The Globalization of the Art Market and What The Future Holds for Small Art Galleries
Large commercial art galleries represent the artistic establishment, principally featuring mid-to-late career artists whose works are found at the heart of art institutions around the globe. These galleries bank on the reputation of well-known artists to ensure the steady flow of sales needed to maintain their profit margins. On the other hand, small and midsize galleries have always been the advocates of the artistic avant-garde and incubators of new artists whose works challenge the status quo.
For several decades there has been a growing barrier between large-scale commercial art institutions and emerging art galleries. This division has been fueled by the wide-spread industrialization of the art market and the shift from art collecting as a hobbyist pursuit to one of investment and financial gain.
The consolidation of the art market into a select group of market players has had a profound effect on the art ecosystem. The expansion of so-called ‘mega-galleries’ — the likes of Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, and David Zwirner — has created a reality in which commercial art galleries are beginning to mirror the world’s leading museums and cultural institutions in their size, ambition, and reach. With the recent emergence of the online art market combined with the mega-galleries quest for market dominance, small art galleries are struggling to survive.
Shifting Consumer Trends in the Art Market
To fully understand these development, we need to turn our attention to the commoditization of art and its effect on the dynamics of the art market ecosystem.
The art market has relied on the same supply-demand chain for decades. Art school students, fresh out of university, look to art galleries to promote their careers. Galleries depend on the works of emerging artists to make their profits. In this way, art dealers become the gatekeepers of the new artistic current, deciding which artists’ works will appreciate over time and which of those will be forgotten. The newly rich turn to art galleries to buy works of art that can show off their wealth and status to the outside world.
Over the past several years art collectors have become increasingly disinterested in the actual works of art themselves, some buying works merely as an investment opportunity, others as a pretentious display of wealth. These new collectors favor established, late-career artists whose works are instantly recognizable and are bound to appreciate both commercially and canonically.
In his seminal 1939 essay, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, the renowned art critic Clement Greenberg wrote about the impact of consumerism on art. He argued that the artistic avant-garde pioneered new aesthetic standards in response to an industrialized society that had facilitated a decline in consumer taste. Even nearly 100 years ago emerging artists had to battle the dumbing down of culture in order to satisfy the needs of contemporary art collectors.
As dealers struggle to meet the financial burdens which come with running a commercial art gallery they broaden their clientele. This has created a vastly globalized art market in comparison to the art market dynamics of past years. Now, prospective collectors are able to turn their attention to a suite of international galleries with relative ease.
At the same time, the rise of the art fair has increased the cost of business activities while damaging normal foot-traffic to galleries. Instead of spending one’s Saturday afternoon strolling in and out of a couple art galleries, making slow, conscious decisions about the works of art they might wish to purchase, collectors can now attend an art fair and visit several dozen galleries in a single day.
All these factors have combined to produce a homogenized art market in which both dealers and collectors have systematically devalued the place of radical artist within the art ecosystem. Instead of promoting artistic development, I fear that the market has stymied real growth. When the dealers who support emerging artists struggle financially, it is the artists themselves who are most affected.
The Future for Emerging Art Galleries
With small art galleries going out of business left and right and the desire by collectors to acquire works by recognized artists, which institutions will step in to support our current generation of artists?
There are a solutions to this problem.
First and foremost, those who champion art — museums, galleries, collectors, curators, directors, critics, and even artists themselves — all must make a concerted effort to support emerging artists whose works challenge and drive art forwards. I believe that greater financial support and cooperation between these institutions and artists will help alleviate the pressure to create commodifiable artworks.
Condo, which takes its name from ‘condominium’, is a company devoted to large-scale collaborative exhibitions between international galleries. Galleries who sign on to the initiative collaborate with other galleries either by co-curating on a single exhibition within the space or by dividing the physical exhibition space between the galleries that come to visit.
The founders of Condo are committed to supporting small to midsized galleries and representing the works of emerging artists by reevaluating existing exhibition models. By pooling financial and physical resources together, small international galleries will have a better chance of competing with the mega-galleries currently consolidating the art market.
Initiatives like Condo are helping financially sustain the place of the emerging gallery within the art market but more change is needed.
At the same time, small galleries must commit resources to the bourgeoning online art market. As I wrote about early in July, sellers will need to transition away from conventional art forums towards progressive spaces which can attract a younger generation of art collectors. Almost anything can be bought online today, so why not art?
Countless sources have looked at the ways in which Millennials and Gen Z’s are largely dependent on online sales channels for their consumer spending. As their wealth increases in the coming years and they decide to spend that wealth on consumer goods, galleries will need to adopt new business models and marketing strategies which will best attract this younger audience.
Artsy, a New York City based start-up, has capitalized on this new commercial reality by offering galleries the ability to upload their inventory to an online marketplace. Artsy has reshaped the art market ecosystem by successfully combining a search engine which features advanced filters with an algorithm designed to match collectors with artworks based on art preferences and spending choices. The company is making art shopping an incredibly familiar and speedy process for a generation which is notably tech-savvy.
Still though, there are plenty of challenges that dealers face when they shift their business away from the traditional, intimate gallery setting to the somewhat remote world of the internet. Works of art are meant to be enjoyed in person, not as a digitized image on your computer screen. Only time will tell how accepting older generations of collectors will be of this new way of buying and selling art.
In any case, it is clear that the current small art gallery business model needs to change if they wish to survive in the future. A greater sense of financial security between emerging artists and the institutions which represent them in addition to larger collaborative efforts between various galleries are the steps needed to ensure the continued existence of the beloved brick-and-mortar art gallery.
