When Gallery Owners Bite

Four years ago I wrote this piece for Blogcritics on the subject of "Vanity Galleries."

And today, some disgruntled gallery owner somewhere, perhaps burned out after the waste of time and money that has been the 2008 art fair season, and maybe in a hotel room somewhere in the South as he/she drives the gallery van full of unsold work back to his gallery in Illinois or some other such state, writes the following in a comment about my post:

What you don't realize is that running a gallery is a BUSINESS, and there are expenses. If you had a full list of patrons and a CONFIRMED sales track, you'd be able to show anywhere in the world free of charge. If you're NOT going to sell paintings, a gallery still needs to pay its operating expenses. Upcoming artist need to gain EXPOSURE before anyone will buy their paintings.

If you are a NOBODY, no gallery will show your work. Show me a list of patrons who regularly BUY your work, and I'd invest into your career. It costs upwards of $40,000 a month to run a commercial gallery. If a gallery only showed UPCOMING artists with no fees, they would go out of business. My gallery shows one established artist a month, and has a few unknown artists.

If I ONLY made $20,000 from the established artist, I'd be $20,000 in the hole EVERY MONTH. Why should I take that burden to promote your art. PLEASE EXPLAIN THE LOGIC BEHIND THAT!

You are DELUSIONAL if you think that I'm going to go broke promoting you for no financial reward!

You folks need to reevaluate the BUSINESS that you have chosen. When I go to Red Dot or Art Miami, I have to pay upwards of $20,000. EVERYONE has to pay to show work! You need to join the real world. A gallery falling in love with your art and selling out of an UNKNOWN's paintings is a fantasy. It doesn't happen. You need to be FAMOUS before you make money as an artist, or you can paint "hotel paintings" and sell them for $1,000 a piece. The choice is yours...

I'll let you folks answer this person; please feel free to comment here or at the Blogcritics post. I'm too tired to deal with this asshole.

Margaret Boozer at Project 4

I visited Margaret Boozer's studio a while back and cheated a little, and have already seen most of her next show (titled "Acumulation"), which opens at the District's Project 4 gallery on Thursday, December 11, with a reception from 6:00-8:30 pm.

Boozer is truly one of the District's blue chip artists, and as Project 4 sharply describes her, she "approaches ceramics with an eye for painting and a mind for experimentation. She encourages clay’s physical properties to express themselves in unpredictable manifestations of cause and effect. Drying, warping, cracking- small studio processes echo large geologic events as clay reclaims its origin as earth. Boozer disguises her hand underneath clay’s distortions, then claims authorship with carefully orchestrated compositions driven by the randomness of the result. The work is unexpectedly recognizable as a variety of subject matter that crosses genres between representation and abstraction, painting and sculpture."

There's an Artist's talk on Saturday, January 10, 2:00 pm and the exhibition goes through January 17, 2009.

Time for Glass

It is time for the semi-annual Washington Glass School Holiday Open House & Sale this coming Saturday, December 13, 2008 from 2-6 pm

There will be art, glass, music, food, jewelry, craft, class discounts & more!

Artwork by noted DC area glass artists Tim Tate, Erwin Timmers, Michael Janis, Liz Mears and all the Glass Studio artists and the Washington Glass School instructors will be on exhibit and for sale. The many adjoining artist studios will all be joining them to make for a huge event!

Cool ceramics works from the artists of Flux Studios and Red Dirt Studios, painting and encaustic works by Sinel/Stewart/Weiss Studios, Janis Goodman, Blue Fire Studio and the other artists along the Railroad Tracks.

PG County's Gateway Arts District has their arts & craft sales at their nearby arts centers scheduled to coincide.

What : Annual Holiday Party and Sale!
Where : The Washington Glass School, 3400 Otis Street, Mount Rainier, MD
When : Saturday Afternoon, December 13th from 2pm to 6pm

This is a really great event to pick up Christmas presents by the way. Last year I ended up with a box full of small, gorgeous and affordable glass works from many of the school's studio artists which saved my butt for Xmas and the Holidays.

Directing Cornelius

On December 12, 2009, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, as part of the Arlington Art Center's show about art, mass production, and commerce titled "Unlimited Edition", D.C.-based performance artist Kathryn Cornelius will be transmitting a performance piece live via webcam to be projected onto the walls of the AAC. For ReDO IT, Cornelius will "upend the typical model of artistic production and authority, allowing gallery-goers to direct her actions, turning her into a sort of service provider."

Anyone who chooses to do so can send instructions for Cornelius to act out -- via Twitter, through e-mails prior to the night, or at a web terminal conveniently set up in the gallery.

All of the instructions will appear projected on one wall as they are updated; on the adjoining wall, viewers will see Cornelius interpret her audience's directives.

More information on how to participate can be found on a website designed by Cornelius specifically for the project: redoit.kathryncornelius.com/blog

Cornelius is "known for pieces that create a strange, phantom territory at the edges of the art world: From offering massages at one art fair; to staging a faux red carpet event at another; to masquerading as a one-woman arts corridor cleaning company, Cornelius is often darkly funny, never boring, and typically whip-smart."

Seven Days in the Art World

"Hollywood, it has been said, is like high school with money: cliquish, catty and status-obsessed, awash in insecurity and plagued by conflicting desires to stand out and to fit in. The same might be said of the contemporary art world, particularly during the glitzy boom years chronicled by Sarah Thornton in her entertaining new book, “Seven Days in the Art World.”

A freelance journalist with a background in sociology, Thornton spent five years air-kissing her way through art fairs, auction houses and artists’ studios as a “participant observer” intent on decoding the manners and mores of this globe-­trotting Prada-clad tribe. What she learned, among other things, is that wealthy collectors buy expensive works of art for a variety of reasons — vanity, social status, an appetite for novelty and, most important of all, an acute excess of money. As one of her auction-house informers bluntly puts it, “After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there?”

The book is cleverly divided into seven day-in-the-life chapters, each focusing on a different facet of the contemporary art world: an auction (at Christie’s New York), an art school “crit” (at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia), an art fair (Art Basel), an artist’s studio (that of the Japanese star Takashi Murakami), a prize (Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize), a magazine (Artforum) and a biennale (Venice)."

Read the review of Sarah Thornton's "Seven Days in the Art World" by Mia Fineman in the New York Times here and buy the book here.

Early Look: Miami Sales Report

The recession sculpted Art Basel Miami Beach into a humbler version of itself this week, with galleries reporting significant drops in sales.

Nearly half of all art dealers interviewed saw sales drop, with almost 20 percent saying sales fell below the 30 percent mark. Just over 15 percent reported a sales increase, while 30 percent said sales were flat.

To gauge the effects of economic turmoil on the country's largest contemporary arts fair, five Miami Herald reporters surveyed 85 exhibitors participating in the official Basel show and in five satellite fairs.

Read the report in the Miami Herald here. From what I am hearing from the ground, some of the satellite fairs are doing better than others.

Neptune's beautiful new building

Nearly everyone in DC that has been to Gallery Neptune's new location in the renewed PeriPoint Building in downtown Bethesda, Maryland keeps telling me what an amazing transformation has taken place.

Not only has PeriPoint applied to become Bethesda’s first Silver Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design building as certified by the US Green Council, but let me be the first to say that award winning architect Michael Belisle AIA should easily win whatever architectural award is given to gallery designers. PeriPoint is located at 5001 Wilson Lane, at the busy crossroads of Wilson Lane, Old Georgetown Road, Arlington Rd. and St. Elmo Avenue.

The corner site has been a landmark in Bethesda since 1927, serving first as the Sanitary Grocery store, later as USO Headquarters during World War II, and most recently as a vacuum repair shop. Today, the 80-year-old structure has been renewed, embracing the 21st century while maintaining the defining geometry of the building’s early 20th century shell.

It is absolutely gorgeous inside and out, from the cool lightning to the even cooler hollow storage/wall units and even the balcony addressing the busy street corner below.

Michael Belisle and Elyse Harrison's labor of love shows, and the new gallery is easily among the most beautiful in the Greater DC area, and also (as far as I know) the only "green" one around here, and maybe even in the entire nation.