What If There Were No More Galleries?

Recently in Vancouver, two well-known galleries, Buschlen Mowatt Gallery and Dianne Farris Gallery, closed their doors. Their owner/operators are both staying active in the visual art field: Barrie Mowatt with the Vancouver Biennale and Dianne Farris with her online gallery, but the closures of these two galleries could be the canaries in the coal mine.

If it was hard for a Metro Vancouver visual artist to secure representation last year, it is even harder now. Any local artists served in the past by these two galleries that have closed are now looking for a gallery, one would imagine, so the competition for exhibitions will increase. On the other hand, there has been considerable growth in direct sales “festivals” and charity art auctions, serving as retail outlets for artists.

By “direct sales festivals,” I mean sales/exhibition opportunities such as Vancouver’s “Eastside Culture Crawl,” “The Drift” and “Artists in Our Midst”, and by auctions, I mean auction/fundraisers such as “Artists for Life” and the annual Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) and Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) fine art auctions. I don’t mean traditional auctions.

In 1999, five charity auctions – the Federation of Canadian Artists AIM exhibition, the VAG, CAG and Arts Umbrella annual auctions and the Vancouver Art for Life auction – sold almost $750,000 worth of art. This year, the VAG auction alone reportedly sold a million dollars worth of art, representing an estimated 250% increase over 1999, so the combined total of all the charity auctions in Vancouver may be approaching two million dollars! Auctions and festivals are becoming the dominant sales vehicles in the Vancouver art market.

Our non-profit visual art galleries and educational organizations have been forced to find new sources of revenue to make up for the cuts to public funding imposed by our federal and provincial governments. Our political leaders are forcing Canadian cultural organizations to adopt an American market model for financial governance as they have abandoned the British model of reasonable financial support. The result is less experimentation and risk taking in programming, and an increasing concern with earned income.

Some public art galleries have dramatically increased their admission charges and abandon or severely limited free access (the VAG). Others have implemented new revenue generating programs, discontinued some heavily subsidized programs or activities, shared expenses and materials with other galleries, significantly increased their fundraising activity, or done all or many of these things. A preferred fundraising activity of art galleries, not unsurprisingly, is an art auction.

When you buy from a commercial gallery, all you get is your painting, but when you buy through a non-profit gallery’s auction, you get a painting plus a lot of gratitude from the gallery and public prestige. A commercial gallery cannot provide that kind of service – they cannot give their clients the emotional fulfillment they can get from the perceived philanthropy of the auction. (The artists who donate the work are the real philanthropists!)

One has to wonder if these gala charity events have helped contribute to the demise of the two galleries, and if they have, what lies ahead and the implications for visual artists in Canada’s urban centres. If more galleries close – and I am not seeing new galleries of the same size and operational visibility opening – artists who want to sell work are going to have to abandon their dreams of representation and become involved with direct sales and charity art auctions.

Direct selling is a challenge, but with the abundant new technologies and advents in social media, direct selling has never been easier. Lots of resources exist to help artists learn about direct selling and self-promotion (not the least of which is my book, Artist Survival Skills), and Canadian Artists Representation (CARFAC) Ontario has a definitive resource for artists to read about charity auctions on their website. Guidelines for Professional Standards in the Organization of Fundraising Events, is available for downloading from their website at www.carfacontario.ca.

What worries me most about our future is a practice that is common in many American cities, and that is a network of what are called “vanity galleries.” In many large U.S. cities where there are no, or few, artist run centres or non-profit galleries, artists rent gallery space to host their exhibitions. Landlords operate these rental galleries that are physically well-developed spaces for exhibitions, but that have no audience or supervisory staff. Artists rent the space, install their show, staff the space and invite their mailing list. It is a risky and expensive practice, but when there is no alternative, this is what a market society offers. If this is our future, I despair for our upcoming generations of visual artists.

Commercial art galleries have played an important part in the development of Canada’s visual artists. The closing of the Buschlen Mowatt and Dianne Farris galleries feels like I have lost two friends.

Chris Tyrell is an arts writer and educator. His opinion piece has appeared in our newsletter since it began in 1986.