We’ve all read various jeremiads on the art market by now. Amid a hecatomb of galleries, big and small, everyone bemoans the woeful dearth of revenue and the ever-growing expenses of running one of the most high-margin, logistically simple businesses one could imagine.
Like the perseverations of a drug addict, the origin of this collapse is elusive… Could it be the bulky cost of art fair booths, or is it a diminished willingness of the collecting class to part with its disposable income, due to some chill that’s descended upon international commerce? The junkie’s reasoning is perennially magical: No, it shouldn’t be that entirely voluntary participation in an art fair would sink one’s business. (But all one needs to do is subtract the expenses from the projected revenue, and if that number isn’t significantly greater than zero…)
I don’t want to use this pulpit to analyze the international multilevel-marketing scheme that is the fine-art trade fair. This is too obviously the case. I’m also not going to warn against the specter of income inequality, the grim arithmetic necessary to justify the sale of useless luxury goods. What I’m most concerned about as a young gallerist is my industry’s grid problem.
The New York tour guide and flâneur-extraordinaire Speed Levitch once declared: “Let’s just blow up the grid plan and rewrite the streets to be much more a self-portraiture of our personal struggles, rather than some real-estate broker’s wet dream from 1807.” Speed was speaking about his own city, but it makes me think of the kind of exuberant search for art spaces one can still have in neighborhoods and cities that have preserved labyrinthine medieval alleys.
I’ve often—sadly—gotten to know a gallery by its dull, inert trade show booths, and, years later, uncovered its flagship, often carved out of some architectural leftover ill-fitted for a chain store. A gallery, at its best, is sunken treasure. Whether the chest contains moldering garments or glittering doubloons doesn’t matter much: Spelunking a city for its hidden art spaces (whether that gallery is embedded within a grid plan or not) has the power to return the explorer to a sense of urban belonging and agency. It can restore faith in gallery workers, collectors, and artists.
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–43. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50 in. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Public domain.
This ethic of charm-building is in steep decline in my industry, which is increasingly enamored with the grid. As the internet reached early adulthood in the early aughts, various engridifications were coming to pass, as some galleries decamped from the rabbit warrens of SoHo (where it wasn’t uncommon to climb four flights of stairs to pay a visit). Pioneering dealers sensed the direction of the wind and established a small phalanstery of galleries in old taxi garages on the West Side Highway. Decades later, Chelsea is a metonym for the New York art world—a dense, almost digital schema of art galleries with little else to distract the visitor. What once was a dérive became a goose-step of long straight-shots and 90-degree turns.
Meanwhile, our modern trade show emerged with the expansion of Art Basel to Miami Beach in 2002. With the trade show organizer’s promises of greater exposure, increased lucre, and higher praise from the powerful, galleries fell headfirst, en masse, into this perfected art grid, which was condensed, sterilized, deodorized, and climate controlled. These shows were—and still are—remarkably well arranged. With the legerdemain of a great pyramid schemer, fair directors ensconce larger and cruder businesses within an ever-changing astroturf of young galleries, who risk their shops to present money-hemorrhaging but institutional-quality booths. Those with an abundance of clout and credibility are enlisted, pro bono, to recruit their peers to apply. New recruits are usually rewarded parsimoniously, boarding their return flights home with a couple of new business cards and a fresh negative line item on their balance sheets.
Grids are, by nature, disciplinary and usually instated to maximize surveillance and apprehension. It’s not uncommon for a young dealer to be sanctioned for speaking out against this system that’s so patently designed against their business interests. But gallerists have become so attached to this grid that even the slightest mutation of it—in the form of a relocation of a booth, perhaps—can lead to intense protest and even withdrawal from such shows.
Of course, running an art gallery—despite the typical 50-percent cut of sales, rare logistical burdens, low personnel requirements, and light facility-management costs—really can be a tough business, depending on how one approaches it. For much of the history of the art market, a gallery would remain small and reasonably obscure. Its real work was in the cultivation of a handful of reliable clients, private and institutional, who believed in the vision of its founder and felt it advantageous (or even admirable) to support them. This is how all the masthead galleries of the trade shows had their beginnings, and—here’s the big secret—that’s how they still operate their businesses.
For galleries at that lofty level, trade shows are such an insignificant budget item that participating in, say, 12 or 15 of them a year represents an insignificant risk. And they are, for the most part, the creators of the 21st-century art grid plan, and its greatest beneficiaries.
So, given all I’ve explained tried so far, what does this have to do with the impending disappearance of a market for emerging art? Well, because as with so many narcotic addictions, the user isn’t having such a great time on the drug. The pool of unhappy grid-addicts includes not only young dealers but also their clientele: The eye-roll and sigh have become the pro-forma response to any mention of travel to a trade show, be it perched on the West Side Highway or in the empyrean glades of Switzerland.
The actual mana of the emerging-art field does not reside in exposure and distribution, but in elusiveness, in discovery. Kicking the grid addiction will involve the pain of withdrawal and tremendous doses of anxiety. But for me, a gallery owner, recovering from the grid is essential, lest we cede all control of our culture to the gridkeepers.
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