What a Gallerist Actually Does

The public sees a gallerist for three hours on an opening night, holding a glass, talking to people who look as if they own things. It is the least representative three hours of the job. A gallery is a small business with a warehouse, a payroll, a fair schedule and a stable of artists whose rent, in the early years, it is quietly paying. The glass is a prop.

The stable

A gallery represents artists. The word is used loosely, but at its core it means an agreement, often unwritten, that the gallery will show the artist's work regularly, sell it at prices it sets with the artist, promote it to collectors and institutions, and in return keep roughly half of every sale. The artist agrees not to sell the same kind of work out of the back door at a lower price. That is the whole contract, and most disputes in the trade come from one side forgetting half of it.

A gallery with fifteen artists gives each a solo show every two to three years. Between shows, it places their work at fairs, lends it to museums, answers questions from curators, ships it, insures it, photographs it and keeps the archive that, decades later, will decide what is authentic and what is not.

The money

The mathematics are unforgiving. A modest gallery in a European city spends something like 250,000 euros a year on rent, staff, fair booths, shipping, insurance and the printed matter nobody reads. To cover that from its half of sales it must sell 500,000 euros of art, and it must do so while showing artists who are not yet selling, because those are the ones who will carry the programme in ten years. Most galleries live on two or three artists who sell and use the income to build the rest. When one of the two leaves for a bigger gallery, which is the natural order, the arithmetic breaks and has to be rebuilt.

We are a bank that lends taste. The repayments come in eight years, if they come.

A gallerist in Vienna

Fairs

Fairs are where the money moves and where it is spent. A booth at a major fair costs a mid-sized gallery 40,000 to 100,000 euros with shipping, travel and the walls, and the gallery must sell three or four times that to justify the week. Which is why fairs are not places where art is discovered; they are places where art already sold, or sold in advance to collectors who were shown the works on a phone in May, is displayed for the public in June. A gallery that has not pre-sold a booth is nervous, and a nervous gallery is a good place to negotiate.

Museums

The unpaid half of the job is institutional. Placing an artist's work in a museum collection raises the grid, confers a kind of permanence, and takes years of lunches. Gallerists lend to exhibitions at their own expense, produce catalogues for shows that sell nothing, and sometimes give a work to a museum outright, or sell it at a price that makes no sense, because the line "in the collection of" is worth more than the invoice.

The eye

Underneath all of it is the part that cannot be taught: the gallerist decided, at some point, that a painter nobody had heard of was worth a decade of rent. That decision is the product. A good gallery is not a shop with good taste; it is a record of bets, and its reputation is the ratio of bets that came in. Collectors follow gallerists the way readers follow editors, which is why the name over the door is the first thing a serious buyer checks.

The email

Ask any gallerist what they did yesterday and the honest answer is: wrote to a museum that did not reply, chased a shipper, sent a condition report, argued about a frame, updated the website, told a collector a work was sold, told an artist a work was not, and stood in the space for an hour looking at a wall and wondering whether the painting on it was hung ten centimetres too high. Then, at seven, the glass.