Two recent unconventional gallery openings on the West Coast have upended expectations about how the commercial and nonprofit sectors of the art world correspond to and interact with one another. Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s seven-building complex in Los Angeles’ downtown arts district is a commercial gallery with institutional ambitions, promising thematic exhibitions, high-profile loans, publishing, and scholarship. Minnesota Street Project, located at 1275 Minnesota St. in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, is uniting ten different galleries in a cooperative setup that includes shared exhibition space and joint events. While both entities are for profit, they’ve adopted nonprofit conventions that speak to the art market’s shift away from exhibitions and toward art fairs, which reduces the value of the monthly rotating shows that are standard in the majority of commercial galleries.

Exterior view, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, 2016. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Joshua Targownik/targophoto.com.

A comparison of these two new spaces is fruitful; they are as different from one another as they are from the average gallery. Hauser Wirth & Schimmel is a partnership between one of Europe’s most esteemed blue-chip galleries and Paul Schimmel, the former MOCA chief curator whom many credit with putting Los Angeles artists from the 1990s on the map. Fueled by cash and name recognition, HW&S continues the established Hauser & Wirth model of developing exhibitions that go beyond the traditional gallery functions of representation and sales. The motivation is not necessarily philanthropic, although the new HW&S does appear to have, if not a public mission, a strategy for public engagement that emphasizes accessibility as well as scholarship. The education program, headed by former MOCA public programs curator Aandrea Stang, will bring leading intellectuals to give public lectures and offer tours of the exhibition to schoolchildren and the public, free of charge. These museum-like activities make the gallery into a destination, one that incentivizes visits by collectors who favor the biennial and museum circuit, and who are increasingly unlikely to make the trip to a gallery just to buy art.

Exterior view, 1275 Minnesota Street. Courtesy of Minnesota Street Project.

Minnesota Street Project also creates a destination, one that features emerging and middle-class galleries that have felt squeezed by the costs of San Francisco real estate and international art-fair participation. The ten member galleries operate out of relatively small individual spaces and share packing, shipping, and kitchen facilities as well as the rotating use of two larger exhibition spaces. Artist studios for SF-based artists are also provided at a separate, nearby location. Again, the emphasis is on establishing a scene that will attract and motivate collectors. Alternating the exhibition programming in the larger spaces will provide a contrast to the familiar mode of hosting annual shows by the same ten artists that generally populate a gallery’s roster. Combined events promise to draw crowds and press interest to confer legitimacy on emerging galleries and artists. Importantly, the collective space engenders a network of support in a typically fraught, and often isolating, line of work.

Interior view, 1275 Minnesota Street. Courtesy of Minnesota Street Project.

Just as the shapes of these new galleries reflect the face of a changing art market, their modes of operation speak to the challenges of gallerists who are trying to adapt to a world in which not every in-demand artist lives in New York, London, or Berlin, and not every titan of industry believes that art is a worthy investment. San Francisco currently rivals Manhattan for the nation’s costliest real estate, but Silicon Valley riches have yet to translate into serious support for the arts. The most successful attempt to engage them so far appears to be The Battery, the private membership club that has launched several successful partnerships with Bay Area galleries since 2012. Their model of working with guest curators and galleries to organize exhibitions prefigures Minnesota Street Project’s rotating exhibition spaces.

Installation view, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, 2016.
Courtesy of the Artists and Hauser & Wirth.
Photo: Brian Forrest.

In downtown Los Angeles, the arrival of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, along with Sprüth Magers and Maccarone, could herald an art bubble. Gallerists, curators, and artists—myself among them—have flocked to Los Angeles in the past few years, seeking something like the visibility of New York without the dismal winters, brutal summers, and crushing rents. Despite the appearance of a boom, most Angelenos agree that the abundance of wealth in Los Angeles has not yet come to bear fully on the space of contemporary art. Support for the major museums has often come with a tangle of strings attached, and while midsize arts institutions and middle-class galleries can tread water, they do not always attract revenues commensurate with their stature. There are risks to these ventures, which seek to drive a level of interest and investment that has been slow to build by other means.

Shinique Smith, Forgiving Strands, 2015–2016; installation view, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel breezeway, 2016. Courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Joshua Targownik/targophoto.com.

Minnesota Street Project will get a boost from the enthusiasm of the new residents and the novelty of the site. Yet we will not know whether the experiment is truly successful for five or ten years, at which time the anchor galleries that drive the bulk of collector interest could relocate and leave the weaker ones to struggle as has happened at 49 Geary and elsewhere. HW&S is banking in part on LA’s ability to meaningfully address the intractable homeless encampments in downtown, a mayoral promise that has yet to materialize. More broadly, these large investments in commercial galleries come at a time when the art communities in both cities are threatened by gentrification, rising rents, and a lack of collector engagement that means most measures of value or significance are established by New York, without California’s contexts or interests in mind. This encourages a superficial approach to regional talent that skims the most visible artists from the scene without establishing a pipeline to ensure continued investment in the artists that have not yet broken through to the blue-chip level. LA and SF museums have likewise reduced or curtailed consideration of local curators for staff positions—another stream of support for the regional art community, championed by Schimmel’s generation, that threatens to dry up for younger artists. With these trends, the arrival of big art-world players could snuff out these emerging scenes as easily as they could be supportive, by draining California’s already-vetted talent and failing to cultivate the next generation.

Caroline Woolard. ourgoods.org cards, 2010. Courtesy of the Artist.

Within a neoliberal economy that supports the debt-backed-professionalization of artists and activists, I question the relationship between overproduction and underpayment. What are the conditions that make overproduction desirable? When did monetary payment for art and activism become necessary? While artists and activists demand payment for work, we must also articulate our relationship to payment systems: market sales, state-support, philanthropy, and solidarity economies that center on livelihood. Acknowledging the diverse economies that I circulate in, I hope this writing points towards the internal contradictions that make professionalized, debtor artists and activists in the United States (including me) hustle for cash while engaging in projects on scales that cannot possibly compensate all participants equitably.

As most people reading this already know, the labor behind many works of art is veiled by a myth of individual genius. Although contemporary artworks that circulate in museums, galleries, and biennials are mostly produced by unpaid interns, underpaid artists’ assistants, seasonally-employed shop technicians, and far-flung contractors hired by artists’ project managers, narratives that celebrate individual charisma and “the artist’s touch” continue to permeate wall labels and art discourse alike.

Many artist-collectives, by sharing labor and decision making power, counteract the alienation that often occurs with an hourly wage and a drive towards efficiency in rapid production. To make labor visible, for Artists Experiment at MoMA in 2013, I proposed an ongoing event where artists, interns, assistants, and craftspeople would stand beside the works of art that they labored on, telling visitors about the process of producing each work, as well as the forms of compensation received by each person. This proposal, submitted as one of six options for Artists Experiment project at MoMA, was not chosen.

Read the full article here.

On September 15, 2008, contemporary artist Damien Hirst took an unprecedented risk. Bypassing the normal protocol enforced by his partnering galleries and dealers, Hirst took 223 of his own works to auction at Sotheby’s Auction House (London), resulting in a two-day sale marketed as an ephemeral, high-stakes solo exhibition titled Beautiful Inside My Head. The event was strictly all-ticket and limited to 656 clients, arguably ironic considering this was Hirst’s attempt to “democratize” the sale of his artwork. The high estimate for the combined sales of Hirst’s works was £98 million; by the end of the second evening, the lot had totaled £111.5 million—and represented the peak of the contemporary art market.(1) Simultaneously in New York City, Lehman Brothers was in the process of processing the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history— revealing losses of $639 billion, kickstarting what would shortly become the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. In this environment, how would any business—much less the small niche of contemporary art galleries—survive?

Damien Hirst. For the Love of God, 2007; Image courtesy of Aaron Weber and Flickr.com.

Partnerships have served as one successful facet of the coping strategy devised by dealers to survive the tightening scope of the art market. In forging a well-regarded community brand, Culver City galleries had the advantage of being able to address some of the early needs of the Knowledge Age consumer by providing multiple options in one location. At the same time, because of falling real estate prices, the prospects for both large and developing galleries to buy space instead of renting became increasingly feasible, along with a lessening of the strain on midsize and emerging galleries in the same area, thereby creating a more solidified network of eclectic art spaces. Being in Culver City allows the galleries and the consumers to be part of a more diverse art community, and not just one gallery.

At the same moment, the advent of additional technologies expanded the Castellian notion of the provincial gallery network: in fact, the very idea of a province could be taken online, where it could be defined as a part of a localized or branded gallery culture. One of the more successful examples of this is Artsy, founded by Princeton undergraduate Carter Cleveland after trying to search for a “cool” piece of artwork in a gallery-deprived New Jersey town.(2) Cleveland wanted to fill the void between gallery communities and non-local budding collectors, making all the world’s art available to anyone with an Internet connection.  With the help of partners, advisers and backers like the infamous gallerist Larry Gagosian, the Russian art-world celebrity, Dasha Zhukova, and John Elderfield, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, Cleveland was able to quickly develop a product that offered a user-friendly platform and global interconnectivity at essentially zero cost to either user (gallerist or collector).

Sebastian Cwilich (left) and Carter Cleveland (right) at Haunch of Venison, 2011. Photo: Eric Ogden.

With 275 galleries and fifty museums and institutions as partners, Artsy has digitized twenty thousand images into its reference system, which it calls the Art Genome Project. Each partnering gallery or institution retains full control over the images uploaded to their individual profiles, and can maintain an easily accessed, online active inventory of their available works or exhibitions.  Once uploaded, a team of art historians “tag” the work with terms associated with certain genres, movements, techniques, or styles, which then enters that work into dialogue with like-minded works listed in the index.  The average browser can be introduced to thousands of artists, galleries, and institutions simply by defining his or her general preferences within a given image gallery. From the gallerists, Artsy simply asks for 3 percent of the net sale price of any work sold through the website, which is less than the average gallery salesperson earns on a sale commission.  Furthermore, with no required membership or listing fees, Artsy offered an attractive, progressive alternative to pre-existing online inventory listings and databases like ArtNet, which do not ask for commissions on sales, but require monthly hosting dues upwards of $350. And Artsy is merely one brand within the groundswell of economical online art platforms.

This new way of conducting business is less a viable replacement for the gallery business model than a compliment to it, but in the post-2008 economic climate, access has become an infinitely more critical aspect of the gallery world than what the original “White Cube” attitude may have prescribed. Today, access is about availability in both time and space. “One hand washes the other,” says Bennett Roberts of Roberts and Tilton. “You must have both [an online presence and a physical space] to reach the audience you want.”(3)

An illustration promoting a smartphone application being developed by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Image courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

In the Knowledge Age, access is about being there when the individual wants you to be there; there is no single method for being there for people.  In other words, access can be achieved through physical location [as well as] by the use of technology. The arts province of Los Angeles (as developed by the Ferus-era galleries) is divided into sub-provincial states of encounter, which includes the brand of the Culver City gallery community, and that sub-province is divided further into multiple forms of online presence and collaborative byproducts.  In testing and implementing the adaptive gallery model required for sustainability and advancement, contemporary art galleries in the post-2008 recession environment (like those in Culver City) have managed to navigate and make use of various avenues for interactivity and exchange.

Of course, this leads us to question where galleries will find themselves as the economy continues to shift.  Will physical gallery culture, which responds to the unique socioeconomic environment of a given time, eventually be rendered obsolete?  Art dealers today claim not, but many feel that the traditional boundaries of the brick-and-mortar gallery are beginning to feel strain.  The desire to be everywhere at once with inventory for every possible configuration of collector, coupled with the increasing advent of art fairs in every city in the world, will ultimately take its toll. Yet despite the hardships, the changes made within the Culver City gallery community represent an advance in the methodologies employed by contemporary art dealers—not mere temporary adjustments—and as technology and consumer expectations continue to develop and change, so will gallery culture, as it always has.

Catlin Moore is currently the Director of Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, CA. Some citations have been eliminated for the sake of brevity.