Museums become online educators and content providers: Metropolitan Museum of Art video, “Unfolding an 18th century gaming table”
The Art World in Motion: Global Disintermediation
Auction Houses as Gallery Owners:
Not that long ago, auction houses concentrated on holding public sales and dealers put together their own shows, where the main point was to move merchandise. These days, the traditional conventions that once defined the art world seem to have evaporated. The auction giants Sotheby’s and Christie’s now run in-house art galleries and are increasingly selling art — just as a dealer would — privately. Teams of their experts are traveling the world trying to pair buyers and sellers.
“Private sales are another leg for us to stand on,” he said. “We have the connections and the manpower; it’s all about taking advantage of a bigger marketplace.” And of course if something doesn’t sell privately, these companies have the advantage of then giving a seller the choice of putting it at auction with a lower estimate.
At Christie’s, Mr. Porter is building the business with a long-term view. “Within a decade, it’s a very real possibility that our private sales will be equal to our auction sales,” he said. “That’s what we’re aiming for.” Private sales have become the fastest-growing part of the auction business. “Until recently, we mostly waited until something came to auction,” said Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s in the Americas, who is also heading the company’s international private sales initiative. “While we have been doing private sales as an adjunct part of the business for years now, we realize we’re limited having basically just an auction channel. Private sales are not aligned to auction seasons, they are not dependent on a twice-yearly calendar, they can happen 365 days of the year.”
Sotheby’s and Christie’s have dabbled with dealerships for years. As early as 1996, Sotheby’s bought the André Emmerich Gallery (which it closed two years later.) It now owns the London-based Noortman Master Paintings, which it acquired in 2006. Meanwhile, Christie’s took over Haunch of Venison in 2007, a contemporary art gallery with spaces in London and New York.
But recently both auction houses have opened their own private sale galleries on their premises. Sotheby’s S2 is on the second floor of its York Avenue headquarters; Christie’s space is on the 20th floor of 1230 Avenue of the Americas, around the corner but connected to its Rockefeller Center home. It too organizes exhibitions like one that ended on Saturday and was devoted to painting in New York in the 1970s.
“It’s dedicated to putting on several shows a year for private sale,” Mr. Porter said on a recent fall day, as he stood in the middle of the galleries, whose walls were filled with works by blue-chip artists like Elizabeth Murray, Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns.
In addition to the public gallery spaces, there are more intimate, private viewing rooms where potential buyers can look at a painting, drawing or sculpture in a secluded environment knowing they don’t have the now-or-never pressure of an auction. Christie’s has a special private-sale gallery only in New York for now, but it is planning to open others in London and Hong Kong. Sotheby’s, meanwhile, presents S2 exhibitions in Los Angeles and Hong Kong.
Already equipped with the infrastructure — experts and representatives based in all the major art capitals who make it their business to know the rich and about-to-be-rich, and comprehensive databases of information about collectors, what they own and what they want to own — officials at Sotheby’s and Christie’s say they see the area of private sales as a natural extension of their core business. Sotheby’s reported that during the first half of 2012 its private sales totaled $513.6 million, an increase of 14.5 percent from the previous year. At Christie’s, sales for the first half of last year were $661.5 million, an increase of 53 percent compared with the same period in 2011.
“Our goal is to match buyers and sellers and know what each is looking for,” Mr. Porter said.
Galleries: Not Just for Sale
Galleries are stepping up their game, opening multiple spaces around the globe to offer buyers the same kind of international reach as the auction houses. They are also calling on former museum curators and scholars to organize exhibitions with lavish, erudite catalogs. Often these shows have almost nothing for sale, and a surprising number of artworks are being lent by museums.
Retrospective used to be a word associated primarily with museum exhibitions, but now commercial galleries are using it, too.
Although there are things for sale, Mr. Wilmerding sees the retrospective more as a scholarly exhibition that just happens to be in a commercial gallery. “I’m doing it because the artist is worth it,” he said.
Organizing an exhibition in a gallery has its advantages. “They have the resources and are willing to put up the money,” Mr. Wilmerding said. “You can do a When the financial crisis hit in 2008, major museums pulled back, organizing fewer expensive loan shows and presenting more exhibitions using their own collections, which has left the field open for blue-chip galleries like Acquavella, Gagosian and Matthew Marks to step up their own programs and producing handsome catalogs in two months, not a year and a half, which is what it takes at most museums.”
Museum as Information Provider:
In the museum world, being an information provider has become a priority, so much so that museums are becoming online publishers. This month the Metropolitan Museum of Art introduced MetPublications, a resource that allows users to search more than 600 catalogs, journals and museum bulletins online by title, keyword, publication type, theme or collection, including, so far, about 140 out-of-print books. And the Met is not alone, as museums across the country are putting more and more scholarly content — along with lavish illustrations — online and available free.
Museums as E-Publishers:
There’s nothing new about exhibition catalogs, but soon after a show closes, these beautifully presented publications are generally relegated to the graveyard of out-of-print books. And as museum’s permanent collections grow, having up-to-the-minute, in-depth information available to the public has become impossible, at least in the form of a printed publication. Now museums, especially the larger ones, are fast becoming their own online publishers.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums are making out-of-print catalogs available online, along with related materials like reviews, illustrations and journals.
The Getty Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles have created what they call the Getty’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, a five-year program whose mission is to transform how museums disseminate information.
“Museums are definitely becoming digital publishers,” said Deborah Marrow, director of the J. Paul Getty Foundation, who has headed up the initiative. It will bring together a group of institutions — the Art Institute of Chicago, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the J. Paul Getty Museum — to work together to catalog online projects using research materials, audio and video. Excerpted from Carol Vogel, The New York Times
“Each museum is doing things their own way,” Ms. Marrow said.
The Walker began putting essays from its new printed publications online and has been experimenting with print-on-demand titles. By early next year it plans to introduce the first phase of an online initiative that focuses on making artworks as well as actual moving images, photographs and ephemera drawn from its permanent collection available on its Web site.
The Los Angeles County Museum has a “reading room” on its Web site that makes available out-of-print books and related materials, which will grow over time. And through the Getty’s program, Lacma is working on three catalogs of its collections, one devoted to Dutch paintings, another to European art and a third to South East Asian art. “Next year we will have 20,000 high-resolution images online, all free, so anyone can use them for a scholarly paper or put them on a T-shirt,” said Michael Govan, director of Lacma.
If all its catalogs will be available online, will it eventually mean the end of the printed book? “Not at all,” said Mr. Govan. “We find if we put out an e-book, it only increases print sales.” Excerpted from Carol Vogel, The New York Times.
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