What Have You Done For Me Lately? Open Thread

You know those kinds of mornings when you're just so grouchy you'd kick a puppy or drop a wad of chewed gum in a blind man's cup or pick up a catalog from a decade-old Whitney Biennial and count how many of those artists no one's heard from since?

Well, it's a beautiful day, Bambino and I are heading to the beach with some very fun friends this weekend, and I'm not even remotely as grouchy as all that. But I did think back this morning to that tendency in the art world--you know, that sphere in which the second thing someone invariably says to you at your solo show opening, right after they air kiss you and squeal "Congratulations!!," is "So, what you got coming up?"--to devour ideas and images and people like one does the free hors d'oeuvres at a charity benefit (you know who you are...standing near the entrance to the kitchen and mobbing the cater-waiters before they get three feet with their trays over to the rest of us...I'm watching you).

It can be a thoroughly thankless task to wish to bring love and light into the lives of your fellow humans through art sometimes.

But this is New York, and the thin-skinned need not apply.

Still, I was briskly woken up by a line in the article Roberta Smith penned about the art market today, titled "The Mood of the Market, as Measured in the Galleries":

An art gallery is like a single-cell organism: it is the crudest but also the most essential life form in the art-world food chain. It is among the easiest of public forums to start up, and therefore the most efficient means of introducing new blood into the system. All it takes is one person with the single-minded determination to get the work of an artist or two seen and a reasonably clean, well-lighted space of almost any size — something that is becoming a more affordable option as rents soften and storefronts, even in some of Chelsea’s chic new condos, sit vacant.

At the same time keeping a gallery going is usually fairly hard, and can seem impossibly daunting when sales slump. As small operations, galleries are highly vulnerable to changes in the economic climate — canaries in the coal mine, as they have often been called. So it made sense, as the bottom fell out of the art market last winter, that many people predicted galleries would start closing fast and furiously.

As it turned out, it is hard to know if this summer has brought much more than the usual in the way of closings, along with relocations, expansions, contractions, splits and alliances. So far the list of galleries that have closed is barely two dozen long, and only if you include galleries that closed several months before the crash; galleries that, to be blunt, will not be missed; neophyte galleries that had yet to establish either a financial or critical foothold; and galleries that closed for reasons only partly related to the market, or not at all. [emphasis mine]

Wow, I thought at first, I can think of several galleries that closed before the crash that I do miss...and Wow, that's one impressive ability we have in this realm to forget someone in infinitely less time than it takes to establish a financial or critical foothold. But that was just my bleeding heart speaking. Afterward, I slowly realized that I do know exactly what Roberta means. With hundreds of galleries in Chelsea alone, who can muster the energy (seriously) to miss all that many of them once they're gone? Further, when you multiple the galleries times their average artist roster, you realize this "here today, who? tomorrow" effect is even worse for artists.

I have a stock answer to that for artists: focus on your studio practice, make the art you want to make, tastes and careers fluctuate, blah, blah, blah. But for dealers I tend to have nothing more in my encouragement bag of tricks than to point to those who've managed to regroup, with a new partner or new program, and reopen (always after a hiatus long enough for the art world to forget why you closed, which, as we've established, takes about 3 weeks or 3 martinis, depending on who you're asking).

I'm not sure why I'm feeling so frisky about so grim a topic...guess it's the thought of cocktails and the sound of the ocean washing away all my cares.

Consider this an open thread on ways to keep fighting the good fight and thickening one's skin.

Oh, and Happy Labor Day!