Status of NYC Galleries

Roberta Smith has a good article in the NY Times about the mood and state of art galleries in New York City. Unfortunately, the report is not that positive despite some early expectations that the market had bottomed out. Smith reports some galleries expect further declines in sales. The article grabs you with the firs two lines “No one is doing well,” snapped the New York dealer Michele Maccarone over the phone. “And anyone who says they are is lying.” Smith also reports that ad pages in Art Forum are down 40% from this time last year, a drop from 363 ads to 206.

As you read deeper into the article there are examples of some galleries doing well and expanding, so it is not all gloom and doom, but the beginning and the toward the end, the outlook is rather negative.

Smith states

At the same time keeping a gallery going is usually fairly hard, and can seem impossibly daunting when sales slump. As small operations, galleries are highly vulnerable to changes in the economic climate — canaries in the coal mine, as they have often been called. So it made sense, as the bottom fell out of the art market last winter, that many people predicted galleries would start closing fast and furiously.

As it turned out, it is hard to know if this summer has brought much more than the usual in the way of closings, along with relocations, expansions, contractions, splits and alliances. So far the list of galleries that have closed is barely two dozen long, and only if you include galleries that closed several months before the crash; galleries that, to be blunt, will not be missed; neophyte galleries that had yet to establish either a financial or critical foothold; and galleries that closed for reasons only partly related to the market, or not at all.

Smith continues

Ultimately, of course, how things are going depends on whom you talk to. Ms. Maccarone, at her most optimistic, foresees “an O.K. September until the auctions,” which she predicts will once more confirm a downward trend. To be followed, she says, “by a dry winter and a lousy spring,” with things approaching normal by fall 2010.

“I’m doing everything I can think of” to get by, she said. She cut staff and eliminated art fairs even before the market crashes of 2008. She is going to younger artists whose work can be priced less expensively (maybe not the first reason an artist wants to be given a show, but never mind). And three benefits will be held in her gallery this season. Will she be paid for the use of her space? No, she said, “but they might bring people into the gallery who have not been exposed to contemporary art before.”

To read the full NY Times article, click HERE.