Charles Lewis Art - California

Do Art Galleries Matter Any More?

I can’t help noticing that art galleries are closing in droves. In the USA, anyway. Maybe someone will comment on how things are in Europe, Japan or wherever. It’s easy to blame this on tough economic times, when spending on luxury items – even cheap luxury items like a small art print – is always the first thing to get cut out of a budget. But I can’t help thinking that there might be more of a shift going on than the one caused by the recession. I started wondering: do galleries really matter any more?

I read in one of Jack White’s excellent books on the business of being an artist (I think it was “The Mystery of Making It”), that fewer than 5% of Americans had ever been inside an art gallery. Maybe it was more like 1%. Either way, it’s not a good thing if you are a gallery artist.

Artists want to reach the public with their work. And have the public buy it. Art galleries are a traditional place where art and public intersect. There are, of course, others: retail locations like coffee shops, restaurants, craft shops, and so on. They are a poor place for art, most of them, since people don’t go to coffee shops to buy paintings, for example. There’s the direct-to-public route, as in art fairs and craft fairs, holiday bazaars, etc. That can work well, depending on the artist and the art, but they don’t really help build a rep. There are museums, but that’s an impossible route for all but a miniscule percentage of artists, and you can’t buy art from a museum exhibition usually. Of these venues, galleries have long been the premier situation.

Of course, there’s the internet. Actually, I don’t think much good wall art or sculpture is sold over the internet, at least not yet. The computer viewing experience is pretty poor, and it’s hard to really know what it is you’re buying. Artists that get magazine coverage might do better from the internet, since there are good reproductions to look at in the art mags before you order a print or original.

Why, then, do I get such a gloomy feeling when I go into galleries these days? The first thing I notice is the poor quality of sales staff in galleries. Sorry, but it’s true. Galleries exist to sell art – don’t they? How many times have you gone in a gallery and never even been talked to? Plenty, I’d bet. Some lamebrain behind the desk is fascinated by his or her computer, but completely uninterested in a prospective customer. Are they all recent MFA grads doing unpaid internships; into art but not at all into the commerce of art? How many times have you heard this: “Let me know if I can help you,” followed by a grateful return to the computer screen. Selling is a learned skill; every industry depends on sales (even non-profits, who have to sell their need for donations) and there are vast resources out there whose focus is to train salespeople. However, virtually no one in the retail art world seems to know anything about it. Most gallery owners haven’t learned basic selling skills, and they don’t expect it of  their employees. Getting back to Jack White: in his excellent book The Magic of Selling Art, he says “Art is not bought. Art is sold.” I couldn’t agree more. I probably go in fifty galleries a year, and rarely do I see anyone getting sold any art. Nor are buyers elbowing each other out of the way to snatch pictures off the walls.

Another observation: art galleries are getting uglier. More and more galleries just rent a warehouse space, slap some Home Depot closeout white paint on the walls and hang a mishmash of stuff floor to ceiling. The gallery interiors are so unlike any normal living environment that it’s hard to even imagine how a picture might actually look where you live. The lighting is garish, the floors are trashed wood or painted concrete, and the overall effect is just, well, hideous. Maybe this works for the 25 year old set, based on the crash pad or dorm room aesthetic, but they don’t buy much art, if any. When I see exceptions, I take pains to tell gallery owners how attractive their galleries are. The Paul Mahder Gallery in San Francisco is like that: great presentation and good stuff inside. It should be attractive, serving upscale patrons in Pacific Heights and other flashy neighborhoods.

Which brings me to content. What the galleries sell. I sense a shift in public taste that I believe may be already affecting gallery sales. My gallery hopping usually reveals one of two art styles, or maybe types.

First, most commercial galleries feature bright, harmless, decorative pictures that have all the personality of a banana slug (UC Santa Cruz mascot!). This is reliable stuff, but the market for it – for all wall décor, really – depends a lot on folks moving into new houses, needing to redecorate. But many, many fewer people are moving these days, and the walls of their existing dwellings are chock full. I’m talking about Carmel or Sausalito or Santa Fe or Florida art. The galleries in the first two at least, which I see firsthand, are moving a lot less product than they used to. Their featured artists are still churning this stuff out, but the gallery storerooms have enough product to last for years. This content is strictly for home décor and will trend up and down with the housing market and the relative affluence of young marrieds. These pictures avoid offense and work with Ralph Lauren or Martha Stewart paint chips in a perfect Pantone world.

Then, there is the rest of the gallery world, where you are likely these days to find “installations,” which are hard to look at and almost impossible to buy – where would you put an “installation?” Or if they feature paintings, the trend is for “edgy.” Edgy is another word for dreary, unhappy, and generally hard to live with. Some of it is tremendous, technically, but most of it is just plain depressing. After you get past being 25 and full of angst, you can leave depressing behind. And most of the art 25 year olds buy is on t-shirts and tattoos. The art in these galleries is just not customer-friendly. The colors tend toward dark browns and reds, guaranteed to wreak havoc with a living room color scheme unless your living room is deep into black and chrome. A particular favorite color scheme of this edgy stuff is what I call “dried blood” color: an ugly red-brown with a bit of yellow and grey mixed in. Beyond hideous, if you ask me. You didn’t? That’s okay, I’m just blogging.

The galleries that I have seen full of people are offering happy stuff! Not edgy. Happy.  Funny. Light. Colorful. Not necessarily simple or unsophisticated, though, just upbeat. Something you could live with. The cutting edge in art, however, is just not about happy and it may never be. That’s why cutting edge edgy doesn’t sell very well.

The gallery business model also seems threadbare. This model depends on at least some repeat customers, with the possible exception of tourist centers like Carmel or Santa Fe. But buyers of wall art in America seem to buy something once, and then it lives on their wall for decades after anyone has actually looked at it. This is the problem of refresh. If everyone still had the first computer they ever bought – say, a 1984 IBM PC in my case – the computer industry would not exist. It requires constant refresh. The art world hasn’t found a model for swapping customers’ old stuff for fresh content on a regular basis. That might be the main problem of the art business, overall.

What about Art Fairs: are they cutting into gallery sales? It seems like there are more and more of these, ranging from the county fair types with an emphasis on cheap handbags, bad imported jewelry and cheap wine, to very upscale affairs with opening night soirees and admission charges for customers. Going this route has advantages to artists – direct interaction with the public and no 50% commission to split with a gallery. But if you go that route, you’d better learn to sell! In addition to one’s time spent producing artwork, art fairs are very hard work, requiring some significant infrastructure investment and also a high level of time and commitment. There is the 80/20 rule: 80% of the sales are made by 20% of the artists. If you’re not consistently in that 20%, you won’t make much of a living from it.

One gallery owner I recently talked to said this, when I asked how business was, “Grim. Really, really grim. I’m about a month or two from having to find a new career.” So are galleries losing their luster with the art buying public? Or is the public losing its interest in buying art? I don’t know. Outside of some traditional gallery strongholds (which seem to correspond to places with a lot of rich people) like NYC and Santa Fe, the gallery model might be entering its life support phase. I hope not. I’d love to see ten times as many galleries, full of great stuff, and have the public feel that galleries are a key part of their civilization. If the model is broken, let’s fix it!