As the Contemporary Market Cools, Galleries Pull Back on “Buy One, Give One” Deals
At the height of the ultra-contemporary boom, a collector who couldn’t crack a gallery’s waiting list had a well-worn workaround: buy two works and donate one to a museum. The arrangement, widely known in the trade as “buy one, give one” or bogo, functioned as a kind of fast lane for access to in-demand artists — and, for a time, it reshaped the flow of new art into American institutions.
Bogo deals are straightforward in structure and strategic in intent. A collector agrees to purchase two works by a sought-after artist — most often paintings, still the primary market’s most liquid medium — and then gifts one to a museum while keeping the other. Supporters have long framed the mechanism as mutually beneficial: the artist gains institutional validation, the museum receives a desirable acquisition, and the collector secures a work that might otherwise be out of reach. For galleries, bogo also served as a tool to discourage quick flipping and to “raise the bar” for buyers when demand far exceeded supply.
During the market’s recent peak from 2021 to 2023, bogo became a near-default conversation for certain artists, according to the collector and art adviser Adam Green, who estimates he facilitated dozens of such arrangements for clients. Sources say bogo donations helped place works at institutions ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio.
That momentum has slowed. As the contemporary market contracted over the past two years, the volume of bogo deals fell with it. “The economics aren’t what they used to be,” Green said, describing a shift that signals changing power dynamics among collectors, galleries, and museums — and one that could reverberate through the early careers of younger artists.
Although bogo is often associated with the post-pandemic frenzy, it predates it by more than a decade. Its prevalence has risen and fallen over roughly the past 15 years in step with the ultra-contemporary cycle. Michael Darling, the former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, recalled working with the now-shuttered Shane Campbell Gallery on a bogo arrangement for a painting by American artist Mark Grotjahn (b. 1968) in 2010. At the time, Darling said, the works were priced around $300,000 to $400,000 at retail — already a level that reflected intense demand and speculation. The expectation, he noted, was that a collector might see the price triple within a year.
Market observers point to two main reasons bogo has lost its appeal.
First, buying contemporary art on the primary market is simply less competitive than it was three years ago. In the boom years, bogo could help less established collectors — those without major museum board roles or private institutions — demonstrate commitment and gain access to artists whose lists were tightly controlled. Art adviser Benjamin Godsill put the hierarchy bluntly: “Not all collectors had to do a bogo — just the ones deemed not good enough to buy a work outright by a given artist.” In today’s softer environment, he added, “any collector is a good collector.”
Second, primary-market prices have climbed. In response to rampant speculation, many galleries raised prices to better track auction results. That shift has narrowed the gap that once made bogo financially attractive. Collectors can no longer reliably purchase two works from a gallery for less than the cost of a single comparable work at auction. And as retail prices have moved closer to fair market value, the tax-deduction advantage that could accompany a museum donation has become less compelling.
The retreat from bogo is more than a footnote in sales strategy. It reflects a recalibration of leverage across the ecosystem — and raises a larger question about how museums will secure works by in-demand artists when the informal mechanisms of the boom years begin to disappear.
