Notes

Insights On How Galleries Support Their Creators
سربرگ اداری

A routine reader of the news has likely seen headlines about a Damien Hirst program, a record price fetched for a Jeff Koons sculpture, or a brand-new work of street art by Banksy. And there's some exposure to the examples of an artist's trajectory: group and solo programs at galleries, price appreciation and a great proving at auctions, and eventually an appearance in a museum program or collection.




What's less immediately noticeable to the broader world is the function that galleries play, and how a gallery itself becomes established. There are a handful of so-called "mega-dealers" whose names may recognize even to those on the fringes of the art world, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, and David Zwirner amongst them. However galleries are still the beating heart of the art world, the mechanism through which many artists find their way to institutions, the world's great collections, or simply the homes of people who enjoy their work.

Galleries have several functions, both noticeable and undetectable: to breed and support their artists, typically by going above and beyond the typical work of putting on programs, promoting their artists, and selling the works; and to providing services such as financial management or book publishing, in order to help their artists focus more fully on their work.

"There's the things that you see in our gallery that are in front of the scenes, which are certainly the exhibits, the publications that we make, then there are things that lag the scenes, which could be everything from working with an artist on their archives or dealing with research study for an exhibition for many years or maybe researching artworks that passed through the gallery in terms of secondary market," says Julia Joern, a partner at David Zwirner.

Galleries are available in any ages, shapes, and sizes too. Art Basel and UBS's Art Market | 2017 report approximated there were roughly 296,000 dealerships and gallery businesses in 2016. Simply under 40% of them had annual sales of less than $500,000, while a similar share had sales totaling between $1 million and $10 million. Almost two thirds of all galleries employed 5 or fewer people, and just 4% had 20 or more employees.

Despite size, at the core of a gallery's identity is its "program." The term typically describes the lineup of artists a gallery represents, but can also describe a conceptual structure or location of focus that guides that roster, in addition to other activities such as cooperations with other galleries, performances and lectures, or reasonable appearances. A lot of will stress that their main function is to facilitate their artists' production of great work, in any way they can.

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