C94 Column
Art, hauteur and lucre
At the National Sculpture Factory's seminar on public art, Vivienne Roche made a simple but telling point, partly in response to Declan McGonagle's observations about the emphasis on production in the art process, with galleries serving as distribution centres. He was arguing for a greater concentration on the consumer at the level of interaction with art. Roche took up this point, saying that for her galleries had always been places to encounter art, not distribution centres. Clearly, in an obvious sense, public galleries and museums are places to encounter art, but so too are commercial galleries.
Yet commercial galleries tend to get a bad press. There are obvious enough, if not exactly good reasons why this should be so. Peripherally, they are associated with art dealers, who in the popular imagination and often enough in fact are notoriously shady characters. It's a view hardly contradicted by various scandals over the years concerning the shenanigans of supposedly reputable auction houses. A sizeable sector of the art market is inextricably bound up with pretension and profiteering, but it's just one sector, and it could be argued that it seems to satisfy a real if sadly skewed need.
More to the point, among many artists there persists a feeling, often deeply entrenched, that galleries and gallerists are in some sense there to rip them off, to exploit their labour. Of course that is sometimes, if infrequently, the case. Ironically, the view of galleries as exploiters of artists is very much of a kind with the view that when artists sell their work they're getting money for nothing, that they are somehow outside of the conventional economic equation.
Yet the majority of commercial galleries are not simply art shops. They offer the chance of an encounter with art, as Roche said, and one that is untouched by commerce. To visit an exhibition, to experience it, can be significant, troubling and enriching in a sense in no way diminished by the fact that you are not going to buy a work and possess it - probably because you simply cannot afford to.
Of course, the bottom line is that commercial galleries are not cushioned, like publicly funded institutions, from hard commercial reality (though such institutions are increasingly exposed to the laws of the marketplace), and they have to sell work to survive. But to define them in terms of an exclusively commercial function is a distortion of the role they actually play, even if this role were solely a by-product of doing business. Such a definition is in fact to concentrate on one level of analysis at the expense of all others.
The others might include the significant fact that gallerists are usually engaged in a passionate way with art rather than profit. To have followed the difficult progress of commercial galleries through long hard times is instructive. Throughout a period when relatively little business was being done, there were hesitant initiatives towards lobbying for some form of Arts Council support. These came to nothing, and quite rightly, though the galleries did have a point to make in terms of the extra-commercial dimension of their endeavours.
Aidan Dunne
