Closed gallery

On art and commerce

Two drawings, 2024

There is a gallery down in the street, a large shopping window inviting passers-by to notice the few paintings on the walls of a not very sizeable room. They might as well sell shoes or groceries instead of art. We all need groceries, shoes, and art, more or less in that order. Each time I have passed by the gallery has been closed. Not just Mondays and Tuesdays, but any day. Actually I think it is called something like open gallery, as if they'd need to stress that it is. Had it been a window gallery they wouldn't need to keep open at all. You don't get a very good view from the street. There is a desk in the room and a chair behind it. That must be where contracts are signed and the business is handled. No need to do what Michael Asher once did, removing the wall that separated the office from the rest of the space in order to expose that economical transactions also take place in galleries.

Maybe they open on special occasions and for special customers who have an appointment. They don't seem to care about the haphazard visitor strolling down the street with a few spare minutes to drop in and have a look, those who have no empty walls left where they might hang another painting, and not enough savings to buy one anyway. It looks like the kind of place where merchandise changes hands. Surely the painting must match the sofa, though the paintings on display are colourful, almost noisy, but still the kind of easy-to-like pieces you'd expect in commercial galleries.

My favourite gallery, nearby where I used to live, had a series of interesting exhibitions, often paintings, sculpture or objects, prints, some photography, and sometimes inviting newly graduated artists who might create installations of bathroom fixtures with towels, or large sheets of paper wrinkled into sculptural shapes. That gallery kept going for about four years. Then the landlord figured he might treble the rent and adjust it to common market levels. That was the end of that, at least for now. Soon after it closed a shop appeared in its stead, selling what appeared, from the outside, to be useless decoration or maybe some half-cheap design products. One could imagine an artist recreating the look of this shop as an installation, organised on shelves around narrow aisles, all provided with price tags and special offers.

It is certainly possible to walk into a store and behold it as an aesthetic expression. By "aesthetic" I don't necessarily mean beautiful, but appealing to the senses. Of course there is a whole science of how to entice customers to buy the products on offer, how to place the most necessary or popular products far into the shop so that you have to pass by all other shelves and pick up a few other items than those on the shopping list; how to use lighting, scent, and sound to enhance the experience. I don't know of any artist who has recreated the shopping mall as an installation, but, if someone has, it would almost certainly have been critical of consumerism. Just as some artists take jobs in advertising for the survival tickets, many would be highly qualified to design the "shopping experience," as it would be called in consumer-friendly lingo. No matter if it should turn out to be surreal, highbrow, conceptual, minimalist, anything that distinguishes the shop from its competitors would be good for business.

There is a genre of closed exhibitions: The artist announces the show, then hangs a sign on the door that says CLOSED. The conceptual artist Robet Barry did it in 1969, and has then repeated the stunt at various locations. In his first solo exhibition, Daniel Buren covered the gallery door with his famous stripes, thus blocking entrance. In 2001, Elmgreen & Dragset covered a gallery window and door with the message "OPENING SOON. PRADA".

Maurizio Cattelan, reputed for his talent for avoiding work and making money, had a place called The Wrong Gallery which was permanently closed. For those who want their own Wrong Gallery, Cattelan has made a miniature edition (1000 copies realised) of the characteristic gallery door with the sign, available for only £ 3,750.

Yves Klein's 1958 empty exhibition at the Iris Clert gallery might in a way qualify as a forerunner to the closed shows. Apart from a large cabinet with nothing in it the gallery was completely empty. Although there were no artworks in a traditional sense, Klein had the window painted blue, there was a blue curtain, and blue cocktails were served, but I doubt there was enough for all the 3,000 visitors who had come to see it. "My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner," Klein stated.

The Emperor's new clothes were also, upon closer inspection, found to be invisible. Reactionaries like to dismiss figures like Klein as charlatans, at the risk of drawing contemporary art in its totality with him. A new Klein biography, reviewed by Maxime Vivas in two parts, finds enough to complain about. But Klein continues to influence other artists.

For some reason I come to think of a quotation by the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, known, among other things, for having proposed to celebrate Art's birthday:

Art is what makes life more interesting than art.

Finally, I should mention that some of these thoughts about commerce and art, and their intersection, were partly influenced by reading Laurent Buffet's tome Captation et subversion. L'art à l'epreuve du capitalisme tardif (Les presses du réel, 2023), which I will not review in detail here. I have also mentioned Buffet’s book in an earlier post:

Suffice to say that Buffet's agenda is to set straight an assumption which he calls the sociological paradigm of art. This paradigm holds that late capitalism has been strongly influenced by modern and contemporary art. Job postings call for "creative" people. Advertising, design, and commerce borrow heavily from art. The artist has become a role model for capitalism (though I think this doesn't apply to exploited Amazon workers or Uber drivers, examples which Buffet doesn't mention). Meanwhile, postmodern artists like Jeff Koons and Cattelan adopt commerce as their own expression, and make lots of money doing so. I must admit that I had not heard much about the ideas summarised as the sociological paradigm of art before reading Buffet, ideas which he refutes at length over the almost 500 pages. Instead of being captured by commercialism, Buffet argues, a segment of contemporary art has withdrawn from aestheticism as a reaction against the aestheticisation of every other aspect of life. This is probably correct, although I assume there can be other additional reasons for the turn away from aesthetics.