“Running a contemporary commercial gallery is unsustainable within Scotland”
September 18, 2011 in art, discussion, gallery, press
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/news/Renowned-art-gallery-set-to.6838214.jp
Glasgow’s Sorcha Dallas gallery is to close. Losing an art gallery is usually (not always, ha!) sad but what’s really interesting about this particular closure is the rationale, as explained in the linked article [my emphasis]:
“Sorcha Dallas, who set up the eponymous gallery in 2004, said Scotland could not sustain commercial galleries and she was shutting down after the government’s arts agency Creative Scotland withdrew its financial support… This is due to no local collector base and little public support meaning heavy personal financial investment from the start in order to establish international markets and networks. The small amount of support I normally get was withdrawn this year by Creative Scotland and this, coupled with the dire present economic situation, makes continuing untenable.”
Two main issues or points for discussion arise from this statement:
[1] How is it a commercial gallery if it can’t run without state financial support? It may be valuable in some way and worthy of support, but it’s not a business except perhaps in a Potemkin Village kind of way.
It’s pretty well known that I think the state should be investing in the arts and in artists because the social and cultural (i.e. non financial) returns on relatively trifling investments are huge and they often succeed in reaching people where business and politics have previously failed: but I’m finding it hard to see why public finances should foot the bill so a commercial (i.e. not to the public’s benefit) gallery can make a profit. Surely a private commercial gallery should be investing its own money instead of the public’s? Am I missing something here?
[2] Scotland can’t sustain commercial galleries? Really? Does this mean that nowhere can except for London (or one of the world’s other major cities/cultural hubs)? SD’s statement seems to imply that Glasgow/Scotland is not in that “major” category. My instinct is that this is an unwarranted extrapolation of general trends from the failure of one gallery’s business- or rather, publicly subsidised “business”- model. Perhaps she made the mistake of setting up where the artists are instead of where the money is? The two rarely coincide.
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[1] The gallery was run as much to the benefit of the Glasgow art scene, if not the wider public, as any publicly-funded institution in the city. It grew out of the grassroots of the city’s art scene in the same way as Transmission and the other publicly-funded contemporary art initiatives, with the intention of allowing Glasgow-based artists to maintain representation within the city. If you don’t think that’s worthy of public support, then I think you make it hard to argue for any public support for contemporary art and artists in Glasgow.
[2] Yes, really. There is precisely one sustainable commercial gallery representing internationally credible artists in Glasgow. Its sustainability is built on years of much, much greater core public funding than SD ever benefited from.
Glasgow has, against all odds, one of the most active and interesting visual art communities in the world (many commentators would say it’s in the top five). But it has next to no local collectors. That means that artists must either move, or galleries must sell at international art fairs, to sustain even minimally viable careers for local artists. Participation in art fairs requires large initial financial outlay, necessitating either independent wealth, or public support.
If you’re happy for Glasgow visual art to become a monoculture, then sure, regard this as a simple commercial failure. Otherwise, see it as the wake up call that others in the art scene do.
Thanks “Anon” (ha ha, yes, good one) for providing a bit more context. As a former resident of Scotland I know from personal experience that there is a big, vital art/artists scene in Glasgow. Any development that degrades or damages it is very sad indeed.
I completely agree (as I said in the OP) that artists need support from a variety of different sources, commercial or public. I could not agree more that sometimes projects and businesses need an injection of investment otherwise they’d never grow at all. Being commercial and sales-driven is fine, being non-commercial is (or should be) also fine. There are many things that are good for society or for particular communities that should be available to all and are not amenable to being run on a for-profit basis… public libraries, for example.
However, you didn’t really engage with what I was actually getting at: can a business be called commercial if it absolutely requires subsidy to survive and immediately folds without it?
Again I emphasise that in my view not everything has to be or should be a business for profit; but if something IS supposedly a business then surely it should be breaking even, at least, from its own income?
And pointing to the other gallery is not an answer, because if they’re a profit making business that’s been funded by the public purse then a similar question hangs over their heads too.
No-one wants anywhere to become a monoculture unless they are a monoperson. (BTW: If you ARE a monoperson, who wrote your software?)
This post and the responses highlight a very valuable fact – that there IS an assumption by some people that the arts are not expected to be a regular business. By a regular business I mean one that operates with a balance sheet mentality, makes enough money to cover it’s costs and at a minimum breaks even.
Whether you are an artist, a gallery, an exhibition space, a dealer, or a combination of these if you are making a living from it you are a business and whether you are successful depends on whether you can survive financially without asking for help from you mum and dad*
I don’t know Sorcha Dallas or the gallery – I’m sorry to hear it’s closed, regardless of the reasoning. My course of action would be to move swiftly, set-up something else and learn from the fail (and then forget it). It might be worth considering why your cashflow was so tight the whole business depended on a tiny investment from public funds to sustain it. It’s a high risk affair to be reliant on one key, small, erratic egg. I would imagine you won’t do that again.
The local collector argument is also interesting, most sales aren’t local. The big transactions are global. The deals don’t happen on the gallery floor. A good gallery should be outward looking and putting the work where it will be seen, not naively sitting and waiting for the collectors to nip in on a sunny afternoon.
*replace as necessary with funding avenues relevant to you.
The gallerist has many roles it seems:
1) to scout out good artists (and therefore art)
2) to display art (in own or other venue)
3) to pull in audiences (influential and not)
4) to be part of a buying and selling network, to know collectors
5) to be financially astute
6) to understand the market they are in
7) to work with curators or be qualified to curate themselves
Any more…
scotland regarding art of any seriousness is full of mostly crap. It really is just a fact of life here that mediocrity is the norm and expectations of new adventures hardly exist. I praise all serious people who exist in this country. And people like Sorcha Dallas who i have never met but who obviously puts her finger out to explore art nows and identities from her culture.
a little piece of my work from suite 99, perhaps describes my views about scotland and most of its art.
was as
sweet words spat out from your
swirling kilt
sporraned roon the
edges way dods a keech.
craig mckechnie