There are many factors that support the architecture of the art market. In particular, I was most fascinated by the concept of “Goffmanian Separation” which is the separation of the front and back rooms in contemporary art galleries.
Since the inception of the modern art market, art dealers have defined their own identity as promoters and patrons of art rather than merchants and marketers of art. Through the evolution of the concept of the contemporary gallery art dealers have steered away from commerce and consumerism, which they perceived would degrade and devalue the art. Art dealers began to strive for their galleries to be “places of experimentation” and “vehicles for ideas” where art could flourish. This aim at engaging “in a privileged dialogue with the artist” still exists today. The function of contemporary and avant-garde galleries is to provide people who understand art and who appreciate being engaged by it with the opportunity to see it, rather than to simply make money. The concept of these Galleries is to “work for the long term development of the artists career.”
One of my favorite revelations from Olav Velthuis’ study was: “The fact that art galleries are also supposed to sell art can only be read between the lines, if at all.” Art galleries strive so hard to be non-commercial and disassociate themselves with commerce that one almost forgets that the art hanging on the walls is for sale. I actually believe this art dealer marketing ploy as an obsession to promote the artists’ talents, rather then exploit their creations, goes so far that it may hinder the successful sale of the artists’ work. Many people walk in an out of galleries like a museum. They may not even realize that the gallery is trying so hard to prevent the works from coming into contact with money that they are selling to a very elite group of patrons, not the general public,
The concept of Goffmanian Separation is the most intricate symbolic attempt to separate art from commerce. It is the physical separation of the front and the back of the gallery. The front of the gallery contains, depending on its size, one or more exhibition spaces. Such spaces may have concrete or wooden floors (carpets are hardly ever used) white walls without ornamentation, no furnishing, and neon or bright halogen lights. The minimal decor and lighting create an atmosphere that reinforces the autonomy of the artwork on display and forces the commerce of transaction to be kept at bay. The loftiness of the process inculcates only aesthetes and those with deep pockets. There is literally nothing else to focus on but the art. This architecture is one of the many examples of the market’s isomorphism, as institutional sociologists have come to refer to it: the minimalist, austere architectural language of the world of museums versus the commercial world of luxury commodities.
The austere, sparsely-furnished spaces that have dominated the western art markets for at least half a century are white cubes. The term has now been coined to refer to such austere gallery spaces that strive to provide a neutral background for contemporary art. Galleries rarely deviate from this layout. Doing so would seriously compromise the legitimacy of a gallery within the prescription of what the art world markets itself as.
(Exhibition of Picasso: Mosqueteros' at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, New York, 2009)
The sharpest distinction is made between the front room of the gallery where the works are exhibited and commerce is suppressed and the back room, which is the commercial nerve center of the gallery. Inside the front room neither a cash register nor price tags are present. When a work has been sold it is not removed from the exhibition, but a small sticker may be put on a price list of the works that are being exhibited. In 1988 New York City decided to enforce the “truth-in-pricing” law for art galleries. The law stated that all galleries had to conspicuously display prices. Protests against the decision criticized that the law would turn galleries into retail stores. This law would bring the consciousness of money to the forefront of the galleries and that exposure of prices would get in the way of the visitor’s enjoyment of the exhibition. After violators refused to pay fines the government eventually dropped the issue. Typically today prices of very expensive artworks are only available on request
If the front, most visible and museum-like part of the gallery suppresses any reference to the commercial function of the gallery, the back room, by contrast, is constructed as a commercial space. Art and commerce are juxtaposed physically in the architecture of the modern gallery. For example, in the largest New York venues such as the Marlborough Gallery or the Wildenstein Gallery located in a corporate building on 57th street, the back of the gallery consists of several corridors of spaces with distinct functions. These spaces include offices for the directors or negotiating a sale and usually a private viewing room, furnished with comfortable seats, where potential buyers can look in full comfort at a small number of works they may be interested in.
By making an architectural distinction between the exhibition space known as the (noncommercial) primary thrust of the venue, from their (commercial) secondary marketing activities and by deploying two opposed sets of selling techniques, art dealers enact the Durkheimian separation of the “sacred and the profane.”
(Private Viewing Room, Opera Gallery, SoHo, New York)
Within the restriction of the white cube, dealers can construct and fortify their identity by means of their installation techniques and layout. Typically galleries are located away from shopping districts, tourist hotspots, or other high traffic area. When it comes to location, a separation is established between the art market and the wider economy. New York art galleries remain clustered in streets, neighborhoods (such as Chelsea). The post war movements of these clusters can be traced in time: on west upscale 57th street, where the market for contemporary art was centered in the 50’s and 60’s and in SoHo, where the art market moved from the mid 70’s onwards, few galleries can still be found. Nowadays most of them are located in Chelsea. Some less commercial art galleries have been founded since the late 1990’s in Williamsburg Brooklyn (where many artists actually live and work). At the time when galleries started moving to Brooklyn, both Chelsea and SoHo were by and large industrial neighborhoods. Although these neighborhoods have become gentrified, none of them had many retail stores or restaurants at the time that the first galleries started moving there. These collective migrations of art galleries are first and foremost propelled by the prices of real estate: when dealers were unable to afford the galleries they were renting or when they wanted to expand their exhibition spaces. They proceeded to be pulled towards new locations because of the lower rents. Some galleries have even claimed to move out of SoHo only because of the increased popularity of the neighborhood and the influx of tourism that they did not want to be associated with. The location of a gallery or the timing of its relocation is in itself a source of prestige within the arts community. These moves speak of an independent attitude that is exclusively appreciated by the arts community. Similarly, galleries that refused to migrate have been praised for their stubbornness and their willingness to resist the trend.
Along with location, there is another pattern that many contemporary galleries follow. Almost invariably, a shop window to the gallery is absent. It is typically impossible to view the inside of the gallery from the outside because of the use of opaque frosted window glass or because of thin curtains behind the windows. Some galleries only display their name in small letters next to the entrance door. For smaller galleries this entrance door gives access to the main exhibition space, while visitors to larger galleries need to pass though a small hall or corridor before accessing the exhibition as Velthius point our, this hall serves to disconnect the world of art from everyday life. It is these important athestetic and architectural factors that successfully allows galleries to separate art and commerce through the physical separation of front and back rooms, which in turn support the architecture of the art market.