The NY Times has an interesting article about the struggles of the middle market, galleries focused on emerging artists and the smaller art galleries. The article states fewer collectors are visiting smaller galleries and with that many are struggling to survive or are closing.
The NY Times reports
Source: The NY Times“We sat down with five or six other little galleries and went to the pub and asked, ‘How’s it going?’ ” said Tot Taylor, co-founder of the contemporary art dealership Riflemaker, recalling a meeting he had in 2012 with a group of fellow London gallerists. “Everyone said, ‘Not very good.’ ”
Mr. Taylor said he had then asked his colleagues if there was one big thing that had changed. All of them replied that fewer people were visiting their galleries. Why? “We just don’t know,” they said.
Five years later, in September 2017, Mr. Taylor’s gallery, situated in a 19th-century gun maker’s shop in the Soho district of London, joined the art world’s ever-lengthening list of small and midsize dealerships that have closed.
Founded in 2004, Riflemaker was one of a crop of London galleries that sprang up when the generation that became known as the Young British Artists, or Y.B.A.s, was in vogue. The Soho gallery’s entire inaugural exhibition, devoted to more than 450 drawings by the imaginary artist “Naomi V. Jelish” (an anagram of Jamie Shovlin, who made the works), was bought by the British collector Charles Saatchi for 25,000 pounds, about $45,000 at the time.
As Mr. Taylor recalled: “It was fashionable to buy works by people no one had ever heard of. Everyone was at it. A collector who’d buy a Damien Hirst butterfly painting for a million would still buy a little painting for three thousand.”
But then, he said, “It stopped.”
The former gallery space is now occupied by a branch of an upmarket Parisian fashion store. Mr. Taylor plans to open a new gallery in the King’s Cross district of London in October next year.
Gallery openings and closings have always been a feature of the art world, but recently, closings have predominated. The annual report on the art market published this month by Art Basel and UBS said that in 2017, for the first time in 10 years, closings of galleries outnumbered openings.
Carroll/Fletcher, Ibid, Limoncello, Vilma Gold, White Rainbow and Wilkinson were among the contemporary dealerships in London to fold spaces last year.
Why are galleries that incubate emerging talent finding it so difficult to survive? Is it simply the pressure of rising rents in expensive cities like London and New York? Or is there a wider problem?
“The collectors aren’t going to galleries any more, they’re going to art fairs,” said John Martin, a dealer in contemporary art who has a gallery in the Mayfair district of London. “They’re less intimidating, more social, more convenient, and they’re open in the evenings and at the weekend,” he added. “People are time-poor.”
The Art Basel and UBS report estimated that more than $15 billion of sales were made at art fairs in 2017, representing about 46 percent of total dealer transactions. International collectors flock to destination events such as the three Art Basel fairs and the two (soon to be three) Friezes, where the booths of mega-galleries like Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace and David Zwirner occupy the prime positions.
“Smaller dealers can’t compete with the big galleries in a fair environment,” said Mr. Martin, who pointed out that the prices for emerging artists were often too modest to recoup the expense of participating. “We can be facing costs of up to $80,000,” he added. As well as being a gallerist, Mr. Martin is the co-founder of Cromwell Place, a project to develop a complex of rentable art spaces in the South Kensington district of London.
But there are other forces at play. According to the latest Art Basel and UBS report, galleries with annual sales below $500,000 experienced a decline in turnover, while those with sales above $50 million registered growth. At the same time, the wealth of the world’s millionaires and billionaires rose to just under $129 trillion. In other words, the rich are getting richer — and they’re making bigger purchases at the top galleries.
That was plain to see by the art and the price points at the grander gallery shows held to coincide with this month’s contemporary art auctions in London. Gagosian’s main gallery in Mayfair, for example, was showing “Come to Dust,” a museum-like exhibition of 60 recent paintings, drawings and sculptures by the British artist Glenn Brown. Many of these technically dazzling reinterpretations of old masters were presented in elaborate antique frames. They were priced at $120,000 to $4.5 million, according to Magnus, an app that makes gallery prices available. Hauser & Wirth was showing “Unanswerable,” its first exhibition of works by the critically admired American multimedia artist Lorna Simpson. Prices there were $150,000 to $450,000, according to the gallery.
Both artists are, in their different ways, established figures. Both shows were dominated by big, substantially priced paintings and sculptures that would impress in a public or private museum. Even smaller “entry-level” purchases were tagged at more than $100,000.
“The art system needs renewal,” said José Freire, founder of Team Gallery, a contemporary dealership with spaces in Los Angeles and New York. “There’s a danger of it becoming codified, and if it becomes codified, it squashes the idea of the avant-garde,” he added.
Mr. Freire has announced that he is giving up fairs, having exhibited at 78 over the last 17 years or so. His final participation will be at Art Basel Hong Kong, which opens with previews on March 27.
“I don’t understand why the internet hasn’t killed the art fairs,” said Mr. Freire. “I don’t need to go to an art fair to see it. I can stay where I am.”
In reality, the internet has done more to kill smaller art dealerships, given that anyone can see an exhibition on a smartphone without having to visit a gallery. But Mr. Freire, like pretty much every other dealer in the contemporary art world, still cleaves to the idea of having some kind of physical space in which to present a work. And Mr. Freire will only sell to collectors who turn up to his shows.
Mr. Freire said he had a waiting list of over 100 would-be buyers for “Daisy Chain,” his recent sellout exhibition of nine small figurative paintings by the New York-based artist Sam McKinniss at Team’s intimate, cost-effective space in a bungalow in Venice, Calif. Priced at $12,000 to $18,000, the works feature edgy portraits of California-linked celebrities as diverse as Joan Didion and Whitney Houston.
On March 1, three days before “Daisy Chain” closed, Damien Hirst’s “Veil Paintings” also sold out — albeit at a rather different price level — nine miles away at Gagosian in Beverly Hills. Hailed as the latest stage in the comeback of perhaps the world’s most famous (if, now, not so young) Y.B.A., those huge abstracts were painted by Mr. Hirst in a neo-pointillist style evoking the art of Georges Seurat and Pierre Bonnard. They were snapped up by collectors for $400,000 to $1.6 million, according to Artsy, an information and advertising website for the art world.
Mr. Freire, who has his California bungalow, and Mr. Martin, with his Cromwell Place project, are trying to come up with imaginative survival strategies for lower-tier dealers. But ultimately, for that to happen, more collectors are going to have to rediscover that smaller art in smaller galleries at smaller prices can be beautiful, too. If they do not, the art world faces a serious problem.
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