A regular reader of the news has likely seen headlines about a Damien Hirst show, a record price fetched for a Jeff Koons sculpture, or a new work of street art by Banksy. And there’s some visibility to the touchstones of an artist’s trajectory: grup plus solo shows at galleries, price appreciation plus a good showing at auctions, plus ultimately an appearance in a museum show or collection.
What’s less immediately visible to the wider global is the role that galleries play, plus how a gallery itself becomes established. There are a handful of so-called “mega-dealers” whose names may be familiar even to those on the fringes of the art world, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, plus David Zwirner among them. But galleries are still the beating heart of the art world, the mechanism through which many artists find their way to institutions, the world’s great collections, or just the homes of people who love their work.
Galleries have multiple roles, both visible plus invisible: to incubate plus support their artists, often by going above plus beyond the normal work of putting on shows, promoting their artists, plus selling the works; plus to providing services such as financial management or book publishing, in order to help their artists focus more fully on their work.
“There’s the things that you see in our gallery that are in front of the scenes, which are obviously the exhibitions, the publications that we make, then there are things that are behind the scenes, which could be everything from working with an artist on their archives or working on research for an exhibition for years or maybe researching artworks that passed through the gallery in terms of secondary market,” says Julia Joern, a partner at David Zwirner.
Galleries come in all ages, shapes, plus sizes too. Art Basel plus UBS’s Art Market | 2017 report estimated there were roughly 296,000 dealers plus gallery businesses in 2016. Just under 40% of them had annual sales of less than $500,000, while a similar sharing had sales totaling between $1 million plus $10 million. Nearly two thirds of all galleries employed five or fewer people, plus only 4% had 20 or more employees.