Antiestablishmentcontarianism

Maybe it's the cloudy head my allergies are giving me, but I'm having a bit of trouble reconciling two comments Marc Glimcher made in the great interview with him by Sarah Douglas on the heels of the announcement that the super galleries Pace and Wildenstein were going separate ways. Now I should note that I'm certain Mr. Glimcher knew more about running an art gallery by the time he was 12 than I may ever understand, but I still can't piece together two ideas he shared into a cohesive whole:

One was actually very heartening:

When Sugimoto left Gagosian to join your gallery several months ago, it seemed to confirm Pace's reputation as an “establishment gallery.” Are you at all interested in changing that image? After all, you’ll be inheriting this gallery eventually.

The gallery is seen as establishment. I guess that has always bugged me. My father doesn’t get bugged by it, because he doesn’t listen to anybody. He doesn't see us as an establishment gallery. To him, it's about this: 50 years ago, his father died, and his brother told him he had to start an art gallery because they were broke, and he was a painter and called all his friends and they started a gallery for radical art.

Then that little gallery for radical art got bigger.

And a gallery gets to look pretty establishment when it gets big, and when artists stay for 30 years. It went from being a minimalism gallery to being an establishment gallery. That doesn't bother my father, never has. But it's natural for it to bug me. During the boom, some galleries did things to make themselves appear less establishment. But my feeling is that all the things they did were very commercial things to do. Go after this group of artists that you don't actually have any interest in and don't believe in, follow this group of collectors. Somehow following the trends and doing the most fashionable thing came to be what seemed anti-establishment. To me, those are the most establishment things you could possibly do. Whereas if you stuck to building a community of artists, and thinking of all these things that could be done for them and with them, you were in danger of looking like an establishment organization. So I say, all we have to do now is to push harder and further, and then that idea of whether or not we are establishment will be irrelevant, because we'll be doing things that have never been done before, like pushing the definition of an art gallery, and the boundaries of being an art dealer, and doing all of this in the service of our artists.

I have to admit that I've given such matters some thought myself and heard other dealers of my generation share similar concerns. (I'm going to introduce a rough nomenclature here...it's purely my own invention, used for brevity's sake.)

One can only strive to be seen as one of the hot new galleries for so long. Even if you are considered one of the younger galleries to watch, you still have to prepare yourself; eventually other, newer galleries will rightly take that title from you. So you hope to evolve then into an important gallery. One taken seriously by museums, collectors, the press, and other dealers, but still seen as on the rise.

If you look around, you'll see that many galleries level off at this stage. They are widely seen as important contributors to the cultural landscape but there's so little room past that level and so much that isn't related to working with artists that it takes to transcend it, that only a few of the most ambitious and uber-competitive of dealers rise to the stage of establishment galleries. Clearly, not every gallery wants to get to that stage. As Mr. Glimcher notes, it comes with some negative associations. But I never actually thought that it would occur to anyone who had attained that status that they should try to shake it. As Mr. Glimcher notes, and I understand now, it comes from having been born into a gallery family and, like anyone else, wanting to make your own mark on the industry.

Still, as much as I can empathize with that idea (not wanting to be viewed as establishment), it seems this other idea of Mr. Glimcher's would only seem like a good idea to someone entrenched in the establishment level of art dealing:

Is there a correlation between the ending of the Wildenstein partnership and a change in Pace’s overall direction?

There is. In 1993, it was clear that change was coming, but how that change was coming was unclear. We certainly made attempts to move in directions that would embrace it.

What change are you referring to?

The globalization of the art world. It has globalized in a different way than anyone thought it would. What it means to be an art collector, or an artist, is in flux, and that’s fantastic. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the whole “what does it mean to be an art gallery?” question come up. The answer, for a lot of innovative people, has been a franchise, a brand. That has been incredibly successful, and Pace has participated in it to some extent, but there have been a lot of dealers who, along with the auction houses, made the concept of planting their brand around the world a defining characteristic of what they do.

So what's the next step?

What I see as the next evolutionary step after the franchise is the network. Creating and being part of a network is something that the rest of the world has been deeply engaged in for at least the last 10 years. Because of its strange characteristics, the art world is genetically behind the rest of the world, so the idea of networks is just now taking root.

Now, there are plenty of details left out in how this might work, but--call it the latent socialist in me--I read "network" in this context as "conglomerate," taking the selling of art past the corporate level and into the sort of commercial empires that dwarf (in terms of economic power) a large percentage of independent states. Yes, the rest of the world has been deeply engaged in building conglomerates for the past 10 years, and we've seen a rise in terrorism and other anti-globalization movements in response to that. And we've seen politicians put the needs of those conglomerates above the needs of the people who elected them. Fortunately, we've also seen visual artists (protected by a highly individualized industry) be among the most outspoken critics of this trend.

I'll cut to the chase of what's bugging me here: How could a Pace artist whose work deals with critiquing the impact of globalization on the people of poorer countries (or any country) be taken seriously if they exhibited within such a network? A company can't be both non-establishment AND have a built-in corporate need to turn a blind eye to such critiques.

Now, I've had neo-Marxist artists criticize even my participation in the commercialization of art (the same artists had no problem selling their work out of their studio, mind you...they simply thought galleries were inherently evil). So I know there's a bit of "take the plank out of your own eye" in my post this morning, but a mom-and-pop shop gallery doesn't have the same bureaucracy a "network" will have. It doesn't have systemic needs that have nothing to do with art demanding resources or considerations. The reason this smaller shop system has remained in place within the art industry, whereas nearly every other industry has already gone conglomerate, IMHO, is the intensely individual nature of it. It's not only the non-mass-marketable aspect of unique objects, but the individualistic culture of the visual arts world.

The problem with the Pace plan as I interpreted it is that networks thrive through a never-ending push for enhanced efficiency, and that push for greater and greater efficiency will reach back into the workplace of the creatives in any conglomerate. In the typical conglomerate, the needs of the network will demand it.

Again, there are plenty of details left out in how this might work for Pace (and Mr. Glimcher would be a fool to share them with the world), but if I were an artist in that program (particularly one whose subject matter included critiquing globalization), I'd want some more information about those details. Of course, there's no reason Pace needs to work with artists who feel strongly about such matters. There are plenty of other artists exploring plenty of other issues/concerns. It just makes one look a bit more like the establishment to need to exclude them.