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Politics. Contemporary art. Artificial intelligence. Some journalists at The New York Times have beats that focus on a single topic. But for Zachary Small, who covers the art world’s relationship to money, power and politics, few subjects are off limits.
“I have one of the weirder jobs at The Times,” Small said in a recent interview. “I cover this very fancy world full of billionaires and starving artists, while at the same time reporting about the video game industry. I also occasionally dip into the weird world of fossils and paleontology.”
Small grew up outside New Haven, Conn., and began their career in journalism while pursuing a career as a theater actor.
“You go to these cattle-call auditions and sit there from 5 a.m. until 5 p.m., waiting to be seen for 20 seconds,” they said. “I thought I could maybe make $50 writing a review of an art exhibition for a blog.”
Since joining The Times’s Culture section in 2023, Small has written about the video game industry’s risky investment in hyperrealistic graphics; rising costs and lower sales contributing to a decline in the art market; and, more recently, the Trump administration’s review of Smithsonian museums.
In an interview, Small discussed their process for finding stories and the challenges of their work. These are edited excerpts.
You studied art history and political science at Columbia and interned at museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. How did those experiences inform your role today?
I don’t come from a family in the arts. You’re more likely to find my family at a football game than inside a museum. I came into this world as a student and then as an intern and very much felt like an outsider. I think it benefited me as reporter because I didn’t take for granted some of the weird ways that the art world works.
I had fantastic experiences interning at the Met and MoMA. Hearing the experiences of other rank-and-file employees informed my reporting. Reporting on the arts can often be very top-down. I wanted to give a bottom-up perspective.
You began contributing to The Times in 2019 before becoming a full-time reporter in 2023. What was your first Times byline?
The story was ambitious. It was about an Australian couple who had, in many ways, taken advantage of New York’s public art process in order to become the most displayed artists in the city. They did that, in part, by financing their own sculptures in public places.
It was a story about how much you can get away with if you know the intricate details of the New York City public art process. That process became a cornerstone of my reporting during Bill de Blasio’s administration, when he was promising as mayor to build monument after monument without following through on a vast majority of them.
What convinced you that this was a New York Times story?
You had these characters at the center, a couple who figured out a byzantine red-tape process and kind of gamed the system. There are artists who have lived in the city their whole lives and have never figured that out. I think it’s an excellent New York Times art story; there are artists, some elements of politics and a municipal procedure that is not well understood. The story showed how someone could become a smooth operator in a strange place.
Your beat is so wide-ranging. How do you decide what is worth covering?
I would say 95 percent of my articles involve me having a hunch about something. The other 5 percent are really driven by hard news and breaking news.
There’s so much that goes on in the world that readers might not know about, especially at a time when we’re increasingly relying on A.I. to tell us things. So I try to be those eyes and ears for people through my reporting, and go into the less-looked-at corners of the world.
I have to ask: What games are you playing these days?
I’m playing Sword of the Sea, which is by an indie developer called Giant Squid. I’m looking forward to Hollow Knight: Silksong, which comes out soon. In general, my appetite in games is for ones that make me think the same way I do about art; they tell interesting stories, have convoluted lore and also just question what the medium is supposed to be doing.
What are some challenges of your beat that readers might not expect?
I have a friend who is a politics reporter, and we often joke about the barriers that we encounter in our respective beats. Unlike those who deal solely with the government, most people in the art world are private citizens. Billionaire collectors may not necessarily feel that they have a duty to inform the public about what they’re doing in the art market. There’s a lot of secrecy in that world, and we have written many stories about the prevalence of crime, fraud and money laundering.
Part of my job involves developing a deep network of sources — from the billionaire collectors to the art handlers who ship their work around the world. On my beat, we rarely rely on unnamed sources, so we have to corroborate everything with a high bar of evidence. One of the challenges of covering what is considered one of the most unregulated luxury markets in the world is that you have to convince people that you will do their stories justice.
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