Dawson's Pique

Writing on Douz and Mille in the WaPo, Jessica Dawson mentions some changes in the art market:

One is the rise of the Internet as a vehicle for showing artwork, facilitating its sale and publicizing artists. The second is a proliferation of art fairs. When the fairs touch down for a long weekend in London or Miami, dealers are nearly guaranteed binge buying. Ask even those gallerists who oversee permanent spaces and they'll tell you that the real money gets made on the road.

This convergence of events has spawned a gallery that avoids almost all the costs of rent and utilities; essentially, overhead is plane fare. It sounds like a dream but brings with it new problems -- the biggest being how to show an artist in depth or in context."

It's worth expanding on exactly how art mover through the intertubes. Of course, some artists sell work over eBay and MySpace and so forth—all those painting-a-day artists, for example. But that's penny-ante stuff.

In the larger contemporary art marketplace, I can't come up with a gallery that sells exclusively via jpeg. The NYT ran an article a while back about a Tom Friedman show at Gagosian that sold out in minutes, well before anyone viewers actually saw the work:

It's another sign of the acceleration of the contemporary art market: New works, even in the six-figure range, are selling by digital image alone. For the Friedman show, Gagosian set up a private section on its Web site, accessible only by a password sent via e-mail message to select collectors.

That's still a gallery that oversees a (prominent) IRL* storefront—as is every gallery in the article (New York's Cheim & Read, Chicago's Kavi Gupta, and L.A.'s Blum & Poe. And those gallerists take pains to note, almost defensively, that buyers are familiar with the works of the artists that they're buying site unseen. The jpeg sale falls somewhere between an exclusive VIP preview and a waiting list.

In a smaller market like the District's, where fewer established and more emerging and unknown artists show, this phenomenon's rarer. (But not unheard of.) Even a virtual gallery like Douz and Mille hosts only a select number of small images online of artists' work.

The significance of the art market can't be understated in shaping the gallery space. . . but I think Dawson does exactly that, perhaps inadvertently. Plane fare is far from the only overhead involved: renting a cubicle—renting cubicles at Basel and ABMB and Armory and so on—adds up quick. There's plane fare, accommodations, the cost of shipping work—that adds up, sure—but the biggest costs are the 4 and 5-digit prices to rent the cubicle for 4 or 5 days. It's not the case that fairs or the Internet have rendered rent an obsolete cost for art dealers.

* IRL = in real life. Stay with me, folks.

Posted by Kriston at April 16, 2007 4:20 PM