The Gallery Is A Mendacious Pimp
Galleries emerged in the modern world with the rise of Capitalism in the 16th Century. As such, their primary role has never been to serve the artist or the community at large, but rather to pimp out the artist to whatever buyer they can fool!
With the transparency of the internet, media emerges daily regarding the lewd prices at which art is selling. Some of the most recent are: Jean Michael Basquiat’s “Untitled” (1982), which sold for $110,000,000.00 at Sotheby’s New York; Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450,300,000.00 at Christie’s New York. While prices such as these are absurd and arouse questions as to the original sources of the money, it is no surprise that the behavior surrounding art as upper-class commodity has distilled over centuries into that of our contemporary art galleries.
In the future, art will be shared more and accessible to anyone, as we are already observing with the emergence of online galleries funded through crowdsourced viewing. It is, therefore, the responsibility of the gallerist or curator in physical and long-standing locations to cast away these practices of greed and adopt a methodology of serving the artist and arts community. Without the artist, there would be no art; without the art, there would be no gallery. As the slave turns to master and master to slave, so does the artist and gallery. Furthermore, with increased numbers of viewers and participants in the gallery community, the gallerist will be forced to rebalance their prices within the market in order to accommodate and retain its market share. Rather than displaying works that, simply put, sell, art works displayed in galleries will become a honest selection by the viewers as to how their interactions dictate their sense of taste and, ultimately, purchasing power.
“When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don't want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out.” — James Frey
“I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.” — Jean-Michael Basquiat
