He graduated from Bard College and in 1961, he went to work for Halle and Stieglitz where he focused on option arbitrage and became the youngest (24 years old) New York Stock Exchange approved office manager.

[2] Edelman's Wall Street businesses included investment banking, money management, and derivatives trading.

The FAE Musée d'Art Contemporain launched the first European retrospective exhibitions of Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, and Peter Halley.

[9][10] In 2007 Edelman loaned Courier 1, a painting by American painter Robert Ryman, to the Swiss-based Galerie Gmurzynska for exhibition at Art Basel Miami Beach.

XL Specialty Insurance made Edelman its assignee, and he then sued the gallery for $750,000 plus a further $250,000 for "willful conduct of defendant" and "reprehensible motives and such wanton dishonesty as to imply a criminal indifference to civil obligations.

Using a writ of execution for an unanswered lawsuit, Edelman arranged for the US Marshals Service to confiscate some of the gallery's works at the opening of the Art Basel Miami Beach fair.

The gallery denied instructing its insurer to withhold payment and claimed that they had no knowledge of the judgement; they paid up and the paintings were returned to the stand.

ArtAssure were offered a collection of over 100 paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries, supposed to have been in the ownership of Hiroshima Bank of Japan, at a discounted price of €350 million.

[13] The claim was dismissed on the grounds that Artmentum was a Swiss company, with few commercial activities in the US, and therefore the case was outside the jurisdiction of the court.