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.

Writing for Artnet in January, Ben Davis’s “Do You Have to Be Rich to Make It as an Artist?” raised an important question about the relationship between privilege and access to a life in the arts. Examining the upbringings of a number of artists currently or recently on view at museums in New York, Davis drew the conclusion that if not middle class, the majority of artists were more likely to come from wealth than from working/poor backgrounds. Can anyone without access to wealth afford to work the long and frequently unpaid hours demanded by the arts?

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Bal du Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

Art history suggests that the well-off have always had an inside line to the halls of culture, acting as artists or producers of major commissions. The middle-class artist is a more recent invention of the 19th century, occupying a social position that emerged with the Industrial Revolution and development in cities from Paris to New Delhi to Brasilia. In the Modernist cultural paradigm that emerges from this circumstance, the middle-class artist has an important role to play. His or her wealth is sufficient to ensure a liberal-arts education, but not so abundant as to be an insulator against the poetry of the street. The middle class ensures that vernacular subjects and art forms infiltrate the spaces of high art and culture. This is now something we take for granted, so much so that even the one-percenter artists that Davis lists work in common, everyday materials.

Our image of the modern artist is circumscribed by expectations of middle-class status. We imagine Manet, the son of a judge, or Picasso, the son of an art professor. As a group, the Impressionists largely shared middle-class origins. Degas and Cezanne were bankers’ sons. Prior generations of artists were artisans, working with their hands, or they were patriarchs, commanding teams of apprentices. The scale, values, and materials of Modernism originate with the middle class, which shares interests in industrialization and technology, and influences resulting from the import of large amounts of global crafts and commodities to satiate their consumer appetites.

Jeremy Deller. English Magic, 2013. 55th Venice Biennale.

No one in the late 20th century modeled the virtues and vices of the middle-class artist better than David Bowie, who died this month at the age of 69. A rock star, a painter, and an art writer, Bowie’s eclectic interests belied his art-school education, and his fan base reflects this orientation. The young people depicted in Whistler, Sargent, Cassat, and Renoir paintings—whether at home, gathered in groups, or at the opera or the cafe-concert—are little different from the ones shown thronging at the Hammersmith Odeon in D.A. Pennebaker’s iconic Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973). The spectacles that Bowie put on as Ziggy, on his infamous Diamond Dogs tour in 1974, and as the Thin White Duke in 1976, were heavily indebted to the Modernists, drawing on Constructivism and German Expressionism, and enacting a Modernist global synthesis of Kabuki theater and African diaspora performance traditions. In his private life, Bowie confounded the press by representing as two conflicting middle-class tropes, the libertine and the family man, at once.

David Bowie, 1973. Photo by Leee Black Childers.

Born in working-class Brixton, Bowie’s middle-class identification is all the more relatable because it was attained, when his family moved to suburban Bromley, rather than born. He appropriated this strategy when, with his manager Tony DeFries, Bowie in the early 1970s more or less bluffed his way into stardom by presenting the extravagant lifestyle expected at that level without worrying much about who would pay for it. The performance of class is an essential aspect of the middle-class climb. In this he resembled his idol Andy Warhol, another artist whose work reflected on the process of constructing identity according to social expectations and class hierarchies. Both artists worked for years in relative obscurity to establish themselves, while watching their friends and peers gain recognition, before achieving global attention. There may be no more typically middle-class experience than this, of striving for greatness and achieving mixed results. The intersection of aspiration, abjection, anxiety, and privilege that class transition represents was a favorite subject in Bowie’s work, and a problematic one. Like the Modernist flâneur, Bowie romanticized the people and cultures of the street, while emulating the fashions and affectations of the upper class. He also brought an avant-garde theatricality born on society’s margins, in the queer community of New York’s Lower East Side (and with Warhol’s support), to the mainstream.

David Bowie, 1973. Photo by Leee Black Childers.

At his best, Bowie used the access that his privilege granted to promote other, less recognized artists, including Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, but also Luther Vandross, Jayne County, and Ava Cherry, and give them credit for influencing him. At his worst, he commoditized the counterculture for the benefit of the powers that be, which may have led to the midlife crisis he described to Michael Kimmelman in 1998. All the same, without him and others like him, there would be no conduit to draw the resources and support of the powerful to the vibrant cultural inventors of the street. In a cultural landscape where even emerging artists and performers now require major money behind them to even get started, that link is disconnected. Mainstream artists still appropriate from the artists of the street, but support no longer flows downstream, because blockbuster culture and its makers are socially isolated from the creators from whom they borrow.

A couple of years ago now, this column addressed “the squeezing of the middle-class gallery” as smaller professional galleries, many family-run or sole-proprietor, struggled to keep their spaces against rising rents. This trend has continued, along with the trend of institutions courting artists with connections to wealthy families. As resources are increasingly consolidated in fewer hands, the middle-class artist threatens to become a relic of the 20th century; the effect of this shift will be to snuff out innovation. Artists will continue to emerge who can remix the artistic canon in contemporary, trendy ways, but an artist with a gift for appropriation and reinvention on the order of David Bowie is unlikely to appear again.

Image from Art+Tech: Virtual Reality, November 2014. Photo: CODAME.

Over the past year, San Francisco and the Bay Area have come to be defined in the national sphere by the thinkpiece. In the constant stream of articles about gentrification, the Ellis Act evictions, artist displacement, and arts nonprofits closing left and right in response to the city’s rising population and booming tech industry, it might be surprising to note that a number of tech companies are investing increasingly in artist residency programs. In fact, two of the biggest tech companies in the region—Facebook and Autodesk—maintain active residency programs. For companies without the infrastructure for such endeavors, local art and technology nonprofit CODAME offers to pair tech companies with artists for individual projects through their “Adopt An Artist” program. While there is a lot of conversation (and concern) in the Bay Area regarding the tech industry’s lack of support and philanthropy for the arts, the questions seem skewed towards trying to figure out how to cater to tech wealth, rather than thinking through art’s role in the tech industry itself. This text surveys corporate residency programs in the Bay Area which exemplify how artists engage with this industry, and begins to sketch out possible implications—or potential—for the art infrastructure and its relationship with tech creativity.

Autodesk’s Pier 9 Artist-in-Residence program is housed in the corporation’s immense facility in Pier 9 along the waterfront in downtown San Francisco. Artists apply for four-month residencies at the space, which provides access to their workshop, a stipend, and the ability to work directly with the company’s engineers on their projects. The program maintains a diverse pool of applicants who range from fashion designers to chefs, architects, and technologists as well as fine artists, who have access to Autodesk’s high-end equipment, materials, and software, plus training and skillshare programs. Although it is not an explicit part of the program, the focus on “makers” over “fine artists” benefits Autodesk as well. The company launched Autodesk 123D in 2009 as free 3D modeling software designed for the general consumer, and they acquired the DIY info sharing website Instructables in 2011. The AIR program began at Instructables before their purchase by Autodesk, who developed it into a much larger initiative. All AIR residents are required to post their projects to the website, so there is a direct tie into the site’s content. Envisioning how people create with their tools, or their competitor’s tools, in a variety of scenarios is clearly a valuable asset to the company, especially as the mainstream culture moves into a maker culture.

Read the full article here.