated something I have witnessed for a long time without ever seeing an artist put to the page. This kind of honesty about the interior life of a practice has historically lived in private conversations, in studios, over dinners that run too long.

Burrows writes from inside the artist’s experience. About the way external definitions of success can narrow rather than open a practice. About what gets lost when the market becomes the measure.

I read it and thought: someone should write the other side of that.

An art writer, someone who has spent years doing studio visits and writing seriously about artists and their work, said to me recently after a studio visit “that was genuinely fascinating, I had no idea what it looked like from where you sit.”

After hundreds of studio visits, after nearly two decades inside this industry: is it really that invisible?

It is. And I think about that now more than ever. This world has always been my life; the arena, the garden, the gardeners, the flowers, the impossible beautiful labor of it all. I have never known anything else. But now, building my first garden for myself, I find myself wanting to open it up.

Maybe that is arrogance. I think it is also connection and a form of documentation. I am a gatekeeper by trade. I have never been interested in gatekeeping for its own sake.

The art world runs on opacity. Not maliciously – structurally. The knowledge that makes this industry function has always been distributed through proximity. You get it by being inside rooms, by working for the right people, by accumulating years of experience that nobody writes down because writing it down would theoretically dilute the competitive advantage of knowing it. Access to the knowledge has always been inseparable from access to the people who have it. And that access has never been equally distributed.

Disrupters are almost never people who were comfortable inside the system. They are people who had to understand it completely in order to survive it and who at some point decided that surviving it wasn’t enough. That the system itself needed to change.

The traditional move at this point in a career is to leverage that knowledge privately to let the opacity work in your favor the way it worked against you when you were coming up. Most people in positions of knowledge protect it because protection feels like power. I understand that instinct. I just don’t share it. The knowledge cost me something real to acquire. That’s exactly why it should move.

But I want to say something specific about what access actually means because this industry has been getting it wrong for a long time.

Visibility is not access. Price is not access. Putting works under $5,000 on a wall is not access. Those things lower the barrier to purchase. They do not lower the barrier to understanding. And the barrier to understanding is the only one that actually matters.

What people are asking for when they say they want access to the art world is orientation. They want to know how the game is structured. What the rules are at each level. What it costs to play seriously. What the difference is between being a visitor to the garden, a flower in it, or a gardener tending it. That knowledge has never been priced. It has been gatekept through proximity and time. No amount of affordable art fairs or Instagram democratization changes that because none of those things explain how the system actually works.

If you genuinely democratize the knowledge, if you give people real orientation rather than just visibility, the quality of participation goes up across the board. Better informed artists make better decisions about which garden they belong in. Better informed collectors ask better questions and build more coherent collections. The whole ecosystem gets more sophisticated. The bar rises. That is not exclusionary. That is exactly what a healthy market looks like.

The art world has been confusing exclusivity with sophistication for so long that it has forgotten they are not the same thing. Exclusivity keeps people out. Sophistication raises the level of everyone inside.

This Substack exists because I believe that. This piece is the first public demonstration of it. And my garden that opens May 1st is what it looks like when that philosophy becomes a physical place.

What it looks like from this side of the table is worth saying out loud. Not because it is a secret. But because transparency is its own form of generosity. And because the garden is worth seeing as are the people who make it what it is.

There is a question I ask every artist at the beginning of any possible relationship. Before we discuss the work, before logistics, before anything practical enters the room: What does success mean to you?

The answer tells me more than exhibition history, collector provenance, or price trajectory combined. It directly determines the expectation of my performance in relation to their work. I have asked this question for years so you can imagine my surprise when I opened Burrows’ essay and found an artist asking it too, from the other side of the table. The first time I had ever seen it written down by anyone other than me.

I am goal-oriented. The level of the market I operate in demands it. I stand behind what I say and what I do. Alignment before relationship is not a preference. It is a professional necessity rooted in hard experience.

An artist can hold a loose or evolving definition of success and still make extraordinary work. I cannot afford that luxury. Their answer becomes my benchmark and at the level I operate, benchmarks have consequences. For them, for me, for the collectors who trust my judgment, and for the other artists whose careers I am already responsible for.

This is part of what makes dealing art one of the most intellectually alive things I can imagine doing. The work is always different. The collector is always different. The artist, the show, the moment none of it repeats. There is something deeply stimulating about a profession that requires you to hold an artist’s vision, a collector’s psychology, a market’s current appetite, and the specific gravity of an individual work, all at once, and find the place where they converge.

I love this job. I want to say that clearly before I say what comes next.

In an earlier essay I wrote about art as pedagogy about how the transmission of knowledge in this field is, at its best, an extension of love. This piece is a continuation of that argument. I did not arrive at my philosophy of dealing through theory or business school, although I have both. I learned how to tend a garden because other gardeners taught me carefully, generously, and through acts of love. That origin matters. It is why the frustrations I am about to describe land as hard as they do.

Where Lion & Lamb Operates

The art market is not one market. It is several, operating simultaneously, by different rules, for different participants, with fundamentally different stakes at each level.

I refer to this collectively as the arena. Within it are bands, formed like a target, specifically about price and value. As you move through them the rules change, the players get more serious, the margins for error get smaller, and the consequences of misalignment compound. Within them are series of gardens, each one more demanding than the last. Different soil, different climate, different flowers, different stakes.

The market has three broad tiers, three bands or layers that narrow as you move toward the center, each with its own climate, its own players, and its own rules: emerging, mid-level, and blue chip.

Emerging is the entry point and the largest of the bands by volume. It is a price band and a market condition, not simply a career stage. Art advisor Maria Brito puts it plainly: emerging no longer means cheap or untested. It means first serious evidence under real scrutiny coherence across a body of work rather than one viral moment. Production artists and arena artists coexist here in a way they cannot further up the bands. And it is commercially vital, according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, galleries with annual turnover under $250,000 grew sales by 17 percent in 2024, even as the broader market contracted 12 percent overall.

Some artists, galleries, advisors, and collectors spend their entire careers here and build serious practices doing so. Emerging is not a waiting room. For many people in this ecosystem it is exactly the right home, a garden worth tending for its own sake.

But it is not the arena in full. It is the antechamber the place where you learn whether you want to step through the door into another band at all, and whether the door opens for you.

Mid-level is smaller in volume but where the real weight of the market lives. This is where the market forms around an artist. Where price architecture gets established and has to hold. Where collectors stop buying on instinct and start asking sophisticated questions about trajectory, institutional attention, and long-term value. Where a collector acquiring a painting at $15,000 or $30,000 or beyond is making a considered bet and expects the dealer to speak to that bet with authority. The Art Basel and UBS report confirms mid-tier resilience in 2024, auction sales over $10 million fell nearly 45 percent while mid-range segments held. Established artists at this level accounted for 44 percent of total collector spending in 2024, the largest single share of the market by value. The collectors here are driven more by passion and aesthetic conviction than financial speculation. They are building something deliberate. They expect their dealer to be doing the same.

This garden is exposed, unlike emerging, which is sheltered by low stakes, or blue chip, which is insulated by institutional permanence. Full sun and full weather. What grows here grows because it is genuinely strong enough to withstand it and because the gardener knows exactly what they are doing. This is where practices deepen, markets solidify, and careers either take lasting root or quietly collapse.

Blue chip is the ceiling. Institutional permanence, catalogues raisonnés, markets that don’t move in recessions. It is not what I am building toward. Depth over scale has been my north star since before I had language for it. Selling thirteen meaningful paintings over fifty units. That is my work.

Lion & Lamb operates at mid-level and not at its floor. This is not an aspiration. It is where I have worked for nearly two decades, across gallery programs, artist relationships, collector development, and market formation long before Lion & Lamb had a name. What I am building now is the formalization of a philosophy I have been living professionally for most of my career.

The Group Show Problem

There is a dynamic in the market that causes more confusion and pain for artists than almost anything else. It operates almost entirely in silence because nobody explains it.

Mid-level operators regularly present large group shows that include emerging artists. This is a legitimate strategy and a leveraged one. It capitalizes on the energy and price accessibility of emerging work without the dealer absorbing the full risk of mid-level representation. The emerging artist gets real CV credit and a genuine introduction to the arena. The mid-level gallery gets curatorial vitality, a lower-risk commercial event, and a controlled look at new flowers under real conditions. When both parties understand what the arrangement is, it works. This is often the moment the door between emerging and mid-level bands cracks open for players.

The problem is that artists frequently don’t understand what is actually happening and operators have no particular reason to explain it. This is not cynicism. The group show is not a performance of false promise. It is simply a different transaction than artists assume it to be, and the distinction is almost never named out loud. The show only works as a testing environment if it feels like an opportunity which it genuinely is. But it is a specific and limited one. Artists show, receive what feels like validation, and expect representation to follow. When it doesn’t, they experience it as the dealer not believing in the work.

That is a misreading of what happened.

The mid-level dealer ran a risk assessment. Not of the work’s quality, the work may be genuinely serious. But of whether adding this artist to their existing ecosystem makes strategic sense. The garden is already functioning. Adding a new flower isn’t about whether it’s beautiful. It’s about whether it serves the coherence and health of what already exists. Wrong soil. Wrong season. Wrong relationship to the other plants. A group show is the gardener testing new flowers for fit genuine, considered, and entirely separate from the decision to plant them permanently.

It isn’t personal. It also very much is because it’s the dealer’s garden, the dealer’s judgment, and the dealer’s resources on the line.

Artists who understand this use the group show for what it actually is: access, visibility, and a data point in a longer conversation. Artists who don’t tend to experience the art world as a series of mysterious rejections by people who inexplicably failed to believe in them.

The market is not mysterious. It has structure. Understanding the structure doesn’t make it less personal it makes the personal legible.

The Mid-Level Does Not Simply Sell Art

It builds a relational architecture around each artist custom built around what they actually need. And this is where a choice that looks simple on the surface becomes one of the most consequential decisions an artist makes: which garden, and which gardener.

Consider what a garden actually is before you choose one. A cottage garden is abundant, slightly wild, layered with unexpected combinations, it rewards wandering and discovery. A formal garden is structured and intentional, every element in deliberate relationship to every other, it rewards precision and patience. A wild meadow needs almost no tending and produces wonderful things, but it cannot be curated and it cannot be controlled. A walled kitchen garden is productive and private and deeply functional, oriented entirely around yield.

None of these is better than another. But a flower that belongs in a cottage garden will look lost in a formal one. A plant bred for a meadow will be suffocated by the structure of a walled garden. And a seedling with one bloom and no established root system cannot go into a garden like the V&A, two hundred years of established plants, deep root systems claiming every inch of soil, a scale that would consume a young plant before it had the chance to find its own relationship to light.

That is not a failure of the seedling. It is horticulture.

The mid-level is not one kind of garden. It contains all of these and artists can belong to more than one, for different reasons, at different moments in their practice. Gardens in this band are built with deliberate intention. The flowers growing in them are there for reasons. A dealer who runs a high-volume program with rapid turnover is not the same as a dealer who works with six artists over a decade. A gallery built to incubate and transition talent is not the same as one built for the long season. These are not better or worse gardens. They are different ecosystems with different climates, different expectations, and different definitions of a successful bloom. The artist who chooses the wrong garden for what they actually need will struggle not because the garden is bad but because the conditions are wrong for that particular flower.

Some artists need a buffer. The distance between their inner world and the material world of commerce is sacred to them. They need a dealer who becomes the entire public-facing apparatus building collector relationships, creating context, handling every transaction so the artist never has to touch it. That is an enormous amount of invisible labor. It works only when the artist trusts you completely and understands honestly what they are asking for.

Other artists need a co-producer. They want visibility, presence, validation in real time. That is a different kind of work, you are curating their public self as much as their practice.

Neither flower is more beautiful than another. Both are legitimate. But here is where the frustration lives: artists often don’t know which one they are and how could they, without experience? That experience is precisely what the bands are for. Emerging is where you begin to understand what you need. Mid-level is where that self-knowledge gets tested under real conditions. The artist who claims to want total creative freedom but monitors every collector interaction. The artist who says they don’t care about visibility but quietly falls apart when a show doesn’t sell out. These are not character flaws. They are the entirely predictable result of not yet knowing which kind of flower you are and being placed in a garden before you’ve had the chance to find out.

That misalignment, not commission structures, not logistics, not price disagreements, is where dealer relationships actually break down. And by the time it becomes visible at mid-level, a great deal has already been spent on both sides.

The inverse is equally true. When the relationship is genuinely aligned, when the garden is functioning and the flower is thriving, larger gardens take notice. They have their own interest in that success and the resources to act on it. This is not a threat to the mid-level gardener who has done their job well. It is the point. Why would a flower remain in a smaller garden when it could grow among more established plants with significantly more resources behind them? It wouldn’t. It shouldn’t. The goal was never to keep the flower. The goal was to bring it to a point where that question becomes possible to ask at all. The gardener who places flowers in bigger, more prestigious gardens is not losing they are succeeding at the highest level of what this work actually is. Watching something you tended find its fullest expression somewhere larger is not a small thing. It is, in many ways, the whole thing.

This process has a name in the industry, kicking up. An artist leaves one gallery for a larger one, carried by the market architecture the previous dealer built. Some galleries are built explicitly around this model from the beginning; 56 Henry in New York has made the incubation and transition of talent the organizing principle of their entire program artists arrive, the market forms around them, and when the time comes, they move. Everyone in that garden knows the season is finite. That clarity is what makes it work. It is a legitimate and often beautiful part of how careers develop across the bands.

Unless, of course, the flower particularly likes a certain garden, its gardener, and the visitors.

The Invisible Side of the Table

Most people cannot see the dealer’s side of the table. It is structural. The nature of the work makes it invisible by design.

When the work is going well, when a collector finds a painting, when a placement feels exactly right, when an artist’s market begins to build coherence and momentum, none of the labor that produced that outcome is visible. The conversations that happened over years. The relationships maintained through silence and patience. The context built in rooms the artist will never enter. The dealer, when functioning well, disappears into the result.

The flowers in a mid-level garden are the evidence of the gardener’s work. Not the name on the gate. That invisibility is fine. It is the nature of the role. But it produces a particular misconception I now treat as a filter.

It sounds like this: well, you either believe in the work or you don’t.

Belief matters. Conviction is real. I would never represent work I did not stand behind completely. But the statement implies that belief is the only variable that the conditions required for successful placement of work, market timing, collector readiness, price positioning, relational groundwork built over years, are either automatic or irrelevant.

They are neither.

A dealer who only needed to believe would be a fan. And some of them do have gardens, large ones, well-resourced ones, with impressive names on the gate. Vanity is a legitimate market position when capital is not a constraint, and work can move in those spaces. But moving work and building market architecture are not the same thing. One is a transaction. The other is a career. Vanity gardens can sell flowers. They rarely cultivate them into something the broader arena takes seriously over time. I am a performance-based operator. I cannot compete on fandom and more importantly, I cannot afford to. Every flower in this garden has a claim on my judgment. The artists already here made a bet on my expertise, not my enthusiasm. I do not get to spend their resources on sentiment.

When I hear that statement I know we cannot move forward. Not because my ego requires protection. Because working from a false premise produces bad outcomes for everyone, most of all the artist.

The Economics Are Not Symmetrical

An artist’s investment is real, significant, and immediate. The canvas, the paint, the labor, the shipping, the framing, real expenditures with real costs. The object exists. As I wrote in a previous essay, the hard road on which serious work is made has its own immediate returns, personal, private, and present even before anyone else sees the work. The flower exists whether or not it is in a garden, whether or not anyone is tending it.

The dealer’s road is different in kind, not just degree. Unbounded and probabilistic in a way the artist’s never quite is. I spend capital, skill, time, and years of accumulated knowledge to start a conversation. Not close a sale. Not even begin a relationship. A conversation. From that conversation, if everything goes well, I enter a process that might take four to nine months of relationship-intensive work before anything resolves. During which the collector’s circumstances might change. The market might shift. The moment might simply pass.

I am, in this sense, a host. The garden is mine to tend but it exists to receive visitors collectors, institutions, advisors, other players in the arena. My job is to make the conditions worthy of their attention and then to welcome them in. What they do once they arrive is never entirely in my hands. There is no object at the end of my labor. There is an outcome, or there isn’t.

The Art Basel and UBS report notes that in 2024, 31 percent of dealers identified art fairs as their primary source for new buyers meaning even the most productive single investment a dealer makes produces not a sale but an introduction. The art fair is the garden on display among other gardens. The long tail from that first encounter is where the real work lives, entirely relational, entirely time-dependent, entirely outside the dealer’s control once it begins. It is also worth noting that the share of collectors buying directly from artists more than doubled in 2024. Which makes the case for what a dealer actually provides not weaker but more urgent.The relational architecture a dealer builds is precisely what a direct transaction cannot replicate. This is also why studios have a price ceiling and why institutions do too. Context, relationships, and market architecture are not incidental to value. They are the mechanism by which value is established and held over time. Without them, the ceiling is lower than anyone wants to admit.

The artist operates in a domain of control and creative choice. The dealer operates in a domain of influence, patience, and strategic ambiguity. I can prepare the conditions. I can build the relationships. I can read the room with everything I have. I cannot control what happens in it. That is why this work is so alive. It is also why it is so hard.

My garden grows and changes with the seasons. And like any garden worth visiting if I tend it well enough, visitors come back. They bring friends. They start to feel that this place belongs to them too.

The Middle Garden

If the artist’s practice is the flowers, the dealer is the gardener.

Neither more important. Neither more right. Without the gardener, the flowers don’t reach anyone. Without the flowers, the gardener has nothing to tend.

At mid-level this garden operates under genuine pressure. Mega-galleries are actively moving downmarket, encroaching on price points once dominated by mid-level dealers chasing younger talent and compressing the traditional career arc that once allowed markets, and artists, to develop properly. Artists like Sasha Gordon, born in 1998, were signed directly to David Zwirner in 2024 with a single museum debut to her name, bypassing entirely the mid-level development that once formed the backbone of a sustainable career. The pipeline that once allowed artists to build markets gradually, to develop resilience, to experiment with growth alongside dealers who knew their practice deeply, is being short-circuited by dealers with the resources to move fast and the incentive to do so.

The flowers are often placed in soil they are not yet ready for. The consequences are documented and consistent.

The most instructive example is the Zombie Formalist movement of 2014, early-career artists including Lucien Smith and Oscar Murillo whose prices exploded, plateaued, and then collapsed. Many of those careers have never fully recovered. Art critic Jerry Saltz had already identified the pattern that the quality of work by mid-career artists declined after signing with mega-galleries, that the vast spaces and expansive budgets were simply too much to absorb. In retrospect he had accurately called the top on the secondary market performance of an entire generation of hyped artists who were moved into soil they hadn’t yet developed the root system to hold.

The market signals scramble too. As Artnet’s editor-in-chief Naomi Rea recently wrote thirty thousand dollars now gets you a résumé-light emerging artist, three hundred thousand a mid-career work no one can flip. Collectors who spend years building relationships with artists get cut out entirely the moment a mega-gallery moves in. And the career arc compresses in ways that benefit no one except the institution doing the acquiring. It used to be that careers were measured in decades. Now, as one art advisor put it, it’s in five-year spurts, if that.

This is not a romantic argument for the old way of doing things. It is a structural observation about what happens when speed replaces stewardship. Growth take time. It always has.

Despite that fact the institutions with the most resources are doubling down on exactly that speed. The most established gardens, the longest histories, the most recognizable names, the most mature flowers, are struggling to attract new visitors on the strength of their existing bloom alone. So they are acquiring new flowers from younger, less cultivated gardens, bypassing the mid-level entirely. It is a survival strategy. The closure of significant gallery spaces in recent years Blum in Los Angeles, Rhona Hoffman in Chicago, multiple prominent New York galleries, reflects the real cost of this pressure on operators who could not absorb it.

And yet collector behavior is shifting in ways that reward the right approach. New buyers made up 38 to 44 percent of total gallery sales in 2024 a new generation seeking coherence, context, and a dealer they can trust over time. Blue chip knows this and is feeling it. Take Gagosian, an empire built on cultivating the most mature plants, the most resilient specimens, the most consistent and predictable blooms. That association with permanence is the brand. It is also increasingly the constraint. When your garden is famous for what has already grown, it becomes harder to convince a new generation of visitors that there is anything left to discover much less relate to. The entrance fees have become prohibitive and as collecting has shifted from trophy hunting into a lifelong relationship with art, fewer people want to pay them. They are not looking for a predetermined bloom. They want to watch something grow. They want to be part of the garden too.

That is the garden Lion & Lamb is tending. Trust-based, relationship-driven, built for the long season. The flowers, the gardener, and the visitors, weathering the same storms, the same difficult soil, the same drought. Not because it is romantic, it isn’t always, but because that shared exposure is what makes the work matter beyond the transaction. When everyone in the garden has skin in the same season, something real gets built. That is the only kind of garden I want to tend anymore.

What Lion & Lamb Is Built to Do

Lion & Lamb exists to build conditions, the right soil, the right light, the right time, for work to reach the people it belongs to. Not a traditional gallery model that extracts from momentum. A platform built for the long season, by someone who has been in this arena long enough to know what that actually requires.

The question I ask at the start of every relationship isn’t warmup. It is the filter. Informed by understanding not just how art is sold but how careers are built, how collector relationships compound, and what it costs when alignment is absent from the beginning. And how this world is changing, in many cases for the better, toward something more honest, more relational, more interested in depth than spectacle.

The art world has enough spaces that will take the work and see what happens.

Lion & Lamb is not one of them.

This is what a non-zero-sum game actually looks like in practice. Not a theory. A garden.

What Does Success Mean to You?

It is the most important question I ask. It is also the question the industry asks least.

The dealer’s job, at its best, is to hold the specificity of what each artist is actually building and to work inside the market on their behalf without losing sight of it. To be the gardener who knows exactly what is planted, what it needs, and what season it is.

That requires alignment. It requires honesty. It requires artists willing to look clearly at what they actually want, not what sounds right, not what the industry rewards, but what success genuinely means to them. And it requires the self-knowledge to know which part of the arena, if any, is actually theirs.

Everything else is a negotiation with the world.

Thank you for reading. If this resonated, if you recognized yourself somewhere in these pages, I’d like to know what your flowers or garden looks like. My garden opens to the public May 1st.

I hope to see you among the flowers.

-Rachael