A Response to Jerry Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show
I just read Jerry Saltz’s latest overarching trend piece on the state of the art world. It’s entitled “Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show.” Ostensibly, it’s about how no one goes to galleries to see art anymore. Mainly, it’s about Jerry Saltz, which I think is important to remember whenever anyone reads his writing. Not that that’s a bad thing — Jerry Saltz writes really well, and he really truly does love art. He matters absolutely.
As a young art critic, I do feel uniquely qualified to respond to his piece. I am not feeling particularly articulate this afternoon — editing a 10,000 word transcript into a 1,000 word Q+A will do that to you — but I thought I’d share some of my thoughts.
I think that my generation is rising to prominence right now, and as we do, some older voices — like Saltz’s himself — will become increasingly outdated. Not because he doesn’t have anything important to say — he has seen so much that I truly feel deference to his opinion. It’s just that he doesn’t understand the world in the same way as he might have when he was 30, because the world has changed so much. That sounds snippy, but it’s not — when I’m in my 50s, I will have a similar perspective. I’ll look at things historically rather than in the context of the moment, just by virtue of the fact that I have so much accumulated knowledge.
I often feel like whatever I have to say is fucking stupid, but here goes nothing, a point by point response to Saltz’s piece, which is in italics above my responses.
Gallery shows: light of my life, fire of my eyes. I love and long for them. I see maybe 30 a week, every week of the year. Much of what I know about contemporary art I learned from hanging around artists and from going to galleries. Bad shows teach me as much as good ones. A great thing about galleries—especially for someone who spends most of his time alone at a computer, typing—is that they’re social spaces, collective séances, campfires where anyone can gather. I’m a blabbermouth, so in galleries I turn to strangers and blurt whatever I’m thinking about whatever we’re looking at. If they don’t think I’m a creepy geezer, they’ll tell me what they’re thinking, too. Then I see whole new things. As disembodied as they can be, galleries are places where one can commune with the group mind. We have more of them than any other city does, and admission is free.
A few things. Jerry Saltz is known to hobnob. I don’t know him personally, so I don’t even know if that’s true, or if it’s merely a rumor. In a broad sense, I think that hobnobbing really challenges objectivity when you’re looking at art as a critic. If you’re friends with an artist, and with his gallery, and with the people who go to the gallery, you’re going to, subconsciously, be far more biased. To put it simply, it’s going to be much more difficult to write a negative review because you will lose favor with such people, even if they act like “adults” and don’t take it personally. And this loss of objectivity will occur without you realizing it.
When I was in graduate school at Columbia, we had a class with a professor from the journalism school who showed us The New York Times’s ethics contract, which I have since myself signed, when I wrote a few travel stories for them. On that contract, it states that you can not accept so much as a coffee or a pen from anyone with whom you might have a conflict of interest — meaning that in some point, you may in some way write about them or something they are involved with. That’s almost impossible to follow, but I always keep it in the back of my mind, because I do think that objectivity is valuable. I think it’s the most important thing an art critic can do — and I suggest to writers who want to set themselves apart to try the same thing. Then, there will be less mono-thinking. I say all of this outside of the context of Saltz, and more as general advice.
The clustering of hundreds of galleries in several neighborhoods has meant that a huge swath of the art world is continually being presented at our doorstep. That is changing, and changing fast. These days, the art world is large and spread out, happening everywhere at once. A shrinking fraction of galleries’ business is done when collectors come to a show. Selling happens year-round, at art fairs, auctions, biennials, and big exhibitions, as well as online via JPEG files and even via collector apps. Gallery shows are now just another cog in the global wheel. Many dealers admit that some of their collectors never set foot in their actual physical spaces.
But physical objects are still being made, am I wrong? And does it matter if the collectors are seeing them if they are still buying the work? The idea that the gallery, or the exhibition space, will go extinct with work sold online is too fatalistic. If sales are made, in the majority, outside of the gallery space, the gallery still has impetus to exist — because the physical object must exist in order to be sold. In fact, online sales may in fact enable more works to be sold, and thus more daring shows to be mounted in galleries, because it will allow galleries to make money off of sales that aren’t necessarily connected to any one exhibition.
The beloved linchpin of my viewing life is playing a diminished role in the life of art. And I fear that my knowledge of art—and along with it the self-knowledge that comes from looking at art—is shrinking.
Artists and dealers are as passionate as ever about creating good shows, but fewer and fewer people are actually seeing them. Chelsea galleries used to hum with activity; now they’re often eerily empty. Sometimes I’m nearly alone. Even on some weekends, galleries are quiet, and that’s never been true in my 30 years here. (There are exceptions, such as Gagosian’s current blockbuster Basquiat survey.) Fewer ideas are being exchanged, fewer aesthetic arguments initiated. I can’t turn to the woman next to me and ask what she thinks, because there’s nobody there.
The last time someone turned to me in a gallery, she just wanted to talk about how she was from the town near where the film we were watching had been made. She went on and on about a puppet show, and I missed the denouement of the work. She was very sweet, but it was fucking irritating. When go see art, the last thing I want to do is talk to people. The great thing about the Internet is that you can go see art, and then afterwards, go online, and enter conversations with people about your thoughts after you’ve had a chance to process them. Saying that having conversations in galleries seems as ridiculous as saying you should have conversations with strangers while they’re watching a movie. But that might just be me — I personally love the serenity of a quiet gallery.
Instead, the blood sport of taste is playing out in circles of hedge-fund billionaires and professional curators, many of whom claim to be anti-market. There used to be shared story lines of contemporary art: the way artists developed, exchanged ideas, caromed off each other’s work, engaged with their critics. Now no one knows the narrative; the thread has been lost. Shows go up but don’t seem to have consequences, other than sales or no sales. Nothing builds off much else. Art can’t get traction. A jadedness appears in people who aren’t jaded. Artists enjoying global-market success avoid showing in New York for fear any critical response will interfere with sales. (As if iffy international art stars could have their juggernauts stalled by a measly bad review or two. A critic can only dream.) Ask any artist: They’re all starting to wonder what’s going on.
I’m not even sure how to respond to this. What I will say, again, is that narratives and ideas are more readily accessible than ever before, thanks to a little thing called the Internet.
Also, I’m not sure what Saltz means by the “blood sport of taste.” If he means that it is now the rich collectors who decide taste, I dare him to explain how that’s any different than any other point in history, ancient times included, Renaissance included, basically any cultural high period included. Rich people are always the ones who decide what art will be made, and what will last. Our entire Western canon is based off of art made for rich people, by people who themselves frequently became rich of the making of it.
Finally, as Marshall McLuhan, my favorite critic kook, would say, “Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.”
I don’t even mind so much that the role of the critic is diminishing. Clement Greenberg was a bully, anyway. Primacy always belongs to art and the artist. I’ve tried to keep overhyped careers in check, and had no effect whatsoever. In fact, so many shows in so many places mean that we now have an overload of writing about art. Joseph Beuys said, “Everyone is an artist.” Now everyone actually is a writer. Like exhibitions that can’t get traction, commentary also has a hard time gaining a foothold, unless you yourself enter the arena of spectacle, becoming something of a spectacle yourself. (Believe me; I know.) Adding to this, a generation of academically trained critics were taught to believe they should write in impenetrable language and refrain from opinion and negative criticism.
I agree with Jerry that more and more people are writers. But that’s the case in every single field in the world, thanks to the freedom of the Internet. What’s unique is having an education and a devotion to subject matter that allows you to rise about the flotsam. Just because you write, doesn’t mean you write well, and it also doesn’t mean that your opinion will be consistently valuable. It’s like anything else — in order for you to gain trust from an audience, you have to build it.
I also agree with Jerry that there is a generation of critics who write badly thanks to academia. But how about the critics from the 20th century that the academics are imitating? Ie Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze, the list could go for on and on for years. It’s not like terrible, obtuse writing is a new thing — in fact, I think the new thing is breaking the mold, and writing legibly and clearly.
I invite Jerry to read the professional writing of myself, David Everitt Howe, Orit Gat, or any number of other academically trained critics to see that in fact we can write the cocks off a lot of people.
This is not to say that art is not selling. Websites for high-end sales and auctions are burgeoning. We read of sites with technology that allows collectors “to visualize artwork in 3-D space without ever leaving your desk,” an “animated gif display,” an “online sales platform,” “sortable JPEG images.” We hear of an “online collector profile and gallery … to list your preferences and to view our art selections tailored to you.”
Why does he keep on bringing up selling? And wouldn’t it be so much weirder if the art world literally didn’t respond to the Internet? Then you’d be writing a trend piece about how innovative the art world was in your day, and how much more stagnant it’s become.
When so much art is sold online or at art fairs, it’s great for the lucky artists who make money, but it leaves out everyone else who isn’t already a brand. This art exists only as commerce, not as conversation or discourse. Art dealer Kenny Schachter has noted that “the higher and higher prices are for fewer and fewer artists.”
The truth is, my generation isn’t making money at all, not only in the art world. Unless you are a banker, consultant or lawyer in my generation, you are making barely enough to get you through a year. Thank you, baby boomers, for inventing the creative class. Assholes. And on a side note, since when are “successful” artists supposed to make shitloads of money?
Those sales platforms are proliferating, too. Paddle8 advertises that it provides two types of online auctions. Another, called Artspace, recently raised $8.5 million in expansion capital, including money from the Russian collector Maria Baibakova, who also owns a “platform for cultural production.” Still another site, Artsy—co-founded by Dasha Zhukova, partner of billionaire Russian collector Roman Abramovich—says it will “make all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.” The CEO tells us, “The more you use Artsy the more we learn about what you like. Over time, we can better suggest things for sale that you might like. Even if there are no works by an artist for sale today … in the future, if the work becomes available, we’ll notify you.”
As the former editor of Artspace, I can tell you that the sales platforms are not “proliferating” — when I worked for the site, there was far more potential competition. Now, the fact that you only mention three sites show that by and large, the marketplace failed miserably — and, to note, Paddle 8 actually curated the only physical show during the Armory week worth seeing (it was called “Spring/Break Art Show.”) The fact that it did so successfully leads me to believe what I stated before — online sales will allow galleries, and potentially even the sites above, to stage excellent exhibitions that are not nearly as dependent on sales, and thus have more freedom. I look forward to more Paddle 8 exhibitions — which by the way, as a site, is curated excellently.
The auction houses are in on the new game as well. Christie’s, in partnership with a company called Y&S, now provides “a venue for emerging artists not yet represented by galleries” and “creates a bridge between young artists and a young audience.” Translation: “We’re cutting out dealers. Come on down. Make a killing.” Thus, unrepresented artists go straight to auction. Work that is sold this way exists only in collector circles. No other artist gets to see it, engage with it, think about it. The public functions of the gallery space and its proprietors—curation, juxtaposition, development—are bypassed and eliminated. All these people supposedly want to help artists, and they probably think they are doing so. But they’re engaged in something else, and it makes being around art less special. Too many of the buyers keep their purchases in storage, in crates, awaiting resale. Mediocre Chinese photorealism has become a tradeable packaged good.
I mean, to becry the fact that some artists make all the money, and then to condemn others for finding ways to do it seems ridiculous. And, the conundrum of the physical object still remains. These artists, to sell art, are still making physical things that, like art throughout history, may or may not ever be seen by a larger public. The first thing that comes to mind is many of the gorgeous paintings used to decorate Renaissance bed chambers, which we now get to see, hundreds of years later, in museums.
And I’m sorry, how does this make being around art less special?
I’ll admit that there’s something democratizing about all this. All those buyers can judge for themselves what they like and put their bank vaults where their taste is. The paradox is that art is not inherently democratic. It’s a kind of meritocracy—albeit with the interior high-school rules of some other nebula. Today, those with the most money are the only ones whose votes count. Although I love that young broke artists who can’t travel to New York or Berlin can look at art online, think about what it means, and use this information in their own work, seeing art in the flesh really gives you something unique. I have only once gone underground to see cave paintings. But that one cave made an enormous difference in my life.
I mean, that cave analogy is kind of what the problem was before the contemporary era, am I wrong? It’s not that seeing art in person is a privilege that is being taken away from people — it’s a privilege very recently granted to the general public that used to be reserved for a select few.
Also, I think it’s unfair to take literally ALL of the agency from the artist. As you said, galleries still exist, but they’re empty — what if artists don’t want to go see art because they don’t feel it’s necessary? This weekend, I interviewed two separate artists in huge communal warehouses in Brooklyn that have thriving communities of exchanging ideas. Now, more than ever, it seems like artists are working in close proximity — they can’t afford to do otherwise, thanks to the high cost of living in New York.
So far, thank goodness, the galleries themselves are not disappearing, but that day may be coming. Owing in part to the Chelsea condo-and-office boom, even the successful ones are fighting for their financial lives. The excellent Postmasters Gallery just saw its West 19th Street rent raised to $30,000 a month and will have to move. Other mid-level Chelsea dealers are being priced out as well. Longtime gallerist Casey Kaplan told Bloomberg News, “You won’t find much experimentation if the rents continue to escalate …those kinds of galleries won’t be here.” Postmasters’ owner, Magda Sawon, has explained that “mid-range galleries are going to just vanish from Chelsea,” adding, “the whole middle is basically pulverized.” Even if they survive, I wonder whether a much bigger shakeout is about to happen, one that makes art resemble any mainstream business—just another culture industry that’s eaten itself alive.
David Everitt Howe, Jonathan T.D. Neil, Joshua Mack, Christian Viveros Faune are addressing exactly where the galleries are going in upcoming issues of ArtReview. You should read our essays! Not that you are even reading this post, but still.
My piece was about how galleries are moving back to the Upper East Side, where rents are cheaper. And as a commenter on your article noted, Chelsea is so fucking inaccessible, I think that’s a good thing.
Or whether it’s about to go supernova. The galleries that are best suited to this new world are the massive multinationals, whether for reasons of territoriality, market share, or dick waving. I love big galleries as much as I do small ones, but I often wonder if these jumbo spaces aren’t often aesthetic elephant graveyards—places where ambitious artists and the movements of the sixties and seventies go to die. Many feel impersonal, and the art can look lost in them. David Zwirner’s new building on 20th Street adds 30,000 square feet to his space. (I still can’t figure out why part of his new floor is shiny travertine.) The multinational Hauser & Wirth just added what looks like a blimp hangar on West 18th Street. Last I heard, Larry Gagosian, the biggest elephant of all, has eleven spaces around the world. Perhaps the others are all supersizing themselves just to compete with Larry. Or maybe they want to inherit artists from older established galleries like Gladstone and Marian Goodman. But shouldn’t these dealers be looking for young talent rather than vying to show Lawrence Weiner and Shirin Neshat? Maybe everyone will all eventually share Richter and Prince, who will just relocate every five years.
I mean, they are. Hauser & Wirth has an upcoming show of relatively young artist Matthew Day Jackson in the new space in the fall — and given that his sculptures are monumental, it’s great that he’ll be able to show them there. And Zwirner, come on, has the best roster out there. I wish they could take over the entirety of Pace. And have you never been to a single gallery on the Lower East Side? Each one, the size of a closet. Each one, allowing an intimate encounter with works by emerging artists. Saying that there are only a few artists working or being shown is just not true.
Bigness isn’t inherently bad. The dealer Gavin Brown has said that giant art is suited to our age: “When we are able to fly around the globe in 24 hours, and that is a common occurrence … these large-scale works might be an unconscious attempt to rediscover awe.” I agree. But bigness raises prices, and big galleries encourage it. That’s not about awe; it’s about money. The shows themselves should be smaller, too—I see many exhibitions that would be twice as good at half the size. Even Rubens would’ve had a hard time filling these supersize spaces, let alone doing it once every two years. Duchamp said, “I could have made a hundred thousand readymades in ten years easily. They would have all been fake … [A]bundant production can only result in mediocrity.” Many artists are now in “abundant production,” seducing collectors on the prowl for stuff to fill their oversize atriums. I’m not sure that a lot of what they’re making is art at all, and if the artists aren’t making art and the collectors aren’t collectors, the galleries selling this product to these people aren’t really galleries anymore, either.
I’m just gonna say “Andy Warhol” right here and leave it at that.
Art doesn’t have to be shown in New York to be validated. That requirement is long gone. Fine. But consider this: At a Chelsea opening, a good Los Angeles dealer chided me for not going to art fairs, not seeing art in L.A. and London, and not keeping track of the activity online. He said I “risked being out of touch with the art world,” and he was right. It got me down. As recently as four or five years ago, I could have crowed that because I see so many gallery shows every week, I know what’s going on. That’s slipping away, if it isn’t already gone.
I brooded for months over this. Then I started thinking it through, and instead of focusing on the “being out of touch” part of what he said, I started thinking about “the art world.” Something clicked and brightened my mood. There is no “the” art world anymore. There have always been many art worlds, overlapping, ebbing around and through one another. Some are seen, others only gleaned, many ignored. “The” art world has become more of a virtual reality than an actual one, useful perhaps for conceptualizing in the abstract but otherwise illusory.
When was the art world not a “theory”? Did you used to have a member card that expired or something?
Once we adjust to that, we can work within the new reality. If the galleries are emptier, the limos gone, the art advisers taking meetings elsewhere, and the glitz offshore, the audience will have shrunk to something like it was well before the gigantic expansion of the art world. When I go to galleries, I now mainly see artists and a handful of committed diligent critics, collectors, curators, and the like. In this quiet environment, it may be possible for us to take back the conversation. Or at least have conversations. While the ultrarich will do their deals from 40,000 feet, we who are down at ground level will be engaging with the actual art—maybe not in Chelsea, where the rents are getting too high, but somewhere. That’s fine with me.
Ok, so we will feel exactly the same, and the entire above argument was just sort of like you talking about your own experiences. Which is fine. This is the moment where I start really appreciating good editing. But where I also appreciate Saltz for putting ideas out there that get people thinking.
Looking, making, thinking, experiencing are our starting point. Art opens worlds, lets us see invisible things, creates new models for thinking, engages in cryptic rituals in public, invents cosmologies, explores consciousness, makes mental maps and taxonomies others can see, and isn’t only something to look at but is something that does things and sometimes makes the mysterious magic of the world palpable. Proust wrote, “Narrating events is like introducing people to opera via the libretto only.” Instead, he said, one should “endeavor to distinguish between the differing music of each successive day.” That’s what we do when we look at art, wherever we look at it, however much noise surrounds it. In galleries we try to discern “differing music,” and it’s still there right now. I love and long for it.
Five Shows That Changed the Way I See Art
1. Keith Haring at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 1982.
The moment when I understood that all kinds of art could go mainstream. The opening had a “We’ve arrived” vibe.
2. Vito Acconci at Sonnabend Gallery, 1976.
When I saw Acconci’s table-gangplank-sculpture thing extend out of the gallery window over West Broadway, I decided to move to New York.
3. Kara Walker at the Drawing Center, 1994.
Vengeance was nigh in Kara Walker’s giant wall silhouette of slaves and slavers eating and having sex with one another. It was like the end of Heart of Darknessmade flesh: “The horror.”
4. Matthew Barney at Althea Viafora Gallery, 1990.
Seeing one video sculpture by Barney in a large, crappy group show, I thought,Oh my God! This is one of art’s futures. My art-critic wife looked a bit, shrugged, and said, “Boys … It’s pretty male.”
5. Pipilotti Rist at Luhring Augustine, 2000.
Rist’s trippy video installation cast such a spell on me that I saw the show nineteen times. I wrote about it but forgot to say I was in love with it. I also met future art dealer and force-of-nature Michele Maccarone there.
Note: Readers should keep in mind that I arrived in New York in 1980, visiting sporadically before that, and missed many of the formative shows of the seventies. (I was eking out a living as a long-distance truck driver, then working as a chauffeur for a rich person well into the nineties.)
I’m sorry for writing this stupid thing. But my friend Emily told me the other day that she is bored at work, and will read literally anything. So for you, Emily, if you’re still reading, I give you this post.
