The gallery is dead, long live the gallery!

Gallerist Leo Castelli with artist Roy Lichtenstein, 1992.

We love the thrill of catastrophe, so apocalyptic scenarios about the art world have become standard summer reading. Last year, the closures of Blum and Clearing triggered speculation about a looming paradigm shift. This year, the end of gallery times has been heralded by Pace’s abrupt dismissal of artists and staff, the closure of the venerable European galleries dépendance and Air de Paris, followed by New York’s Lyles & King and most recently the tragic end of the gallery Lubov.

Obviously, the art world is part of the wider world, which is currently experiencing a roller-coaster moment, caught between devastating conflicts, populist movements, hopes and fears surrounding AI, and the persistent irrationality of human behaviour. While art can be created anywhere and at any time, artworks can only be traded under specific circumstances, which we call the art market. Like every other market, it is part of the broader – now highly unpredictable - economy, which resulted in the prevailing attitude: “Do I really need it now?”, consequently favorizing only the best works or the best deals. Yet this alone does not fully explain the pervasive sense of crisis of the gallery system that has been widely reported in the media.

Let us therefore look at the art system from a broader perspective. The most important transformations that turned the tiny art market into a still small but significantly more attractive industry over the past two decades were the Internet revolution, globalization, and professionalization. Today, however, these same forces seem no longer helping.

The technological possibilities created by the internet, which contributed enormously to the expansion of the art world, now generate a deluge of information and a sense of weary standardization. We are flooded with solicited and unsolicited PDFs featuring the same stylish—but not too stylish—employee standing in front of a work, alongside the same carefully curated photograph of the never-changing artist. Another consequence of the internet’s success is the accessibility of information that gives everyone the impression of being an art expert. If you want to know an artist’s value, you simply look up their latest auction results, available online within seconds to anyone willing to pay for access. Yet without the necessary knowledge and interpretive skills, auction results alone reveal very little. There are major artists who have never appeared at auction—Medardo Rosso, for example. There are also mediocre artworks that have sold for millions before collapsing in price. To evaluate an artist properly, one must understand their institutional standing, critical reception, peer assessment, collectors’ network, secondary market, future commitments, and, of course, the quality of the oeuvre itself. Speaking of Internet we cannot forget the omnipresent social media that thrive on spectacle and entertainment—both fundamentally at odds with the idea of art and changing the attention span of the audiences.

Let us move to the second great success story of the art industry over the past two decades: globalization. We have become an art world operating on a planetary scale. Galleries opened additional spaces in other cities and countries; new fairs and private museums appeared like mushrooms after the rain. While attempting to reach new audiences, most of these venues ended up addressing the same collectors though, who became inundated with invitations and private views of shows in Chicago, Seoul, São Paulo, Paris, and elsewhere. New people certainly joined the club, many of them with little prior familiarity with art (a development that, among other things, helped legitimize the aesthetics of kitsch). Having discovered the pleasures of the art world, some newcomers approached art primarily as a financial asset, and consequently, many left as soon as their first flipping gambles failed.

The third blessing that has turned into a curse in disguise is professionalization. We have become structured. Invoices have become burdened by non-resale agreements. We dutifully comply with AML regulations. Condition reports have evolved into heavily documented volumes, etc. Yet in this professionalized environment, the essential role of the gallery has remained unchanged: to create the conditions in which art can happen and artists can thrive and make the gallery to a cultural producer rather than a store. The gallery guides, organizes, conceptualizes, finances, and connects - I would hesitate to use the phrase “protect the artist,” as Jerry Saltz did in an otherwise excellent article on the gallery issue.¹ Protection implies dependency on the part of the protected, which is not necessarily the case. The notion of the artist as a fragile being struggling against outside world is a remarkably persistent idea, cultivated over centuries to secure the artist’s exceptional status. There is nothing inherently wrong with this concept. Art is, in many ways, a faith without a god, and every faith requires mechanisms to preserve the special status of the creators. Problems arise when ideological narratives are used to explain—or complain about—the practical realities of everyday work. It is not an honour to represent an artist, it is a job. Galleries invest heavily in artists’ careers. They carry substantial overhead costs, pay for transports, cover production expenses, publish books, invest in digital visibility, participate in fairs, and organize entertainment for collectors. Not every gallery hires an acrobat for a dinner, but even a simple opening dinner for thirty people in a major city can represent a considerable financial burden.

These costs have become increasingly difficult to uphold for the galleries in the middle tier (ironically, the complex, socially critical art so often favored by younger, capitalism-critical curators can be exhibited sustainably only by galleries whose owners are wealthy enough to afford not selling it). The well-intentioned advice that galleries should spend more time cultivating local collectors as suggested in the recent article by Marc Spiegler is largely unhelpful because most galleries have already been trying to do that.² With a few exceptions, attracting audiences to art institutions in general has long been a challenge (otherwise, yoga sessions in museums would not have become so popular).

This brings us to the core of the problem: the increasingly difficult relationship between rising gallery costs and artwork prices that are not eagerly accepted by buyers. Collectors nowadays often perceive primary-market prices as high, particularly when there is no pressure of waiting lists and works by the same artist can frequently be acquired more cheaply on the secondary market. This inverted discrepancy between the primary and secondary prices emerged at the end of the Covid era, when once low interest rates disappeared, many buyers who were keenly buying art works discovered that art was not nearly as liquid as other financial assets, while at the same time, galleries—remaining loyal to their principle of never financially ‘degrading’ an artist—refused to lower prices despite weaker demand. While lower estimates helped create the market momentum at auctions, the primary market follows a logic slightly distinct from that of pure supply and demand since it is the cultural and social value creation that occupies the ideological foreground while commercial considerations have traditionally remained in the background.

What, then, should be done? Well, no simple solutions to complex problems here. Galleries could reduce - and many are already doing so- the number of exhibitions and fairs, and scale back communication with collectors. It is rarely necessary to send emails with follow-up messages containing an “updated PDF” or a ‘kind reminder”- if someone did not respond to your previous email, it is usually not because they failed to see it.

There is no easy solution to the cost-price dilemma either, and this issue is deeply connected to the wider economy. Paradoxically, many people who complain about today’s prices would not actually wish to return to a time when the art world revolved around good conversation rather than money—assuming such a time ever truly existed. Nor would they welcome lower prices for artists whose works they already own.

Let us face it: one of the great attractions of the art world is the promise that an artist might become a star, rewarding our good eye and financial trust in them. Collectors are passionate about art for many reasons – the combination of cultural, social and economic capital is very seductive. The art system offers a remarkable psychological advantage: the ability to switch effortlessly between financial and cultural motivations. If you lose money, you can reassure yourself that you supported culture and that money is ultimately secondary. If you make money, you can congratulate yourself on being a perceptive collector and a clever investor.

We are living through a period of profound transformation and must adapt accordingly. The good news is that a great deal of exceptional art continues to be made, and the gallery system has, thus far, provided the strongest framework for co-creating and sustaining its value.

1. https://www.vulture.com/article/how-pace-gallery-broke-itself.html

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/opinion/art-basel-fairs-gallery-market.html