Hope & Dread, Episode 10: The Business of Art
In the first of two episodes dedicated to the business of art, Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman trace the changing contours of an industry defined by dealmaking. Power within the art trade is held by a few key players and yet, the art market shapes the lives and livelihoods of almost everyone working in art.
In an art world that likes to season the cold logic of commodities trading with the language of inclusion, passion and creation, we speak to dealers, artists and futurologists to discover how — from the local to the global, from private passions to international politics and economics—everything is touched by the market.
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Guests: Tim Blum, Roxane Gay, Melanie Gerlis, Kathy Halbreich, Pam Kramlich, Larry Marx and Issy Wood
Courtesy Moved Pictures Archive, New York and Marian Goodman Gallery
©2021 Moved Pictures Archive, New York / ARS, New York
Transcript:
Tim Blum:
Look, there's a lot of galleries that are like, "Holy shit. We're like a White gallery. This show's almost all men and all White males. Gee, we've never even thought about the rest of the world. It's bad for business." So, that's the cynical, but also realistic, side of this. But you know what? If business is the reason that people are changing, I mean, it's better than the alternative.
Charlotte Burns:
This is Hope & Dread. I’m Charlotte Burns.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I’m Allan Schwartzman. This is a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art.
Charlotte Burns:
We want to hear from people who are making change and people who are resisting change. Today's show is all about the art market–that outsized beast that's the king of the art jungle.
The market is full of contradictions, defined both by the cold language of commodities-trading and also by intimate networks of closely-kept relationships.
What we talk about as monolithic: “the market”, is in fact a series of mini-markets, each of which has their own rhythm. It can all be a bit difficult to navigate.
So, join us today as we talk to a dealer, an artist, collectors—and an astrologer. We’ll trace the contours of an industry defined by deal-making, where power resides in the hands of the few, but affects the lives of the many.
Charlotte Burns:
The consumption of contemporary art has become a global phenomenon—albeit a relatively recent one. The art market used to focus on brown furniture and Old Masters, but over the past few decades has morphed into a different animal altogether.
Allan Schwartzman:
Now it’s changing even more. There's the market for Modern and Post-War art, which functions as it always has, although it has gotten focused much more on top-quality works by the most significant name-brand artists. And then there's the Contemporary market, which is changing that much more rapidly than ever before. In fact, it's challenging the values of that other market.
We're in a moment of massive shift. I believe that art is at the beginning of a very large transformation that is going to change how value gets determined.
Charlotte Burns:
We're going to go into much more detail in the next episode, on the very Contemporary art market in a one-on-one conversation between Allan and I, but for those less familiar with the art market, today's episode asks, "Who wields the power? Who are the key players on the stage?" Dealers say it's the artists. Artists say it's the collectors. Collectors say it's the dealers. And so on.
We asked Tim Blum, co-founder of Blum & Poe Gallery, which was founded in Los Angeles 28 years ago and now has bases in Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo.
Tim Blum:
The artist has the control and artists and their studios should be more and more directing their lives, careers, and activities, with the advice of their select group of global dealers. That is the best way for the artist, and I think if you always follow the artists and are bluntly honest about how the system works, it's the best way.
Charlotte Burns:
Indeed, important artists have a lot of power–or so says the mega-dealer, Larry Gagosian. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, he said the shift in power was not a good thing.
Recalling a story about the dealer Paul Rosenberg telling artist Pablo Picasso that his paintings weren't good enough for his first exhibition in New York, Picasso went on to paint an entirely new body of work. Gagosian marveled, "Can you imagine a dealer rejecting a show of Picasso’s? It just shows you the change now. You walk into an artist's studio, maybe it's really not good work and it's, 'Oh, I love what you're doing.’
Even the most powerful dealers in the world can lose an artist simply by offering some critical advice. So is it plain sailing for artists? Well, power is more complicated than that. Here’s artist, Issy Wood on the realities of being a market darling–and finding out collectors are flipping your work at auction.
Issy Wood:
It can become a full-time job trying to bury your head around that stuff, and so very occasionally I'll run at the problem and really force myself to think about how it feels to have work at auction. One came up recently and all I see is who I'm trying to emulate and the struggles, and how broke I was, because the paint is so shitty. And to see that monetized five years after the fact, it feels really grotesque.
Charlotte Burns:
The heat in the market brings out all kinds of vile behavior. In her book, But Who’s Counting, a collection of blog posts between 2019 and 2020, Issy Wood personifies the avaricious collectors as Marlboro Men riding across the plains of the art market looking for prey. Here's Issy reading from her book.
Issy Wood:
Post number 33, strong and tough. Today, I learned there are a few more frustrating combinations than maleness + knowledge of the art market + boredom
Now our world has become a kind of buffering desert screensaver, the cowboys are riding out with their big lassos (and how different are those, really, from nooses) hoping to catch something promising for their dusty ranches, and they're chewing on those cocktail sticks you sometimes see cowboys chewing on in lieu of a MarlboroCharlotte Burns:
Issy writes that the days of an artist remaining oblivious to their output as a monetizable commodity are long gone. For her, it's important to try to keep the demands of the market at bay and maintain her focus on the work in the studio.
Issy Wood:
Finishing a painting and quantifying it feel mutually exclusive – I'm old fashioned that way. Sure, I could make it rain in my mind when something sells but I'd need a shower soon after, I could eschew my dealers and peddle work from crappy jpegs to whichever cowboy seems most fatherly and wear low-cut Margiela for some iD magazine “London female artist to watch” spread. But I'm already being watched, I can feel it, even in a fleece.
I'm anxious not to gender all the collectors and advisors and dealers and lapsed auctioneers who give me grief, but the ones rearing their heads this COVID season are, whichever way you slice it, men.
Charlotte Burns:
Much of the attention comes in the guise of support.
Issy Wood:
I guess the flavour of hassle I keep seeing is a mix of salvation (I'm plucking you from obscurity!), pseudo-education (listen, here's how things work!), sexualisation (being attractive in this business doesn't hurt!), back-handed compliment (nobody will ever have the passion for your paintings that I have!) and gaslighting (don't flatter yourself into thinking you're the only good artist out there!)
Of course this wouldn't happen without a motive, and I'm beginning to realise it goes beyond mere access to a sales PDF (though buying a painting is the crux of it, being denied one through the official channels is why the lasso comes out). Nope, they want to be able to say in 5, 10, 20 years that I would be nowhere without them, that they were instrumental in shoehorning my life's work into the canon, that they were restrained enough to see past whatever sexual attraction cropped up in our early WhatsApp messages to my “real” artistic talent. In short, they were able to see the Wood for the Trees (!)
Charlotte Burns:
Being in demand can be flattering—but can also lie one step away from being seriously harassed.
Issy Wood:
I make the mistake of entertaining aggressive, abusive, agenda-soaked flattery every time. It has the mouthfeel of love
Because if the paintings are all an extension of my psyche, surely the cowboys want “me”? Perhaps I'm the outlier to the whole commodity racket, that just this once they're buying with their hearts?
I begin to fill the gaps missing in my art market fluency with magical thinking, not realising I'm guilty of the very entitlement-to-exception I despise in these characters, and that this deep-pocketed male quasi-mentor / wide-eyed female naïf dynamic is as old as water
So now it takes one of the cowboys, say, secretly bribing existing collectors for a painting, or threatening me with doom via text, or attempting to poison me against my collaborators, or yelling at me over 12 voicemails, or asking me for naked photos whilst assuring me they're All Business, or ‘matching’ with me on a dating app and getting to know me before asking whether work is available, for me to snap out of it
V texted me the other day saying "I'm getting so many enquiries for your work even during A PANDEMIC, it's crazy". At the time I was flattered, now I'm wondering whether it's because the work is good, or because people are bored and my stock is up. I hope both can be true at the same time, because if not, the next 60 years are going to break my phone
Allan Schwartzman:
Issy is one of the most compelling artists who have emerged in her generation, but the contemporary art market has such volatility and such a voracious appetite for both new talents and for escalating prices at auction, privately and also in the primary market, that that kind of talent is not really a guarantee of continued rising success anymore.
Charlotte Burns:
Absolutely, and interviewing Issy really made me understand how vulnerable even the most successful artists are.
In her reading, Issy referred to V; that’s Vanessa Carlos, Issy’s long standing gallerist, who she talked about in our interview.
Issy Wood:
I can never say for sure, but it feels like the combination of Vanessa being a female dealer and my being a female artist, maybe telling men who have never really been told no, “no, that's what you get.” I wish it wasn't what you get, but maybe that's what you get.
Allan Schwartzman:
This brings us to the power of the dealers. The relationship an artist has with their art dealer is crucial. In the best of situations, it's far more than a transactional relationship. It is much a psychological and a parental one.
There are people who believe that the primary market, which is the market in which artists are represented, and their work is introduced, is a dying phenomenon. There are many who would love to kill it off, but those intimate relationships that are really one-on-one, and that are rooted in supporting an artist in so many ways; they cannot be replaced with a market.
Issy Wood:
I could not do it without Vanessa's help. And though she would never stand against my will, in the way of my saying yes to anything, she will help me unpick a little of why I'm maybe so eager to say yes. And it's usually, when we get to the bottom of it, it's my own, sort of, deep-set panic about this being the final opportunity that I ever get. Do I not want to make hay while the sun shines, blah, blah, blah?
And the more I say no, the more I realize that my "no" lands in an okay way and that my being and my value as a person don't crumble as a result, then the more confident I feel in saying no the next time, and so it's this strength training.
The power to say no is sometimes all I have, and I wish it wasn't all I have. A lot of the results of those nos are the aforementioned abusive phone calls and unsolicited education opportunities that people who, sort of try to be my slightly creepy gurus offer.
I guess being told ‘no’ hurts. And I try to keep that in mind, but also not let it sway my boundaries just because I don't want to hurt some Christie's chairman's feelings.
Allan Schwartzman:
The art market Issy is describing is one that most people outside it don't recognize. In fact, many artists don't recognize. It can be a brutal business, cutthroat, competitive, full of personalities, egos, and money, and people who wish you to not succeed.
Charlotte Burns:
Done properly, dealers will safeguard artists away from some of that drama, because for them, it’s a long-term commitment—and a long-term investment. Here’s Tim Blum.
Tim Blum:
Our whole credo has been that the artist is in charge, and we've always tried to let them know that.
Many dealers would do quite the opposite, right? They try to make them feel utterly tied to, inextricably linked to the gallery and would otherwise suffer greatly if they didn't listen to every single thing that we said.
The artist is the boss, and they should know that. That's why, when there's a consolidation of an artist with one gallery, I don't care how many spaces they have or how many they're opening, I find this to be one of the worst things that an artist can do, is to go all in with one firm.
I think it's far better and far more interesting to have a more diverse group of global dealers and galleries that can really be more bespoke, hands-on, and really be at the top of it in their localized community, whether that's London or Berlin or Tokyo or what have you.
Allan Schwartzman:
Commonly, most galleries programs are underwritten by one or two very successful artists whose markets essentially buoy the rest. It can be tempting for the dealer to pressure those artists to produce more. Supply is the issue in the current market, not demand. Knowing which works to put out into the world and which to hold back can be the difference between great confusion and great clarity about an artist's significance. And sometimes, it's better to just sit on your hands for a while.
Charlotte Burns:
Strategy is key. Here’s Issy Wood again.
Issy Wood:
I make a ton of work and, if anything, Vanessa says, "Please make less."
Regardless of how much is in the studio, a tiny fragment will make it into the world, fiscally or even visually. So it's sort of baked into our process of working together where there are 100 paintings and I get to pick, first, which ones that I want to keep, which is something I'm learning the value of and which feels more possible now that I have slightly more financial stability.
And she'll only ever bring into the world what I’m comfortable with. And, if anything, I'll want to put more in the world than she wants to.
And she was the first gallery I ever worked with. I hear stories, but I don't know what it's like to work with a different kind of dealer. I don't know what it's like to have money kept from me. I don't know what it's like to be pressured into making enough money to keep a whole gallery afloat.
Charlotte Burns:
Issy joined the gallery straight out of art school. It’s the old model of art dealing in which artists and galleries grow up together.
Allan Schwartzman:
Which is, unfortunately, a model that is mostly dead.
Charlotte Burns:
Here’s the collector and philanthropist Larry Marx, who’s on the Board of Directors at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Larry Marx:
It’s got to be brutal as an artist, because the power of the galleries has become really disproportionate I think to the role they play in the whole ecosystem of the art world. Sorry to all my gallerist friends, but I often feel like the gallerists are as much influencing the output of the artists, not only in terms of content, but size, everything. I'd much rather let the artist develop on their own than at the behest of some behemoth gallery with locations all over the world.
But I do feel that artists have lost power in the whole thing, unless you are a David Hammons and can call the shots, but for younger artists in particular, they're really at the mercy of a lot of these galleries, in my opinion.
Charlotte Burns:
Gatekeeping can go two ways. A dealer holding back access to their artist to stave off predatory behavior can also be a dealer controlling the market in ways that are frustrating for buyers. Frankly, most other luxury markets don’t operate in this way. Here’s the writer, editor — and art collector — Roxane Gay.
Roxane Gay:
Galleries can be very exclusionary and they make strange assumptions about who does and who does not have the ability to buy the works they have. I have experienced quite a lot of terrible galleries. Well, not terrible per se. Indifferent. I suppose that's just an aesthetic that they curate, that they're into that. But I find that to be ridiculous.
I don't need any sort of special treatment, but when I walk into a gallery and I see them talking animatedly with a White client, and then that person leaves the gallery and they go to their little office and do something and I'm just wandering around, that sort of sends a message that I'm not a serious buyer.
Well, okay, I'm not a serious buyer with you. I will take my serious buying somewhere else, because quite frankly, there are many galleries in the world.
Charlotte Burns:
A good art dealer is a bit like a good gravedigger: they know where the bodies are buried and they’re keeping the secrets close to their chest. But this handshake society way of doing business doesn’t always chime in an Internet age where buyers value ease of transaction and transparency.
You’d assume the buyer has the power—but usually not.
Roxane Gay:
It's so hard to get information sometimes about just what art costs and if it's available. They're like, "Can we jump on the phone?" It's like, just send me a PDF with information about the provenance and the cost of the art, the dimensions, the condition. That's all I need to know. If I would like more information then I'll let you know. It's always this weird, weird game and I just find it frustrating.
I was recently told by one gallerist that I was interested in one artist, and an incredible artist. I would very much like to acquire a piece of this person's work. The gallery told me that they would like to develop a relationship with me because there's a lot of demand for this artist's work, and that that relationship would be improved if I were to buy some work by some of their other artists. And, "so, here is a PDF of the offerings of the other artists," who I'm sure were lovely. The work was fine, but none of it was what I wanted. I knew what I wanted.
It was so disheartening that you have to pay to play. You have to buy some art you don't want to get to the art you do. It's just what kind of business... It's just corrupt. It's just so corrupt.
Charlotte Burns:
So, Roxane is saying it’s really difficult to get a price for a work of art - why can’t people just send it? And, during COVID, there have been moves to create more transparency, there are more prices available online at art fairs and on gallery websites but price in the art market isn’t a fixed thing, is it Allan?
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, it's more fixed in the primary market than in the secondary market, but more importantly, price is a tool and a weapon.
It's a way that galleries can monitor interest, who's interested in what, and it also a way to build a sense of theater of desire about a work. This is a power that's often used in a horrible exclusionary way to most people who experience it early on. And it seems entirely unnecessary, but this is how some people choose to function. Some places are very transparent. Some are very opaque.
Charlotte Burns:
It's also that the flip side of that is if you're a dealer and you have an artist who's really in demand, there's only a finite amount of work you can sell. Say an artist makes 15 great paintings a year, you have a waiting list of 45 people. You know that you want some to go to museums because the museums will help establish the artist's longer term career. Do you sell to the big private philanthropist who's got their own institution? Do you sell to the collector who's going to donate that work to MoMA, or do you sell to someone who just walks through the door and likes the painting? And they're the decisions that the dealer has to make when they're thinking about where to place the work.
Allan Schwartzman:
One rarely sells to the person who just walks in the door, regardless of the experience of the dealer or the place within the market in which they function.
A crucial part of a dealer's job is to place work well. In order to build a market, you have to have confidence, belief, demand, so many immeasurable qualities that the dealer who does the best job of placing work, and that can mean many different things is more likely to create a more lasting, stable and healthily growing market rather than one who is looking at each transaction as a transaction.
More often than not, when young artists emerge, they even with all the best of intentions, work is often placed at a very inexpensive price level and for an artist for whom demand grows and values rise quickly, it's very hard to, if you pay $4,000 for something to not think about $500,000, if something's reached that level, if you're somebody for whom that's a deposit on an apartment that you wouldn't have otherwise.
So, there are so many ways in which the purity of the faith in the work and the belief in the artist and in the desire for living with great things can be affected by a voracious and rapidly growing art market.
Charlotte Burns:
This is the whole thing of art as an asset class. If you're buying something because you want to live with it, that's a very different proposition if the thing that you love on your wall just meant that you can buy your first home and the pressure to sell that, to make that quick buck is, of course, very tempting. And there's nothing wrong with it. If you're a buyer it's yours, you own it. Why not?
If you're the artist, there's a problem with that because those high prices aren't necessarily helping you. They're not helping your career necessarily, especially if they're happening on the secondary market and the primary prices are still at a lower level. And that's something that isn't always clear to people outside the market. They watch a price fly at auction and they think, wow, this artist must be making bank now, but it's not always the case, is it?
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, it's a more complex story than most dealers would necessarily admit to. No dealer likes to lose control of the material that they're selling. Many artists can begin to lose confidence in their dealer if a lot of material comes back in the secondary market at auction. So, the best dealer tries to control that flow.
And most collectors who are active in the Contemporary market play by the unwritten rule that if you want to sell something, you give preference first to the dealer who sold it to you.
Oftentimes this means selling something for far less than it might bring at auction. But for those who go to auction a little too frequently, access can be cut off very rapidly. And so this could be seen in exclusionary ways, but it can also be seen very much as a necessary strategy in order to build a successful thriving and lasting market.
At the same time, it requires a runaway price at auction for a whole new generation of demand to rise up. So it's a double edged sword, most dealers and artists hate auction, but at the same time, the market thrives on some limited activity at auction that can set records that therefore draw attention to an artist by a wider group of collectors.
Charlotte Burns:
And of course, if you ask dealers, they'll say they prioritize institutional buyers. The idea of works going to museums is where people want things to go.
Allan Schwartzman:
It has become an increasing phenomenon that we see an artist for whom there is great demand where the exhibition will be presented as for museum access only, or where a dealer will say we're taking interest, but we're prioritizing museums. Sometimes this is overused and it's not linked to the demand within institutions. And that gap can get quite annoying frankly, for some dealers.
But the side of it that's far more significant to notice is that museums have been on such a rapid rise in collecting over the last several decades that now they're starting to step back and they're realizing the vast majority of the material that they own will rarely if ever make it to the wall for the viewer. And they become significant costs in terms of storage, conservation, maintaining collections. And so many museums are starting to get far more selective about what it is that they will accept. And it also means that if you're a patron and you're giving things to museums, maybe you start to think a little more strategically about where you give based in part on where you believe that the work will actually be seen by the public.
Charlotte Burns:
Well, the market and the museums are so closely intertwined as we've already heard a little bit in this series. And in some obvious ways that you might expect the pressure of the markets upon the museum, the rising cost of buying art and storing it and all of those financial decisions, but there's also a separate form of pressure upon the museums.
For museum workers beleaguered for myriad reasons, as you may have heard in four earlier episodes of this series, the commercial sector can look attractive. We're talking about a brain drain from museums. Bigger paychecks, less paperwork. What's not to love? Here's Tim Blum.
Tim Blum:
That's why you had seen a lot of migration from the institutional museum world, to this commercial gallery world. There's less bureaucracy. There's like three people deciding about doing a show. The budget is not a problem. It's well-funded. So you had an exodus from museums to commercial galleries because many of the commercial galleries are able to do very high-level institutional quality shows in a very quick, efficient way.
Charlotte Burns:
How serious is the shift?
Tim Blum:
The exodus from the institution to the commercial is profound. I think the museum world is umm…Wow. It's a mess. It's a mess. There's a dearth of great talent that is at a certain level. I think there's great talent at a younger level coming up, but it's going to take a generation to build it up again. And the trick is how do they keep them?
Charlotte Burns:
Meanwhile, the sums of money being traded on works of art can put pressure on traditional philanthropy as well. Curators have typically leaned on private collectors to help acquire challenging or important or expensive works that the museum might otherwise not be able to afford.
Here’s the collector and philanthropist, Pam Kramlich, who’s the co-founder of the Kramlich Collection and President of the Kramlich Art Foundation and the President of the New Art Trust. She's explaining here how the system works, and the challenges it faces.
Pamela Kramlich:
That's where I think the collectors are really important and the curators and the advice that they give all of us who are collecting, because that's how we have those works for the museum to be able to show to the public in context. I mean, that's what's really important. I think that's where we, as philanthropists, come into it.
I think the confusion today is that we have an auction market that has put such prices and such monetary value to these works of art that we've sort of lost the real reason for them. I mean, all of a sudden, we're not giving them to the institutions because they're too valuable in our own collections. And I'm not so sure that is productive either. And then we've got the government weighing in on whether they make it more advantageous to do that or not. And so I think we're dealing with a lot of stresses and strains in the world out there that are making the whole art platform very difficult to navigate at this point.
Allan Schwartzman:
The collection that Pam has put together over the last several decades is one of the most significant that has been formed in the Post-War period. And that's because she has focused on mediums that ordinarily have not had much commercial viability but that have been very significant within the development of art from the mid '60s to the present and that's focusing on video, film and other media. So if she had not committed her collecting life to putting together the New Art Trust and the Kramlich Collection, this simply would not exist in any museum. The fact that the Collection is gifted to three different institutions and collection-sharing is much more viable when it comes to digital works than to, let's say, paintings that could be seriously affected by a lot of travel, then she's really leveraged this collection in a most effective way for institutions. The problem with the market dictating tastes is that the market tends to favor the less risky and potentially less interesting art.
Charlotte Burns:
The other thing that the New Art Trust has done is really pioneer institutional thinking about conservation and safeguarding of best practices around new media works that tend to be more frail. How do you keep them? How do you maintain them? So that's a private collector who's helped spearhead institutional sort of longevity for these works.
And you talk about the risk of things and I will never forget a curator running around an Armory art fair years ago. And I said, you know, "What do you think of the fair?" And they said, "There's a lot of painting". And I said, "Yeah. And what do you think of that?" They said, "Well, you know, we always call it cash and carry art."
So yeah, speaking to that point about risk taking and what the market sees. Here’s Kathy Halbreich, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Kathy Halbreich:
The market is inherently a conservative force. I mean, people don't go into the market to lose money. They go into the market to make killings. And I think that has not really given the art world a very secure foundation for improvisation or collaboration or not knowing all the values that I think are important. It's prized, again, on certainty, just like the educational system is.
So why is that? And the only answer I have is that somehow, capitalism really has failed us. I'm a capitalist. I believe in capitalism as opposed to any other system of governance, but I don't cherish the hyper-capitalism we're living with now, where the inequities are like the Grand Canyon. You can't even see to the other side, it's so vast. And I think the art world perpetuates that canyon.
Charlotte Burns:
It's been a period of reckoning in the art world. Financial value has historically been overwhelmingly ascribed to work by White male artists. But since the worldwide protests during the pandemic, after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man by police, many galleries were quick to say they wanted to better diversify their programs.
How much of this, in the end, was lip service? Here’s Tim Blum again.
Tim Blum:
It's like, look, there's a lot of galleries that are like, "Oh, my God." Their self-reflection is on a very surface level. It's not like going deeply into the self. It's more like, "Holy shit. We're like a White gallery. This show's almost all men and all White males. Gee, we've never even thought about the rest of the world, Asia or otherwise. We got to fucking figure this out, or people are going to disparage us, and it's bad for business."
So, that's the cynical but also realistic side of this. But you know what? That's okay, too. If that's what it takes. That's where capitalism and business, it actually is oddly efficient on some level.
It's a tectonic shift, for sure. Either I've heard face-to-face or anecdotally collectors who are saying literally, "Listen, we're not buying any more White art. We're buying only, in some cases, Black American art, Black female American art,” and/or some sort of permutation within that. And that's full-on White trustees of major museums.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you think it's a trend? Or is it a shift?
Tim Blum:
Well, that gets into dicey territory. It's a shift and a trend. The trend is almost with the shift and the awareness and attention that's being placed on all this work, much of which is tremendous and great art, and much of which is not.
Markets are always so smart. They're smart on one level because they gravitate to that which is trending. So, of course, the market has shifted dramatically. I'm not one to judge whether that's a good or bad thing.
It doesn't matter what kind of art we're all working with. There's trends that come and go. Always going to be some people that are going to get sucked in and spat out. That's just always the case. It doesn't matter when or where or how or why. But, anyway, if business is the reason that people are changing, I mean, it's better than the alternative.
Charlotte Burns:
If you are thinking, "Really? A caring sharing, but still profit-loving future for galleries?", you'd be surprisingly close to the bullseye. During the pandemic, a few galleries worked together to share information and shake the fog from their collective heads. Some of that collegiate vibe has stuck. Former competitors clubbing together? Here's Tim Blum on how a new gallery initiative came to pass.
Tim Blum:
So that initial part was setting up a system to help make everybody survive, the family, the business, the staff. I was joining and starting numerous groups. The Gallery Association of Los Angeles was founded during COVID. I'm the President of that. I'm in another group called the International Gallery Alliance, which is a global group, started mostly in London, in fact. It's more like a union for global galleries.
Charlotte Burns:
The new International Galleries Alliance, or IGA, is a nonprofit collective of art dealers who've united to combat together the various challenges they're facing. From banding together to talk about shipping costs, to sharing information on more eco-friendly practices, from thinking about how to do business better in a digital age to discussing NFTs, the goals are myriad, but they're collegiate.
Unusually for the art world, the organization is one of horizontal leadership. There are more than 150 members around the world, each of whom pays the same annual fee, which entitles them to the same vote and the same voice.
Tim Blum:
Frankly, from my view, it was about helping all these young dealers that don't have the platform that we do.
Now, importantly, this is like union vibes. My whole trip was always that the idea of collaboration, cooperation, is the path forward for a global world and also for the art world.
It's about creating a system in which people can work together to push and succeed together. It's sort of fanciful on some level, but the feeling is quite positive. I mean, we'll see what happens, come over the next year or two.
Charlotte Burns:
This kind of cooperation amongst galleries is a reaction to the consolidation of power elsewhere by the mega galleries, the auction houses and the art fairs. Other recent examples include Gavin Brown closing his gallery to become a partner at Barbara Gladstone in 2020, or the formation of LGDR in 2021, which was a joint effort by four dealers, Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan and Jeanne Greenberg. Or the joint venture by the mega dealers Acquavella, Gagosian and Pace, which was designed to compete with the auction houses for estates. But none of this is quite as new as it might seem.
I spoke to the journalist Melanie Gerlis about this idea of collaboration, and who holds the power in the art industry. Her new book, The Art Fair Story: A Rollercoaster Ride, was published in the US last week.
Melanie Gerlis:
Collaboration isn't that new. It's a word we use a lot at the moment. It's a great post-pandemic buzzword, but when art fairs started in what I would call their modern form in the late 1960s in Cologne, the point was to collaborate. The point was that galleries, dealers didn't have enough heft on their own. They needed somehow to challenge the auction houses that were getting bigger and more international. And coming together all in one place, making the compromises you have to make when you collaborate was very much part of that story.
As the rest of the world became more globalized and more wealthy, to be honest, the fairs themselves became bigger and more expensive to do and more important, more validating within the art world. So a gallery could say, I am a Frieze gallery, or I am an Art Basel gallery, and that would give them extra power over their clients.
And as the fairs got bigger, they could charge more. And suddenly it became really quite difficult for galleries to justify the cost of doing a fair, being out of their own spaces, hosting dinners. I mean the huge jamboree now around some of these mega, mega art fairs. It's a completely different beast to the 18 galleries that sat in Cologne in 1968.
Art Basel launching the Miami fair in 2002 was really the first time that an art fair brand went international. But what was happening in the outside world is this growth of the experience economy. People wanting to have a bit more fun. This is boom, boom, boom time, the turn of the millennium. And next year you get Frieze which absolutely benefited from London becoming a banking capital in its own right. And it was very much the financial class and the aspirational class that, throughout time actually, has, in terms of the buyers of fairs and this is another problem I think for art fairs now, is an erosion of these middle classes.
But you've got younger people making more money and wanting to spend it on beautiful things. COVID obviously put a stop to it, but things were already a little wobbly. We had a 2008 crash and I don't think the art market fully recovered or its trajectory of growth I think stopped then. We've had ups and downs within it. You've had this extraordinary inequality within it. So you're getting the rich getting richer, but that is the opposite of an aspirational middle class. And I think that's where some of the tensions will lie in the future.
Charlotte Burns:
It's also tied as well, if you think about the growth of all of those fairs across Asia, across the kind of BRIC economies and all of those buyers coming in, that is, like you said, tied to this phase of a kind of neo-liberal globalist worldview that the art world very much benefited from in terms of its expansion. We're in a phase now of increasing nationalism. Do you think that's going to make it harder for art fairs and galleries?
Melanie Gerlis:
There is definitely a move towards being more national. There's definitely a suspicion of global partnerships and huge problems in the wider world. You will see fairs become more national. And listen, if your fair is in the middle of Switzerland, that's not a bad place to be. National, kind of includes Germany and the Southern Rhine area and all these phenomenally wealthy places. So national isn't necessarily a dirty word for art. And coupled with the environmental issues of us all flying around the world all the time, I think you will see visitors certainly not going to as many fairs.
But this year and the end of last year seem to suggest otherwise. Since September last year, all I seem to have done is jump on airplanes to go to art fairs and see lots of people who have jumped on airplanes to go to art fairs. But this may be a dead cat bounce. We may all just be so relieved that our two years of perder are over and everything. We can have fun again. I do wonder if the pendulum will swing again.
Charlotte Burns:
Who has the power? Is it the fairs? Is it the dealers? Is it the auction houses? Is it the artists? The collectors? Who, in the art market, wields the power?
Melanie Gerlis:
Ultimately, the artists need to make the art and the collectors need to buy it so, that's where the power lies. It's hidden, it's overtaken, but those are the people with the power.
Charlotte Burns:
Join us next episode for more on the market.
First: change is afoot. It’s in the stars.
Here’s professional astrologer Phyllis Mitz.
Phyllis Mitz:
There's a leap going on, not only in the inventiveness, but in human beings valuing art itself. And an interesting part of that is what people will be willing to pay for art, because there's another planet in the solar system, Uranus that has to do with awakening and shake ups in technology. And interestingly, it's in the sign of currency and literal money, which means that I think by the time it leaves in a few years, by 2025, I can't even imagine currency being in this state that it is now. For us to go to our purses or our wallets and get out some dollars. I can't imagine that's going to be so.
Interestingly, Taurus also has to do with value. And so in the past, there were certain forms of art that were valued. Certain artists that made a lot of money and Uranus is about to shake that whole thing up. What kind of art do we value? What are we willing to pay? How do we pay for art? What are we going to find beautiful?
That's a huge question coming up because we are evolving light matter; what we might want to see reflected to us artistically can change dramatically within the next four years.
And because Uranus has to do with shocking events that happened with the value of art and the traditionally highly valued art pieces themselves, because Taurus has to do with the luxury items, let's call some art, a luxury item. And if there is a planet of radical change running through that, then it's suggesting that the status, the nature, the currency, the commerce of what's considered high or expensive or luxury, the luxury world of art, there's something that's going to radically change there. And I think if that could happen by the end of 2022, and then reverberate of course, through 2025, but something is up there. Something is trying to break through.
Charlotte Burns:
Tune into Hope & Dread every second Wednesday and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts.
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Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&.
The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Robert Bound is our associate editor.
Holly Fisher mixed and edited the sound.
Additional research and support has been provided by Julia Hernandez and Ali Nemerov.
Theme music by the inimitable Philip Glass.
Podcast Art: the artist and Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute; photograph: Haus der Kunst, Munich/Markus Tretter
