Every week, Artnet News brings you The Gray Market. The column decodes important stories from the previous week—and offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of the art industry in the process.

This week, a sense of an ending…

Closing Time

If I’ve learned the wisdom of one journalistic adage since I joined the Artnet News staff full-time in January 2018, it’s not to bury the lede. So, in that spirit, this will be the final edition of the Gray Market in this space, as I say farewell to my friends and colleagues here to move onto something new (to be discussed in another place and time). 

For context, I first started the Gray Market as a freelancer in Los Angeles in December 2013. That means I’ve been writing under this name for about nine and a half years (technically 9.6, but who besides me is enough of a maniac about specificity to count?). For about five and a half of those years, meaning the majority of the column’s lifespan, its adopted home has been here at Artnet News. 

That stretch of time has involved a lot of personal change for me: relocating from the west coast to Brooklyn, watching both my parents retire, making it through the pandemic in good health (without leaving New York), congratulating at least a dozen new friends on becoming parents (y’all have been busy), and meeting my wife (and being smart enough to marry her, obviously), to name just a few milestones. “Bittersweet” is the word I’ve tended to fall back on to describe how leaving feels, but I hope it’s a mark of my development as a writer that I also feel like that word alone is woefully insufficient. 

But no one reads this column for extended personal reflections. What you come here for is reflections on the art business! And based on some of the stories this column addressed during my first few weeks on the job, five and a half years turns out to be an eye-opening span of time to look back on the news in this curious, one-of-a-kind industry. Besides just being downright eerie in the trajectory it reveals, this review also cements that even the most expected changes sometimes play out on an unexpectedly long timeline—and not always for the reasons we anticipate, either.

Case in point, my first Gray Market as an Artnet News employee focused on what was felt at the time as a tectonic shift in the business of American institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s announcement that it would begin charging a mandatory admission fee to non-residents of New York effective March 1, 2018. At that point, the cost for one typical out-of-state adult became $25, a figure that cultural commentators almost universally blasted for its perceived exclusionary effect. 

Fast forward to August 1, 2023—the day that I filed the column you’re now reading—and perhaps the biggest art story was the Guggenheim’s announcement that it will raise the price of its adult general admission ticket from $25 to $30. The new price matches the one implemented by the Met in July 2022, as well as by the Whitney Museum of American Art last month. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art also charges $30, while the Art Institute of Chicago charges $32.)

While it’s true that these latest price hikes prove that the financial struggles of even the U.S.’s most renowned museums have only worsened over the past half-decade, the reasons have shifted, too. Yes, running a top-flight institution continues to get more expensive because of inflation, upkeep, and the pressure to physically expand or renovate the premises in a sector where the bar is always being raised for the appearance of success. Museum leadership nationwide has found few, if any, new levers to pull to try to generate meaningful revenue to cover all of these escalating costs, too. 

Wu Tsang Anthem (2021). © Wu Tsang. Installation view, Wu Tsang: Anthem, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, July 23–September 6, 2021. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2021.

Yet the shortfalls at major American museums have been exacerbated by two factors that were largely, if not totally, unforeseeable in January of 2018: the unionization wave that has walloped a sector historically content to pay staff less-than-subsistence wages, and Covid’s lasting legacy of reduced attendance at museums. For instance, Zachary Small of the Times relayed that annual visitor tallies at the Art Institute of Chicago are still down roughly 25 percent from pre-pandemic levels, while the Art Newspaper reported earlier this year that the Met’s 2022 attendance total had declined 34 percent relative to 2019. So while the underlying trend has been consistent throughout my time at Artnet News, the forces driving it have only multiplied.

What other telling stories were on the Gray Market docket in my opening weeks here? Well, in early January of 2018, David Zwirner announced plans to build a new $50 million, five-story gallery in Chelsea designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano. Zwirner targeted autumn of 2020 as a tentative opening date for the project. My take focused on the fact that it would also be Piano’s first ever commercial gallery, a natural next step for the museum-ification of the sector.

However, on July 26—less than a week before the publication of the column you’re now reading, and nearly three years past Zwirner’s original ETA—the mega-gallery announced that the collaboration with Piano was no more. Zwirner has instead redirected the $50 million budget into two separate projects in Chelsea: a new 18,000-square-foot gallery on West 19th Street designed by longtime collaborator Annabelle Selldorf, and a 36,000-square-foot office space on West 20th Street that opened last month.

If you’re eager to label this news a turning point in the gallery business’s winners-take-all era, however, I’d recommend pumping the brakes. Zwirner isn’t spending any less money than he planned to; he basically just broke a dollar into two 50-cent pieces. The conversion also apparently netted him an extra 4,000 square feet of space. I do think the state of the market has a serious right hook in store for many galleries that expanded unnecessarily using the artificial sustenance of pandemic-era loans, but David Zwirner is not the place to look for evidence of the friction.

Yet the original project’s collapse does show how the über-professionalized, big-money art market is more exposed to external complications than ever before. Robin Pogrebin of the Times noted that the canceled, Piano-designed gallery “was part of a larger development by the investor Uri Chaitchik of Casco Development that encountered financial trouble during the pandemic.” Headwinds in the real-estate market can only fragment this kind of alliance if big-money developers see big-money galleries as viable partners in the first place. So even in its kiboshing, the Zwirner headquarters-not-to-be proves that these two adjacent industries see each other as equals to an extent they haven’t previously.

Rounding out the month of January 2018, In Other Words, the Charlotte Burns-helmed media wing of the now-defunct, Sotheby’s-owned advisory firm Art Agency, Partners, relayed rumors that Frieze was planning to augment its London and New York fairs with a new annual expo in Los Angeles in January 2019. While a representative from the fair brand neither confirmed nor denied the reporting at the time, it took only four more weeks for Frieze to officially announce the move (although the new fair’s dates would be in February 2019, not January 2019).

Visitors streaming into Frieze Los Angeles, 2023. Photo: Casey Kelbaugh. Courtesy of Casey Kelbaugh and Frieze.

Now zoom ahead to July 13, 2023—three weeks prior to the publication of the column you’re now reading—when Frieze announced a different kind of stateside expansion: the acquisition of the Armory Show and the pending acquisition of Expo Chicago, two of the U.S.’s longest-running regional fairs. (The latter deal is slated to close later this year.) Although the Armory and Expo will continue operating under their own names with their existing directors now working alongside Frieze’s other fair brass, per a company statement, the transactions mean that four of Frieze’s seven annual events will now take place in the U.S., the world’s most robust art market. 

This creates a sharp contrast to the closest analogue we have, MCH Group’s short-lived campaign to acquire significant equity stakes in regional art fairs scattered across multiple countries between mid-2016 and late 2018. Which makes Frieze’s expansion-by-acquisition less a revolutionary development than a new strain of the same consolidation trend that has been playing out in the art business for most of this century, including the last five and a half years.

Even some of the smaller stories I touched on during the opening weeks of my Artnet News tenure have boomeranged back in strange ways in recent weeks. Also in late January 2018, Sotheby’s (then still under the leadership of CEO Tad Smith) announced that it had acquired Thread Genius, a startup described by Tech Crunch as offering “a set of algorithms that can both instantly identify objects and then recommend images of similar objects to the viewer.” In other words, its killer app was machine learning, an important stepping stone on the pathway to the more advanced artificial intelligence that is now an inescapable part of the art-business discourse in the summer of 2023. 

Yet almost no one cared about the acquisition at the time. Instead, the central art-tech story of 2018 was the blockchain, mostly as a means of creating either title registries for physical artworks or fractionalized investment opportunities for people who, frankly, I would advise to find better uses for their money. More than four years elapsed between Sotheby’s investment in Thread Genius and the public imagination’s takeover by ChatGPT, DALL-E, and their A.I.-driven competitors in mid-2022. As of my writing, another year has passed since that storming, and it’s an understatement to say we’re still short on clarity about the technology’s likely impact on the arts. This simple math underscores that even allegedly world-changing innovations need more time to take root than it often sounds like in the moment.  

Last but not least, in early February of 2018, I called a little attention to a talk at the 92nd Street Y between then-72-year-old mega-dealer Larry Gagosian and longtime associate Glenn Fuhrman, the financier and collector behind the FLAG Art Foundation. To me, the most newsworthy aspect of the chat was this brief exchange: 

Fuhrman: I can’t think of any other billion-dollar business in the world that theoretically could disappear because it’s so reliant on a leader. Is your business something that could survive you?

Gagosian: We are working on that… I don’t have children and that’s usually how these legacies are established… But this is something that is really important to me.

There can’t be more than about six people reading this column right now who don’t already know that its publication is only a week removed from that of New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s endlessly discussed profile of a now-78-year-old Gagosian. Based on Keefe’s reporting, however, it almost sounds as if Gagosian’s thinking about his gallery’s long-term future (or at least his willingness to discuss it frankly) has regressed in the five-plus years since he spent a few words on it onstage with Furhman. 

Young buck Larry Gagosian cozying up to Leo Castelli in 1996. (Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)

In the piece, Gagosian distances the gallery’s recently formed advisory board from succession planning “per se,” and multiple episodes recounted by others (most notably Issy Wood, who he tried to recruit to the gallery) hinge on Gagosian’s unwillingness to even acknowledge that he’ll one day have to retire, let alone die. In other words, it’s not just that we’re still speculating about the same mega-dealer’s succession plan five and a half years later; it’s that we’ve arguably moved backwards even as the subject has become more relevant.

Fold these early 2018 stories and their 2023 sequels together, and you’re left with something that only time can make plain: namely, that for all the talk about seismic shifts, unprecedented developments, disruptive technology, and other factors, the art business is still largely riding the same trends captained by the same entities as it was when I started this job five and a half years ago. But the motives for these trends’ persistence haven’t necessarily been predictable. More importantly, they haven’t even necessarily been within the control of the people and businesses that have benefited from them the most.

Whether the impetus was a global pandemic, a cross-industry partnership gone awry, or a strategic pivot perhaps informed by a more ambitious rival’s earlier mistakes, there has been no surer way to play yourself in the art industry than to believe that the business is still small enough to give you and your partners even relative autonomy. At the same time, success still often demands an unshakable belief in yourself and your product, whether that means a new tech or the old standby of hard-charging salesmanship in an eternally subjective trade. It’s a paradox that no one should envy trying to manifest.

Sure, things in the art industry have changed since January 2018. They just haven’t done so at any uniform pace, or for uniformly foreseeable reasons. And even after accounting for the differences, most of the landscape looks similar to when I first started at Artnet News. 

In light of all that, my advice is to be skeptical anytime someone tells you they’re going to change anything structural in the medium term. But also keep in mind that the choice to change yourself and your circumstances is still often yours. 

‘Til next time, remember: no one’s here for a long time, so at least try to make it a good time while it lasts.

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What makes a great art fair?

Size.

How about more than 1,000 artists spread over several city blocks?

Quality, of course.

Each of those 1,000-plus contemporary artists are juried into the event, leaders in their fields.

Diversity.

Artworks in this fair are broken out into 10 distinct categories ranging from jewelry to pottery, sculpture, textiles, and two-dimensional art including painting, drawing, graphics and photography.

Invited artists represent over 200 sovereign nations.

Community.

This art fair feels more like a reunion than an exercise in snobbery. Hundreds of the artists and thousands of the visitors have been attending for decades. Artists use the event to catch up on a year’s worth of news. Friendships are formed with collectors.

Here, artists greet visitors in person and chat.

No one’s going to Art Basel Miami Beach, meeting Hank Willis Thomas, and spending 10 minutes talking him up about his work.

Value.

Collectors buy direct from artists at this fair. No gallery markup, no middleman, no shenanigans on price with some customers being given sweetheart deals unavailable to all, or other customers forbidden from buying certain artworks because they don’t fit a profile. 99% of what’s for sale here can be purchased for less than $5,000.

And entry is free. Guests just walk up and start looking at art.

The cheapest tickets at The Armory Show, New York’s art fair, run $35.

Artist booths occupy space surrounded local restaurants. No $15 wine glasses or $21 sandwich hustles at this art fair. If you want a refreshment–Frito Pie perhaps–just bop into one of the many adjacent eateries.

Extras.

Over the two days of this art fair, hours of live musical performances, dancing, and a haute couture fashion show are combined with numerous smaller satellite fairs, museum and gallery exhibitions, and artist meet-and-greets creating a 48-hour wonderland of the arts no person could ever experience entirely even if they were able to divide themselves in thirds and spread out.

Location.

Sunny Santa Fe in stunning northern New Mexico hosts this art fair with the main event occurring outdoors. Watch the weather and wear sunscreen.

Described is the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts annual Santa Fe Indian Market. This year’s 101^st edition takes place August 19^th and 20^th, free and open to the public, with paid advance preview opportunities on the 18^th.

“Market,” as it’s referred to in shorthand, is more than the largest cultural event in the U.S. Southwest. It’s more than the largest Indigenous art market in the world. For the reasons listed, it is the world’s greatest art fair, an experience every art lover should partake in at least once.

Home to roughly 300 art galleries, including those along famed Canyon Road, and a dozen world class art museums, including the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe is a major arts destination year round. It is the epicenter of the Native American art world. During Indian Market, it becomes the epicenter of the art world.

Nothing else remotely approaches its scale, caliber or legacy.

Oh, to be a flower allergic to pollen! In Abi Castillo’s playful ceramics, flowers sprout from the tops of expressive heads, blossoms sniffle, and vases contend with their contents—and the bees they attract. The Galicia, Spain-based artist creates characters that reflect her own experiences and emotions, becoming what she describes as alter-egos into which she can pour all of her feelings. She describes a “need to give life to objects, always looking for eyes to look at. That’s why faces are very important.”

Interested in the relationships between mysticism, drama, beauty, and the grotesque, Castillo imbues a growing cast of personalities with organic qualities, from coral to sprouting cheeks. She focuses on faces as a way to express humor or irony, and begins by making sketches that illustrate the final assembly. “The ceramic work is a slow process, where it is the clay that marks the drying times and where patience is very important,” she says. “The process can last from a few weeks to several months.”

Find more of Castillo’s work on her website and Instagram.

From the series ‘Drama.’ Photo by Sandra MG

Pieces from ‘Allergic Party.’ Photo by Emma Ovin

Flowers from the series ‘Allergic Party.’ Photo by Sandra MG

Photo by Sandra MG

Left: “A moco tendido.” Right: “Nómada con lunares”

“Nómada”

‘Drama’ series. Photo by Sandra MG

“Seres da noite”

Detail of “Seres da noite”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Emotional Faces Fuse with Flora and Fauna in Abi Castillo’s Playful Ceramics appeared first on Colossal.

Boulder County Farmers Markets

Why support local food and agriculture? For Boulder County Farmers Markets, this central question — our why — feels like the sort of wondering that is best answered through experience.

Why does this apple cost more than what I can get at the grocery store? Bite into it, and you’ll discover its flavor and crunch can’t be compared to two-for-$1 crops. Why should I go out of my way to buy dairy and meat from local farmers? Try giving their cows a scratch on the snout and walk away from preferring to purchase from factory farms where animal welfare doesn’t matter.

Why should we all care about supporting local food businesses? Enjoy a sample and conversation with a small business owner, and pretty soon you’ll find yourself rooting for them, too.

In an age in which we’re more connected to our smart devices than our neighbors, the community surrounding local food can be just as nourishing as the bounty itself. As farmers markets, it’s our responsibility to curate those lightbulb moments that catapult casual shoppers into lifelong local food enthusiasts.

This is why Boulder County Farmers Markets is proud to support the AgriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land exhibition as it embarks to create the kinds of experiences that transform our understanding of local food and agriculture.

AgriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land is a collaborative, contemporary art exhibition pairing more than 15 artists with Boulder County farmers to create new, site-specific visual works inspired by farming and the natural world. This exhibition aims to unfold a unique experience by intersecting art and agriculture to inspire visitors to think about their connection with food and nature in new ways.

Currently on display at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and the Longmont Museum, residents throughout Boulder County can roam through thoughtful artworks on a wide range of topics relating to farming, land access and community.

Market-goers can expect to find art created in partnership with three Boulder County Farmers Market vendors: MASA Farm and Seed Foundation, Aspen Moon Farm and Black Cat Organic Farm. “Beyond our family, our greatest treasure is to be a part of this wonderful community,” said Eric Skokan, owner of Black Cat Farm and its farm-to-table restaurant, Bramble & Hare.

“We see our farm as one of the many threads that hold our community together. For us, the agriCULTURE exhibit was a meaningful time for reflection on the how and why we do this work. To see our work reflected through the eyes and masterfully skilled hands of a gifted artist was stunning. To see our work literally woven through our place is profound.”

The exhibition is on display at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art through Oct. 1. Admission is free during market hours, so be sure to stop by before you grab your market haul during the Boulder Farmers Market on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The Longmont Museum will continue to host the exhibition through Jan. 7. Visit their website to learn about admission prices. Discounted prices are available for seniors, students and individuals who qualify for SNAP. Admission is free every second Saturday of the month.

Perched along the edges of swimming pools or bobbing just above the water’s surface, the subjects of Maria Svarbova‘s photographs enliven the interiors of vintage swimming pools. Focusing primarily on Soviet-era architecture (previously), the artist carefully composes figures wearing bathing suits and caps within the colorfully tiled, cavernous spaces. Digitally manipulated to accentuate repetition and precise symmetry, the figures align perfectly as if frozen in the moment just before diving in.

Svarbova often captures a mood of detachment through the expressionless faces of her subjects and an aqueous color palette, blurring the distinction between the past, present, and future. Routine actions “are reframed with a visual purity that is soothing and symmetrical and at times reverberant with an ethereal stillness,” reads a statement. “The overall effect evokes a contemplative silence in an extended moment of promise and awareness—a quality difficult to achieve in the rapid pace of contemporary life.”

Find more work on Svarbova’s website, Behance, and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Aqueous Photographs by Maria Svarbova Synchronize Swimmers Within Cavernous Soviet-Era Pools appeared first on Colossal.

A new art festival is coming to our region this weekend August 4 through the 6. The brainchild of local gallery owner and artist, Christina Varga, Phoenicia Festival of the Arts will span the entirety of Main Street in Phoenicia, New York.

This free, three-day event features a Main Street Market for Artists and Artisans and plenty of family-friendly activities and happenings including an eclectic mix of musical, theatrical, and visual events.

The Main Street Market kicks off with a Night Market on Friday and Art Markets on Saturday and Sunday. Attendees will enjoy live outdoor music, poetry readings, open mics and artist demonstrations as well as artisan-made gifts, artwork, curated vintage collections, ceramics, sculpture and more.

Christina Varga joins us.

NEW YORK – The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Verizon have launched a first-of-its-kind experience at the Museum, Replica, that allows visitors at The Met to scan artwork and bring elements of the works digitally into the global immersive platform Roblox through augmented reality (AR).

Beginning August 2, users can download the Replica app, and starting August 3, visitors to The Met can access the in-app map to guide them to artworks around the Museum, learn about different works of art, and digitally collect unique pieces for free—like a Japanese suit of armor from early 14th–early 15th century or Vincent van Gogh’s straw hat from his iconic Self-Portrait of 1887—for their Roblox avatar.

Each wearable piece in Replica was inspired by art from across The Met’s vast collection of 1.5 million objects; the 37 selected artworks are drawn from objects on view across more than 30 galleries spanning nine curatorial areas, including the American Wing, Egyptian Art, European Paintings, and Asian Art. Highlights include Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (1887); Statuette of Anubis (332–30 B.C.); Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1804–6); Prince Holding a Falcon (ca. 1820); Marble capital and finial in the form of a Sphinx (ca. 530 B.C.); Reaching Jaguar (1906–7; cast 1926); Vase with Rabbits (late 16th century); Helmet (Zukinnari Kabuto) (16th century); and Armor of Henry II, King of France (ca. 1555).

The Replica app can be downloaded for free on iOS and Android devices.

“This groundbreaking app brings artwork from The Met’s illustrious collection into the virtual realm of Roblox, transforming the way visitors engage with art and crafting a captivating, fun, and truly unique journey through the Museum,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “Replica is a testament to The Met’s ambitious exploration of educational initiatives that inspire playful connections with art in the Museum as well as in the digital realm.”

“In partnership with The Met, we created Replica as an experience to connect people to art in a new and culturally relevant way,” said Kristin McHugh, SVP of Marketing and Creative at Verizon. “From The Met Unframed to this exciting launch of Replica, our technology can help bridge gaming and art, creating new possibilities for art education.”

Once inside the app, visitors can follow fun and accessible clues that appear on the digital map, leading to various galleries and works throughout the Museum. After the artworks are scanned in real life, each object is transformed into a collectible replica and can be transferred to the Roblox platform. These objects will then appear in the user’s inventory for their avatar to use as items and accessories.

On Roblox, users can experience a virtual version of The Met’s iconic facade on New York City’s Fifth Avenue and other renowned spaces, like the Great Hall and Great Hall staircase. Each Replica item is accompanied by information and details about the object and its history. Users are invited to create pairings of items and feature their selections in museum-style display cases—which can then be upvoted—and to snap pictures in four photo booth spaces inspired by The Met’s collections of art from ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as European Paintings and the beloved print The Great Wave (ca. 1830–32) by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Created and designed by the multidisciplinary company UNIT9 and Verizon in partnership with Roblox, the strategy and production company Ode to Joy, and The Met, whose digital, educational, and curatorial teams provided rich content and expertise, Replica was built as a user-friendly and engaging experience for children and young adults. The app features strong visuals, clues, and short, digestible educational moments to help users along their journey. In an impressive feat of 3D geometry, the Roblox experience contains a Met-inspired virtual version of the Museum itself, where users can explore the Museum in their newly acquired avatar items. Users can find these items in perpetuity in their Roblox inventory, bringing their favorite Met pieces wherever they go.

Replica will be featured on The Met’s website as well as on social media using the hashtag #TheMetReplica.

About The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met presents art from around the world and across time for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in two iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also take part in The Met experience online. Since it was founded in 1870, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum’s galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures.