The Groove 243 - Trends Will Fade. Depth Won’t.
Welcome to the 243rd issue of The Groove.
I am Maria Brito, an art advisor, curator, and author based in New York City.
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Trends Will Fade. Depth Won’t.
Philip Guston, Riding Around, 1969, oil on canvas. Photo by Maria Brito at Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2021.
Every artist and collector I know has felt it: that gravitational pull toward what’s hot. What’s being acquired. What’s being shown. What the institutions are suddenly championing after decades of indifference.
In one era, you’ll hear: “They ignored me because I’m Black.”
In the next: “Now they ignore me because I’m white and male.”
Then it’s: “They only want women.”
Then: “They’re tired of women.”
It’s not that these statements are untrue. It’s that they’re all temporary.
Markets swing like a metronome. The center never holds for long. But great art doesn’t exist to chase the center. It exists to push against it or ignore it altogether.
Those who last - the artists, the collectors, the thinkers- aren’t chasing proximity to fashion. They’re building something that doesn’t need permission to matter.
The Fashion of Identitye
In a market obsessed with optics, identity has become both a credential and a curse. The art world’s pendulum doesn’t swing because of cultural evolution, it swings because of power, money, and visibility.
At one moment, Black figuration is everywhere. At another, it’s derided as “overexposed.” A few years ago, collectors were scrambling for these works. Today, some of those same canvases linger unsold. You’ll hear dealers say quietly that “no one’s asking for that anymore.”
This is not to say these shifts aren’t correcting historical erasure. They often are. But even those corrections have a shelf life. The same art world that ignores one artist for years will overcorrect and then ignore that same artist again when the flavor changes. This is not justice. It’s fashion.
Take Philip Guston: once championed as a lyrical abstractionist in the 1950s, he shocked the art world by returning to figuration in 1968 with raw, politically charged paintings featuring hooded Klansmen, cigarettes, and disembodied limbs. The backlash was swift: punishing critics panned the work, institutions distanced themselves, and Guston became a pariah.
Decades later, he was hailed as a visionary ahead of his time. In 2015 Guston’s estate joined Hauser & Wirth. But in 2020, forty years after Guston’s death, four major museums postponed a long-planned retrospective, fearing his imagery was “too sensitive” for the moment amid the Black Lives Matter movement. The traveling retrospective finally opened in 2022 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and closed at the Tate Modern in London in 2023.
Now, in a new twist of the cycle, a major solo exhibition opens at the Musée Picasso in Paris this October. In what now seems like satire, the title of the show is “The Irony of History.” Once ignored, then embraced, then sidelined again, Guston’s case is a vivid reminder that the art world doesn’t operate on fairness. It operates on weather.
Art That Outlasts Hypes
Real depth resists this seduction. Artists who endure aren’t echoing headlines, they’re ahead of them. Think of Etel Adnan, painting abstracted landscapes well into her 80s, long before institutions realized her power. Or Charles Gaines, building conceptual systems that felt out of step with their time, only to redefine what art could do decades later.
James Baldwin, in “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” dismantled the very idea of working for applause. “The war of an artist with his society,” he said, “is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, to make freedom real.”
Artists who matter don’t wait to be chosen. They build with such density that the world eventually bends toward them, not the other way around.
Collectors Who Lead vs. Collectors Who Chase
You can always tell who’s collecting out of clarity and who’s collecting out of fear. Fear of being left behind. Fear of looking out of touch. Fear of missing the next seven-figure rocket.
But the collectors who actually shape the market aren’t the ones glued to Instagram, scrolling for the next group show with three “rising stars” and an auction-ready price. They’re the ones who understand that taste is a long game and that real conviction doesn’t beg for consensus.
I’ve watched new money torch itself chasing heat. Buying mediocre works by buzzy names at the peak, only to dump them quietly two years later when the glow fades. These are not collections. They’re mood boards with hefty price tags.
Meanwhile, the sharpest collectors I advise are buying with intent. They’re not asking: “Who else is buying this?” They’re asking: “Will this still matter when no one’s looking?”
You don’t need a curatorial degree to see what’s good. You need rigor. You need time. You need the stomach to say no when everyone else is saying yes.
Because fashion fades. Good work doesn’t.
Depth Pays Dividends the Market Can’t Predict
In 1951, when Jackson Pollock was at the peak of his fame, he said something that should be etched into the studio walls of every artist: “Every good artist paints what he is.”
Not what’s expected. Not what sells. What he is.
What this means is that good artists express the full contradiction, rage, insecurity, compulsion, bliss, and clarity that live inside a person, because nothing valuable has ever been built on trend alone.
The market will swing again; toward minimalism, toward figuration, toward “rediscovered” artists of some identity or geography. But the smartest players aren’t waiting for permission to care. They’re paying attention now. To the work that has gravity. To the artists who aren’t catering. To the signals that live beneath the buzz.
In five years, the hype will have shifted. But the artists who chose substance over fads and the collectors who trusted their gut over the group chat will be the ones holding the work that still commands attention. Not because it was fashionable, but because it was undeniable.