Abstract
Dealers advocating contemporary art occupy a crucial position in the art world, as they often initiate the processes of reception and commodification of art. Despite the importance of the phenomenon of galleries, little is known about the dispositions and interpretative patterns that structure their owners’ professional practice and enable them to commit to their delicate task. A reconstruction of such concepts was conducted by means of contrasting case studies based on interviews and the biographical data of European and American gallery owners. The contribution outlines a typology of gallery owners active in the global art market: the operator, the companion, the curator-gallerist, and the adviser.
I thank Greg Michael Sax for his meticulous reading of the text.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
As of 2005, the president of the Art Dealers Association of America ridiculed the denomination: “Frankly, I’m not acquainted with it. I hope anyone calling himself a gallerist has a medical degree.” (The New York Times, 24 December 2005). “Gallerist” omits, as does “gallery owner”, the commercial aspect of the role and emphasises its public function. “Art dealer”, which captures the dual nature of the profession, is still very common in English and denotes gallery owners active both in the primary and the secondary markets. However, “gallerist” is increasingly used – notably by actors who advocate contemporary (“cutting edge”) art – to distinguish innovative gallery owners committed to living artists and pure, that is, secondary market “dealers” (see Sect. 2). This introduction of a new denomination, meant to suggest distance from the commodifying role associated with “dealer”, is similar to an earlier evolution in other languages, such as French and German (Gautier 2019, 37–38; Loichinger 2014).
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“Even where the experiencing subject believes that ‘insights’ and ‘designs’ come to him from himself alone, ‘inspirationally’ and ‘in a flash’, they nevertheless originate in collective fundamental designs, which are alive in him as well, although he is not self-reflectively conscious of it. It is, however, one of the most important tasks of the sociology of thinking to press on to the level of collective designs – which sustains itself, as it were, behind the individual’s back, not entering into self-reflective consciousness – and to bring out the deeper contextures of discrete individual observations which come about within an age or current” (Mannheim 1986, 51).
- 5.
All translations of quoted German are by M. G.
- 6.
See also Schumpeter (2011b, 241–246).
- 7.
The interviewees’ names have been changed; the country indicates a gallery’s location.
- 8.
- 9.
“Whereas mere common ‘location’ in a generation is of only potential significance, a generation as an actuality is constituted when similarly ‘located’ contemporaries participate in a common destiny and in the ideas and concepts which are in some way bound up with its unfolding. Within this community of people with a common destiny there can then arise particular generation-units. These are characterized by the fact that they do not merely involve a loose participation by a number of individuals in a pattern of events shared by all alike though interpreted by the different individuals differently, but an identity of responses, a certain affinity in the way in which all move with and are formed by their common experiences” (Mannheim 1952, 306).
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Gautier, M. (2020). Mapping the Professional Self-Concepts of Gallery Owners: A Typology. In: Glauser, A., Holder, P., Mazzurana, T., Moeschler, O., Rolle, V., Schultheis, F. (eds) The Sociology of Arts and Markets. Sociology of the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39013-6_11
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