Gagosian Museum Gallery

I have this process when responding to criticism of any organization, whether it be a governmental body or non-profit institution (such as a museum), that guides how I interpret both their actions and the public's response to it. The first thing I generally do is seek out and carefully consider their mission statement. If you've read here for a while, you'll have seen where I cite some organization's mission statement as part of my critique, using their own stated raison d'etre as the baseline for holding them to some standard. Usually, the part of the mission statement I'll focus on, being a member of the public, is the part that explains how the organization seeks to serve the public.

In searching around the website for Gagosian Gallery, I was unable to find any statement about the gallery, but I have spent enough time thinking and writing about what it is that all commercial galleries have in common that I'm comfortable concluding that Gagosian Gallery is a private commercial enterprise owned by Larry Gagosian that admits the public to see its exhibitions for free, and has no stated public service obligations in its mission with regards to its choices for exhibitions. In other words, in making decisions on what he presents to the public (who get in for free), Mr. Gagosian is obligated only to do what he feels is best for his business.

Or so it would seem to me.

If you read the responses to the current exhibition at Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street, of recent work by artist Dan Colen, however, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a tax-payer-funded non-profit with an obligation to give the public its money's worth. Indeed, much of the critique seems more apropos of the sort generally launched at bad museum choices, focusing on whether Mr. Colen deserves the status that Gagosian Gallery bestows by exhibiting him. Here's but a sample:

From artist William Powhida's somewhat stream of consciousness post of twitter responses:

I hate Dan Colen btw, worst artist of the aughts. Gagosian?! The silver man fucked up this time.

From Roberta Smith in the New York Times:

In contributing to New York’s cultural life, there’s no art dealer quite like Larry Gagosian. But he’s not perfect. His forte is historical material and the blue-chip pantheon, from Willem de Kooning to Ed Ruscha, and ascendant blue-chippers he helps pump up, sometimes to the point of implosion — like Mike Kelley, Richard Prince, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

There are certain artists with enough integrity to withstand the combination of hype and weird invisibility that is part of the Gagosian machine — Philip Taaffe and Ellen Gallagher come to mind. But others seem diminished by this context: Paul Pfeiffer, Tom Friedman, John Currin and even Piotr Uklanski, one of the few artists to use his indisputably perverse exhibition with Gagosian as an occasion to fight spectacle with spectacle.

This brings us to the Dan Colen show in the larger Gagosian space in Chelsea.

From Jerry Saltz in New York magazine:

The fall art season has begun—well after the purportedly cleansing end of the bubble—with the Spirit of Stupidity, stalking us in the form of the well-meaning but misguided Dan Colen. A few weeks ago, the New York Times featured the artist, reporting that he caused an uproar in Berlin in 2006 by posting exhibition flyers that showed him nude with a tallis hanging from his erection. The would-be rabbi breathing life into this golem is superstar mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who has given us stellar shows of Picasso and Manzoni, but here seems intent on burning up his credibility on a display of dominion.

While I'm sure Mr. Gagosian must be flattered that he's being held to the same standards usually reserved for our top museums, I still think it makes sense to judge the choices he makes in the context of his being a commercial art dealer. The fact that he does on occasion present museum-quality shows (which, again, are free for us) in no way obligates him to pretend he's not running a commercial art gallery. He still has staff and bills to pay (and his ninth outpost's architect). Criticize the art, by all means..be as harsh on Mr. Colen's work as you deem appropriate. But this critique of the choice and gallery context strikes me as somewhat odd.

It's a private business.