“The artist is a brand, and the brand supersedes the art”
Jerry Saltz on what happens to artists when they sign with the mega-gallery businesses and the “potentially pernicious” effects.
By far the most common topics of discussion and consternation in the art world these days are the four behemoths. Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Pace are the bull elephants of the field, galleries that galumph everywhere all the time, Hoovering up artists and money and monopolizing attention. With their enormous spaces, multiple branches, well-oiled business models, massive staffs, PR networks, market power, and endless capitalization, they are overwhelmingly present. They take up hundreds of thousands of square feet in New York and much more across the globe. Each started small, and each has transitioned from the complex personal visions and eccentricities of its founders into an enormous corporation. All four stand for success, celebrity, spectacle, supply-side abundance, gall, merchandising, and monomania. Call them conquista-galleries. Or Death Stars.
They’re growing, too. Hauser & Wirth opened its second location here in January, in the gigantic former Roxy, and is starting on a great big L.A. space, has hangar-size rooms in Zurich, and will next launch an entire arts center in England, adding to the three galleries it already runs there. David Zwirner—who built big on West 20th Street last season—recently restored a building in London. In March, Larry Gagosian announced the opening of a 22,000-square-foot London trading floor—his third in that city and fourteenth worldwide. The sun now never sets on Gagosian. I know three of the megadealers themselves—Zwirner, Gagosian, and Hauser & Wirth’s Iwan Wirth. (I don’t know Pace’s Arne Glimcher, and I’ve never actually known who Hauser is, now that I think about it.) All three are as smart and passionate about art as anyone I’ve ever met. Each could argue you under a table, with a smile. Each shows great artists. All have done the hardest thing a gallerist can do: discover, rediscover, and nurture important artists.
Yet something happens to people when they sign with the megas. Too often, the artists are brought in at mid-career, and—like 34-year-olds signed by the Yankees—they are poised for a decline. Every show of living artists in these galleries is ushered in like a career retrospective, a quasi coronation, with everything often already sold or spoken for. There’s no space for debate about the merits. Many of these shows are too big by half, filled with dross. No matter. PR staffs crank up; bells and whistles go off; critics give wet kisses and write jargon-filled texts that disguise the fact that what is written and what is written about are often both meaningless, or they take the easy way out and just write screeds. The artist is a brand, and the brand supersedes the art. The scale and pace of these places often turn artists into happy little factories with herds of busy assistants turning out reams of weak work. It’s the new Capitalist Realism.
By far the most common topics of discussion and consternation in the art world these days are the four behemoths. Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Pace are the bull elephants of the field, galleries that galumph everywhere all the time, Hoovering up artists and money and monopolizing attention. With their enormous spaces, multiple branches, well-oiled business models, massive staffs, PR networks, market power, and endless capitalization, they are overwhelmingly present. They take up hundreds of thousands of square feet in New York and much more across the globe. Each started small, and each has transitioned from the complex personal visions and eccentricities of its founders into an enormous corporation. All four stand for success, celebrity, spectacle, supply-side abundance, gall, merchandising, and monomania. Call them conquista-galleries. Or Death Stars.
They’re growing, too. Hauser & Wirth opened its second location here in January, in the gigantic former Roxy, and is starting on a great big L.A. space, has hangar-size rooms in Zurich, and will next launch an entire arts center in England, adding to the three galleries it already runs there. David Zwirner—who built big on West 20th Street last season—recently restored a building in London. In March, Larry Gagosian announced the opening of a 22,000-square-foot London trading floor—his third in that city and fourteenth worldwide. The sun now never sets on Gagosian. I know three of the megadealers themselves—Zwirner, Gagosian, and Hauser & Wirth’s Iwan Wirth. (I don’t know Pace’s Arne Glimcher, and I’ve never actually known who Hauser is, now that I think about it.) All three are as smart and passionate about art as anyone I’ve ever met. Each could argue you under a table, with a smile. Each shows great artists. All have done the hardest thing a gallerist can do: discover, rediscover, and nurture important artists.
Yet something happens to people when they sign with the megas. Too often, the artists are brought in at mid-career, and—like 34-year-olds signed by the Yankees—they are poised for a decline. Every show of living artists in these galleries is ushered in like a career retrospective, a quasi coronation, with everything often already sold or spoken for. There’s no space for debate about the merits. Many of these shows are too big by half, filled with dross. No matter. PR staffs crank up; bells and whistles go off; critics give wet kisses and write jargon-filled texts that disguise the fact that what is written and what is written about are often both meaningless, or they take the easy way out and just write screeds. The artist is a brand, and the brand supersedes the art. The scale and pace of these places often turn artists into happy little factories with herds of busy assistants turning out reams of weak work. It’s the new Capitalist Realism.