Photograph by Alexis Armanet.
One inevitable downside, De Carlo says, is that competition among those dealers has never been more cutthroat. No matter how big or rich a gallery becomes, there will always be rivals angling to lure away promising artists with offers they can’t refuse. “It’s a daily fight,” De Carlo says. “And as with all competitions, there is one winner and one loser. I am trying to balance my defeats. The artist wants the best, and I can’t blame them. So I’m offering them my best, and it’s working.
As the financial stakes have gotten higher in recent years, De Carlo has noticed a pervasive lack of adventurousness in the art world—especially among collectors who behave more like copycats than connoisseurs. “Art consultants are very conservative because they’re paid to suggest the right things,” De Carlo says. “Which means everybody is suggesting the same things. And then all collections are the same.
Inside De Carlo’s new Milan home there are countless clues about the dealer’s personal interests and obsessions, but market forces seem to play no role at all. A beguiling sculptural piece on his kitchen table turns out to be a plain old potato from his refrigerator drawer; it began sprouting green shoots in a way that pleased De Carlo, so he mounted it on a cork from a wine bottle.
Stacked on the kitchen shelves are a few pieces of 20th-century Weimar pottery that seem unremarkable until De Carlo starts talking about them. Produced in factories during the 1920s and 1930s, after the Bauhaus school was founded, they’re hallmarks of an era when the traditional hand-painted flowers and animals of Meissen porcelain were giving way to a bolder geometric style, painted using stencils and spray guns, a new invention at the time.