Watch Our Art Basel Miami Panel on the New Old Masters (or, How Fracking Works in the Art Market)

Contemporary art exists in a limitless, continuously replenishing supply, but the most sought-after categories of historic art do not have the same plenitude—because their moments reside in the past, they are necessarily finite. This makes the best examples of the work hard to find (outside of museums) and valuable. Dealers, however, have recently been using uncommon ingenuity to unearth overlooked artists from these periods and bring them to the wider market. Think of it as the art-market equivalent of fracking.

Francis Picabia , Diane Simpson , Pier Paolo Calzolari , Sam Gilliam , and Marjorie Strider are just a few artists whose careers have been rekindled by savvy dealers over the past several years, and the hunt is avidly continuing for more such finds, even among some of today’s most adventurous galleries of emerging art (though blue-chip galleries like Hauser & Wirth have made a specialty of it).

To explore this phenomenon, Artspace editor-in-chief Andrew M. Goldstein convened a panel at Art Basel Miami to discuss the topic of "The New Old Masters" with Jasmin T. Tsou , owner of New York's JTT gallery; Gregor Muir , executive director of the ICA London ; Todd Levin , director of the Levin Art Group ; and Jordi Pujol , a collector and the director of Spain's Projectes Barcelona .