Anne Luther

Artist-run Galleries - Differentiating Three Models in Current Contemporary Art Markets

Over the past five years the contemporary art market in Western Europe and the US progressed with regard to its economic growth, the professionalization of certain art world roles, and the increase and growing influence of young international galleries and private museums. During 2013 and 2014, epochal auctions of post-war and contemporary art highlighted a new peak in investment in art that had been produced within five years of the auction. When an Untitled (fold) work by Tauba Auerbach from 2010 sold for an auction record price of $1,515,877 in October 2014 on the secondary market, even though paintings by her sold at the same time on the primary market between $40,000 and $60,000, the event opened the door for two years of so-called flipping practices on the contemporary art market. These accelerated (“flipped”) economic increases bolstered a rise in economic significance of contemporary art both at auction and on the private secondary market. Meanwhile, on the primary market rapid developments in the past five years saw a plethora of art fairs, the expansion of New York, Berlin and London galleries with branches in Los Angeles and Brussels, and the emergence of a cluster of new galleries on the Lower East Side in New York. In 2010, the so-called Independent New York art fair proposed a new model with a curated program in an open exhibition space as an alternative to the customary art fair booths based on the traditional model of the venerable Armory Show. Frieze expanded to New York in 2012, and in the same year NADA, another fair for contemporary art, opened in New York for the first time.1 These events corresponded to the unprecedented bidding levels seen at New York auctions in 2013 and 2014. The New York fairs gained significance and generated a local level of attention comparable to established contemporary art fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze London. Although more than twenty art fairs take place in New York each year, NADA, Independent and Frieze built their reputation around offering works through galleries that represented artists with institutional recognition. Steering committees that curate galleries in the fairs select those that have shown a record of institutional representation and international press, and can afford booth prices that reached double the square meter price of the Armory in 2013.2 In addition, these art fairs compete for sponsors and VIP packages among each other.

This article will illustrate different forms of artist-run galleries, in which art was exhibited for sale without an intermediary dealer, or rather with artists who became dealers and handled sales of works. The arguments in this article are based on a field study, participant observation and semi-structured interviews in the contemporary art world of New York for the author’s PhD thesis titled Collecting Contemporary Art: a visual analysis of a qualitative investigation into patterns of collecting and production.3 For this article the author continued the field study with interviews with artists who had run artist-run galleries in New York and with further field research with a reflective, empirical focus on these galleries’ strategies and models.

New York became the center of the contemporary art market in Europe and the US in the past five years due to the opening of new art fairs, the remodeling of institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1, the expansion of the emerging gallery sector on the Lower East Side and the long-standing array of significant auction houses, art magazines and art schools in the city. The multiple roles in the contemporary art market4 of artists, gallerists, curators, collectors, advisors, critics and many more overlap in a local network, in which information is exchanged about artist’s practices, upcoming exhibitions and the Who is Who (or rather who collects what and paid which price for it). The resulting interplay between art fairs, where current primary market prices are generated in an international comparison to other active participants in the sale of works of art, and auctions, in which a current secondary market value is revealed to the public, forms part of a socially coded environment in which these pieces of information are weighted against each participant’s personal access, interest and economic liquidity. In art centers such as New York, local knowledge is a traceable context for the numerous participants that can also be capitalized on, due to certain art world protocols5 that are only known to those who understand the socially coded language. Art world protocols describe positions mutually agreed through social interactions by the participants of the art world. It is a convention that is built in constant flux. Protocols are not written rules but rather attitudes, acts and knowledge about what is described as “good practice”, or as a “shady business”, in other words, the dos and don’ts. The language that is used in the field of the contemporary art market to define these protocols has no limits, as demonstrated by the example of the extensively covered topic of “Flippers”. Flippers were mostly young collectors who bought young contemporary art directly from the artists’ studios, bypassing any middlemen such as galleries, curators or dealers.6 They flipped works of art on the secondary market with a massive price increase, sometimes as quickly as during the same year they acquired them, and were soon thereafter condemned as the greedy devils of the art world7 due to their disinterest in the discourse, practice or sustainable support of the artists whose work they were buying. A “flipping explosion” in 2014 quickly led to the establishment of a protocol designed to blacklist collectors who resold works at auction that had been bought on the primary market and without consulting the gallery. Blacklisting of these collectors was however restricted to works by artists with institutional recognition and secondary market interest. The practice led to a vouchsafing process for buyers interested in works matching these two criteria, and collectors or their advisors developed social strategies in order to gain access to works that clearly showed a market increase. For example, such social strategies included and still include demonstrating a track record of museum loans from a collection or a connection to an institutional network. Publicizing a collection and showing works with “museum quality”8, or the acquisition of works by “artist’s artists”9 from a gallery that also sold so-called “trophy works” can assist a collector in getting access to high quality, signature works. Access not only becomes a matter of demonstrating the correct intentions for a collector, but also allows for greater price control and consequently market security for the gallery, which as a result can offer a more consistent financial support to its artists through sales.

Nevertheless, galleries also developed strategies to financially support the artists they represented that would bring the value and prestige of institutional recognition to their programming rather than turn a direct financial profit. A strategic gallery program would clearly demonstrate a balance between institutional recognition and commercial significance. One example for such a strategy is the increasing practice by gallerists to support artists financially in production, studio and exhibition costs. It may seem that galleries take on the role of patron due to a belief in their artists’ symbolic value, but the strategy is designed to build prestige through institutional recognition and non-market-targeted art production. In turn the gallery gains symbolic capital that leads to economic capital: institutional recognition increases the market value of both the gallery and its artists. Recognition of a discourse, materiality and aesthetics that artists establish supports galleries in their programming, which is also part of the prestige or standing a gallery develops in its local network. The gallery works on a recognizable signature for each artist, and deviation from such a market-ready practice often becomes unknown territory that the artist has to enter alone, with his or her own investment of time and personal risk of failure. Young galleries tend to build a linear narrative of an emerging artist’s practice that is progressing from earlier works. The descriptive word “emerging” also hints at this strategy. Young curators thus have the opportunity of building their own recognizable programming with artist names that stand for certain discourses, while collectors can build their own coherent collection narrative. The reputation of these roles is defined through the categorization of artists they are selling, collecting or exhibiting (“trophy works”, “women artists”, “political art”...). The capitalization of local and socially coded knowledge to establish a certain standing that allows access to art works with a traceable market success (including institutional support as described) is a circular process. By definition, it denied the possibility to reinvent, fail and explore any practices that would not fall into the established standing or narrative agreed on all sides (art production, sales, collecting and exhibiting).

One result of this development, especially looking at the past five years in the local art world of New York, was the emergence of exhibition spaces that are run by artists with an already established standing on the commercial and institutional art market. Some exhibitions were site-specific and temporary, lasting just one weekend such as “Hüttendasein”,10 an exhibition in a temporary cardboard shed in a Brooklyn backyard that included works by Ben Schumacher, (represented by Bortolami Gallery) and Rochelle Goldberg (represented by Miguel Abreu Gallery), to name two artists with established institutional and auction track records. Artist-run galleries emerged not only as a sporadic reaction towards market pressures.

Different sale strategies depend on the model of the artist-run gallery and can be divided in the following categories: an exhibition space that has an autonomous programming, an exhibition space that is representing artists, and a non-permanent space that is not representing artists. An artist studio that turned into a gallery for specific projects is an example of a non-permanent, non-representing space. Artist-run galleries have been a part of the contemporary art world in New York since the appearance of an art market.11 The differentiation made here is contextualized in current art market protocols.

The differentiation of these spaces is important for the negotiation of sales percentages that an artist receives. A protocol for sales percentages of a work of art is that the representing gallery usually receives percentages even if they are not the exhibiting or selling agents. The representing gallery splits the sale price with their representing artist in a 50% share when they are instrumental in making the sale. In the case of an artist wanting to exhibit the work in a different gallery or a non-permanent exhibition space in which works of art are for sale, the representing gallery receives 10% or 15% commission and the owners of the space that sells the work receive 40% or 35%. These commission rates can vary and are negotiated between the representing gallery and the exhibiting space but the abovementioned percentages are a typical protocol. As mentioned before, these practices and percentages are not to be considered as rules but rather as socially constructed protocols that are up for negotiation. The commission percentages are justified through the argument that the representing gallery establishes a collector base and a reputation of the artist that in return opens the possibility for the non-representing space to sell works. Prices are made by the representing gallery and cannot be altered by the non-representing space unless the artist autonomously decides to sell work without the gallery, which usually only happens with works that the gallery do not have in their inventory and which differ significantly from any work that has ever been exhibited by the representing gallery.12 However, the scenario of the negotiation of sales in artist-run projects is especially dependent on the communication with the artist rather than the dealer because these projects are set out as peer-to-peer exhibitions, artists showing artists rather than a dealer/curator who is exhibiting an artist.

Three categories of artist-run galleries that emerged in the context described in the past five years and that exhibit art for sale can be differentiated.

Artist studio turned exhibition space

In 2012, Laura Owens, an artist represented by the New York gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, moved into an old printing press building in Los Angeles and turned it into her studio space. Only one year later, she opened the space as the exhibition location 356 Mission Rd affiliated with her representing gallery, showing her own work as the opening show. Since then, the exhibition space hosted forty-nine exhibitions including artists Alex Katz and Elaine Sturtevant, both represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and with highly acclaimed institutional recognition. The space also opened a for profit book shop and hosts regular art events. Galleries’ support for their artists’ studios is nothing new in the contemporary art world and has been commented on above as being part of a strategy that also targets the commercial success of a gallery. In this instance, turning an artist’s studio into an affiliated exhibition space and exhibiting in a looser fashion than a typical programming by a representing gallery can however also be contextualized with the history of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. Gavin Brown, a practicing artist himself, opened his gallery in Soho New York in 1994, just after his first solo show at David Zwirner Gallery in 1993. Although this studio-turned-exhibition-space is a peer-to-peer or rather artist-exhibiting-artist scenario, 356 Mission Rd. developed a program of work that is also shown in international acclaimed commercial galleries. The financial structure that was already in place for insuring, shipping and handling works of art in price categories of $50,000 and up shows that 356 Mission Rd. is comparable to the extension of a gallery based in New York to a space in Los Angeles, rather than an artist studio turned gallery. Nevertheless, the proximate narrative between Gavin Brown and his role as an artist and gallerist and Laura Owens, a practicing artist who runs a commercial non-representing gallery gives a perspective on how fluid roles in the contemporary art world have always been.

Figure 1: Installation View, National Gallery at Grand Century. Available at National Gallery, accessed August 28, 2017, http://www.grandcentury.biz/nationalgallery.html.

In New York, the described pressure coming from emerging and established representing galleries led to a context in which artists showed peers in their studios with a greater distance to the white wall aesthetics of commercial galleries, an aesthetic that 356 Mission Rd. continued in their programming. Grand Century, an exhibition space in the studio of artists Dora Budor, Alex Mackin Dolan and Olivia Erlanger opened in 2014 on the Lower East Side. The group exhibitions were curated, lasting over one weekend, and the program included artists such as Isa Genzken in an exhibition curated by London-based curator Tobias Czudej in 2014, the same year she had a retrospective at MoMA. Darren Bader was included in a group show just a few months after his solo exhibition at his representing gallery Andrew Kreps in New York in 2014. These two examples from the programming of Grand Century show that the peer-to-peer studio exhibition space included artists that are commercially and institutionally represented on an established level. And although artists such as Seth Price and Michael Williams appeared in their program, the space emerged with the intention to show artist friends and work that would not be found in established gallery spaces, even by the established artists mentioned. Isa Genzken’s work was, for example, installed along all other works in the exhibition National Gallery on a metal construction of a lowered ceiling which was removed and replaced by plexi glass. The work, two small paintings with coins, a ripped dollar bill and miniature plastic figures glued onto it, could be accessed with ladders that allowed the audience to climb to the ceiling and view the exhibition from both the floor looking up and the ceiling looking down (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 2: Installation View, N Figure 2: Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2014, spray-paint, coins, plastic, dollar bill, National Gallery at Grand Century. Available at National Gallery, accessed August 28, 2017, http://www.grandcentury.biz/nationalgallery.html.