In less than a week, nearly all 110 available photographs by Gregory Crewdson were snapped up from his new Luhring Augustine Gallery exhibition at $7,500 each, up from his 1997 high of $5,000. Collectors include three major New York museums as well as several Hollywood types who seem particularly drawn to the cinematic lighting effects of these highly staged works. Crewdson, who describes his work as “psychological realism,” is enjoying rhapsodic press coverage (New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, ArtNews). As a graduate-school professor of photography at Yale, he has served as guru and mentor to the group of hot young women photographers now represented by galleries like Casey Kaplan (whose star artist, Anna Gaskell, just won the Citibank Photography Award in London) and Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren (which sold more than 50 works by Katy Grannan, Malerie Marder, and Justine Kurland at last week’s Armory Show 2000 for approximately $2,000 each). There seems to be no end in sight to the Yale imprimatur’s cachet: More than 50 people and institutions are on the Crewdson waiting list for purchase.
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