How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery (Second Edition)

By Edward Winkleman and Patton Hindle

“A comprehensive guide.” —Artspace.

“Whether you are new to the business or a seasoned gallerist, it is always wise to remember the essentials.” —Leigh Conner, director, Conner Contemporary Art

Aspiring and new art gallery owners can find everything they need to plan and operate a successful art gallery with How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery. This new edition has been updated to mark the changes in market and technology over the past decade. Edward Winkleman and Patton Hindle draw on their years of experience to explain step by step how to start your new venture. From finding the ideal locale and renovating the space to writing business plans and securing start-up capital, this helpful guide has it all. Chapters detail how to:

• Manage cash flow
• Grow your new business
• Hire and manage staff
• Attract and retain artists and clients
• Represent your artists
• Promote your gallery and artists online
• Select the right art fair
• And more

How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery, Second Edition, also includes sample forms, helpful tips from veteran collectors and dealers, a large section on art fairs, and a directory of art dealer associations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allworth
• Release date: Nov 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781621536574

Edward Winkleman

Edward Winkleman is the director of the Winkleman Gallery in New York. He is cofounder of the Moving Image art fair and has participated in art fairs such as ARCO, Art Chicago, Pulse, Year 06, Aqua Art, and NADA. He is the author of How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery (Allworth Press) and of EdwardWinkleman.com, a blog that focuses on art (in particular, demystifying the gallery system) and politics. He lives in New York City.

Book preview

Introduction to the Second Edition

In rereading this book from its original 2009 state, we were struck by how the core of the business is still the same but with two major shifts: (1) a sense of transparency has seeped through into what had been a notoriously opaque industry, and (2) among the few changes, most of them were facilitated by technology. It would be easy to guess around where and how these shifts have evolved, but for both it seems quite clear that the Internet has finally taken hold of the long-thought-uncrackable art business. This doesn’t simply refer to selling art online but more a casualness and access to both artists, galleries, and dealers that wasn’t as prominent in 2009.

Both of us have closed galleries in our careers. Ed closed his eponymous gallery in 2014. Patton worked in two that closed but still had the gall to open her own space recently (www.yoursmineandoursgallery.com). This determination alludes to the core of what this book is about: the still-essential need to have a space, champion art, and share it with a community. What we’ve set out to highlight in the revision of this book are the changes in the models, but also the persistent need in our contemporary culture to help equip young dealers with the best practices of the industry, so they can thrive or, failing that, have the courage to start again.

Our own experiences will continue to color our advice here (indeed, we’ve added a Lessons Learned section to most chapters in this revision), but we do hope that most of this is honest and translatable enough for you, the reader, to garner some tricks of the trade. We encourage you to rely on your peers and be honest with your collectors, artists, and audience even through the difficult times, as this one value helps to create empathy, understanding, and support in meaningful long-term ways.

Introduction to the First Edition

The Easy Part and the Hard Part

by Edward Winkleman

Shortly after moving to New York City, I met an industrious producer of off-Broadway plays at a party. He had one of those truly inspiring New York stories, running three businesses on the side just so he could produce the theater he loved. He also had an impressive determination. He told me that, until he had been turned down thirteen times when trying to raise money for a production, he did not even begin to get discouraged. Then he turned the conversation to me.

What are you doing in New York? What is your dream? he asked.

I want to open an art gallery one day, I answered.

That’s great, he replied. How are you going about it?

Well, I used to work part-time for a gallery and now I’m doing studio visits and meeting lots of artists and. . . .

That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard, he interrupted.

Excuse me? I asked, more than a little taken aback.

You want to run an art gallery, right? he asked.

Yes, I confirmed, still highly defensive.

Well, what is an art gallery? It’s a space with art on the walls. Get a space and put art on the walls.

It’s not that simple, I insisted.

Yes it is. It’s exactly that simple, he said. Get a space, put art on the walls, and you will have an art gallery.

Of course he was right. Six months later, I rented a space on the Lower East Side, put art on the walls, and even managed to sell a few pieces. It was intentionally a temporary setup, one of five I would produce as guerilla-style arts events, but it proved the point the producer was trying to make. It was that simple. What he hadn’t told me back then was that starting a gallery was the easy part. Staying in business, now that’s the real trick.

As with many small businesses, new art galleries have a fairly high attrition rate. There are several specific reasons for this in the commercial art business. First, it can take at least three years before a new gallery will become profitable, perhaps more if the artists in the program are emerging. Second, the path most art dealers take to opening their own space does not include much in the way of classic business administration. Third, you won’t go very far in the art business without a real passion for art; indeed, if you don’t have one, you should probably reconsider opening a gallery. Finally, to be successful you will need more than passion or even business experience; you’ll need entrepreneurial instincts. With all that in mind, the focus in this book is on the business side of starting and running a commercial art gallery, with an emphasis on which standard practices are perhaps ripe for entrepreneurial innovation.

Indeed, because an art gallery is such an individual enterprise, standard practices are constantly evolving as new players, with new agendas, enter the field. From what percentage of sales goes to artists in consignment agreements, to resale rights for living artists or their estates, to how many artists a gallery can effectively represent, long-standing guidelines are continuously being rewritten by newcomers. Even the term that gallery owners use for themselves keeps evolving. Early in the twentieth century, the phrase picture seller was quite common and lingers on, especially in the secondary market, although it carries the connotation of antiquity for many younger dealers. Then slowly picture seller gave way to art dealer, which is more or less the most common term today. A little more than a decade ago, though, the term gallerist, which was already widely used in Europe, became more and more common as the owners of American galleries increasingly saw a part of their responsibility to promote an individual program, vision, or statement about art. Both terms are used somewhat interchangeably in the United States today, but because we’re discussing the nuts and bolts of running a business, in this book I’ll stick with the phrase art dealer.

Each chapter of this book focuses on some component of either getting started or running your gallery from as generic a point of view as I can offer, but I should note that as the owner of an emerging art gallery, my personal experience will undoubtedly color my opinions and advice. There are many other types of art galleries (and we’ll look at the range of them in chapters 2 and 3), though, and while the basic terminology and concepts apply to all of them, you should read each section with the understanding that the most successful galleries are the ones that reinvent the model to fit their own unique goals and talents. In other words, take what you can from the information and advice in these pages, but keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all path to success.

The overriding assumption throughout this book is that the audience most interested or in need of this information includes primary-market art dealers just getting started and others, like artists, who want more insight into how galleries operate. Although some of the following chapters will include discussions on secondary-market practices or concerns, even those passages will be geared heavily toward what it is about those situations a new primary-market dealer should know. There are very few rules in the art business, but I do assume most dealers seriously looking to open a secondary-market commercial gallery will not need much of the advice here.

CHAPTER 1

Education

How to Learn What You Don’t Know before Opening a Commercial Art Gallery

Getting an education specifically designed to prepare you to run an art gallery can require a bit of assembly. Having a PhD in art history is no guarantee you’ll be any good at managing a small business. Just as having an MBA is no guarantee you’ll develop an eye for the kind of art that collectors will want to purchase. Attempt to combine two such degrees, and you may end up owing more in student loans than an art gallery is likely to pay you in quite some time. Besides, many of the most successful art dealers of the past 100 years had no advanced degrees in art or business. How much each of them knew about art, or selling it, varied widely before they opened their galleries. Their reasons for starting their spaces ranged from being asked to do so by artists who trusted them, to discovering they had a knack for it through some other avenue, to simply believing they could do it better than anyone else out there. In other words, pretty much for the same range of personal reasons many small businesses are opened. So, don’t be at all daunted if your background is in nursing or computer programming or communications (all real examples of previous careers for flourishing dealers we know).

Even though there is no predominantly held degree for the art gallery business, there are good sources of information for what you probably should know before opening your own space. Likewise, there are excellent examples of the more typical paths to becoming an art dealer worth considering. In this chapter, we’ll look briefly at the history of art dealing and then at how a few successful art dealers got their start. We will also delve into the more formal options for gaining an education, including continuing education courses, apprenticeships (put in quotes because it’s often best to keep the fact you’re apprenticing at another gallery your little secret), a good mentor, and advanced studies courses tailored toward gallery management, including newly available online courses. Finally, we’ll examine some of the common misperceptions about what a gallery is (or is not) to ensure you’re heading into this world with your eyes as wide open as possible.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ART DEALING

It behooves any budding art dealer to gain at least a cursory grounding in the giants of the field, if only because other dealers you will do business with may use them as shorthand for certain types of business models or cautionary tales. Exactly who the first person was to serve as the representative for an artist or to buy an artwork with the intention of turning around and reselling it for a profit may not be knowable now, but by the time Western art took that giant leap forward in the form of the Italian Renaissance, there were already vendors acting as middlemen between collectors and artists. Giovanni Battista della Palla was among the first international art dealers to make it into the history books by name. Immortalized in Giorgio Vasari’s marvelous series of biographies, The Lives of the Artists, for having sold work by the greatest artists of his day to the king of France, della Palla undoubtedly falls into the cautionary tale category. Called, among other things, a two-bit merchant by historians and eventually imprisoned as a traitor, he comes down to us as a somewhat inglorious character. Accounts vary as to whether he was eventually beheaded at Pisa or took his own life in prison, but della Palla is perhaps the basis for many of the negative stereotypes about art dealers that persist today. Things do get better for the profession’s reputation though, we promise.

Throughout much of the history of art dealing, it was apparently not viewed as prudent to try to make a living selling artwork alone. The celebrated eighteenth-century French luxury merchant (marchand-mercier) Lazare Duvaux offered a mix of exquisite furniture, jewelry, ceramics, and sculpture to his fashionable and very wealthy clients. (Duvaux’s importance continues to the present day because sales ledgers he kept between 1748 and 1758 still provide contemporary scholars with a treasure trove of provenance information.) Well into the nineteenth century, in fact, art was often still viewed—even by many of its merchants—as parallel to a home furnishing, sold as a sideline in shops offering mirrors, furniture, or even toys. One of the earliest recorded dealers in America, for example, Boston craftsman John Doggett, opened his shop in 1810 to sell both pictures and frames. His shop would go on to become one of most important art galleries in America for a while (Williams and Everett), but selling art alone was not his original business plan. This diversification approach exists even today. Many art galleries continue to mix art and design objects in their inventory. In fact, there’s been an interesting resurgence of exhibiting high-end design in some of the most prestigious fine art galleries lately. Where that may lead the profession remains to be seen, but many dealers are keeping an eye on those enterprising souls daring enough to blur the lines after years spent separating out the two genres.

At some point along the line, the relationship between artist and dealer evolved from one based solely on commerce to one that includes sincere advocacy. Even in the face of commercial failure, this new kind of art dealer would champion certain artists because they truly believed in them. For many people, and indeed many artists, the image of the art dealer as an enthusiastic patron (scouring drafty studios, finding that misunderstood genius who’s toiling in obscurity and breaking all the rules, and then working tirelessly to promote this newly discovered modern-day master in the face of even the most scathing of critiques) remains a romantic ideal. A closer look will reveal that among famous dealers even some of the greatest have been known to let go of artists whose work they couldn’t sell, but like many legends, this one is at least partially grounded in truth.

The contemporary version of the legend seems to have begun in earnest with the arrival of the French dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Born in 1831 to a family of picture dealers, Durand-Ruel is considered the first modern art dealer to support his artists with monthly stipends and solo exhibitions. Championing first the painters of the Barbizon school, he eventually would bring widespread attention to the brazen young artists known today as the impressionists. This was no small act of faith on his part. The impressionists were widely ignored or derided for decades, and it took Paul Durand-Ruel years to earn back the money he spent buying up their output. Through his galleries in Paris, London, and New York, as well as a steadfast faith in the importance of this bold new art, however, Paul Durand-Ruel eventually won over the public and helped change art history. The fact that he more than made his money back ultimately should not be overlooked.

From this point forward in our brief historical recap, it is possible to divide art dealers into two camps: those who enjoy working to promote relatively unknown artists and those who prefer to sell work only by established names. There exists considerable overlap in business models, but for a certain breed of art dealer, the thrill of discovering and nurturing new talent seemingly holds little to no interest. They wish to work only with reliably bankable artists. This breed of art dealer found its archetype in the form of Joseph Duveen. Born in 1869 in Hull, England, but expanding his family’s business to include galleries in the toniest districts of London, New York, and Paris, Duveen was a natural salesman. Excessively charming and exuberant, he would notoriously work his clients into a near frenzy of desire for the works in his gallery by dramatically insisting he simply couldn’t part with the old master painting he had recently wrestled away from some duke or count somewhere in Europe. His wife’s reported deep attachment to the piece was frequently the source of the dealer’s dilemma. After several rounds of such theatrics (each seeing the price of the work in question rise), Duveen would reluctantly relent and note that he would just have to figure out how to break the bad news to Mrs. Duveen later. Among Duveen’s clients were some of America’s richest men at the time, including Henry Clay Frick, William Randolph Hearst, J. P. Morgan, Henry E. Huntington, Samuel H. Kress, Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, and Joseph E. Widener. Much of Duveen’s success is ascribed to his realizing that the one thing eluding these titans, who otherwise had everything money could buy, was the sense of immortality that only art can bestow.

While Duveen was becoming extremely wealthy selling the work of artists long dead, though, two of his contemporaries were working overtime to shift the serious attention, and money, over to the works of the more recent and still living European artists who would usher in the era of modernism. Following in the footsteps of Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939) and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979) sold between them some of the greatest works of art created by such revolutionaries as Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, André Derain, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso. Vollard’s practice of buying up a large chunk of an artist’s inventory and then reselling the work for a remarkable profit earned him a few detractors, but in addition to making money and publishing biographies on Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he had unquestionably one of the best eyes of any dealer ever. The younger Kahnweiler, while in awe of Vollard, was overall a better art dealer, and by that we mean he was revered by artists, critics, and collectors alike. In addition, Kahnweiler was a respected art historian. As one of the first people to recognize the importance of Picasso’s seminal painting Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, reportedly asking to buy it on the spot, he was recognized as deserving of perhaps the highest of accolades an art dealer can aspire to: he was a connoisseur.

Throughout the twentieth century, the number of notable art galleries increased so dramatically worldwide that a discussion of each would make this brief history anything but. Limiting the following list to those in the United States that you might hear used as examples of how to, or how not to, run your business, therefore is a matter of necessity, not any indication that art dealers in other parts of the world were any less innovative, successful, or unfortunate as these dealers.

Two of the oldest galleries that dominated up until just recently in the United States began as New York branches of Parisian businesses. When Michael Knoedler, who came to America as the director of the French engravers Goupil & Company, opened his own space in 1846, he raised more than a few eyebrows among his competition by forgoing the entry fee (usually about twenty-five cents then) that most other galleries charged. This visitor-friendly policy, a wise choice to mix contemporary European artworks with those by Americans, and a focus on solo exhibitions (pleasing both his artists and the press), eventually led to Knoedler being the first art dealer to be invited to become a member of the Century Association, the distinguished club of artists, writers, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts. The gallery he and his family built, Knoedler & Company, remained one of the most respected and flourishing of American art galleries. That is, until 2011, when the gallery closed under a cloud of scandal and multiple lawsuits for fraud. Having perhaps grown complacent about their position in the art world, as well as the trust they had earned as one of New York’s oldest and most important galleries, they ignored experts’ warnings that paintings by Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, and others they were offered for resale were forgeries and resold them anyway. The lesson here is that an art dealer must be vigilant about due diligence in every transaction. Reputations are built very slowly but can come crashing down in a heartbeat.

Knoedler’s longtime competitor, Wildenstein & Company, has an arguably even more colorful history. Also a family business (now in its fifth generation), the gallery was founded in Paris and opened a New York branch in 1903. Famously secretive about the inner workings of their business, the Wildensteins have nonetheless seen a fair bit of sensationalist press. From a still ambiguous arrangement for selling artwork confiscated from Jewish dealers in Paris reportedly forced out of Georges Wildenstein by the Nazis during World War II to a 1956 suit filed by Knoedler against the Wildenstein company for allegedly hiring a private investigator to wiretap Knoedler’s phones, the history of the gallery is almost as interesting as the sales of acknowledged masterpieces they have placed among the world’s top museums.

The twentieth century also saw the rise of galleries opened by dealers as well known by the art world now, if not more so, than many of the artists they exhibited. Alfred Stieglitz opened Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1905. Eventually it became known simply by its street address, 291. It was among the first spaces to eschew the plush red velvet of most important galleries for a crisp modern look. Julien Levy Gallery was founded in 1931 and is noted for introducing the surrealists to America and with hosting the first cocktail party opening. What Stieglitz and Levy personified, though, was that passion for contemporary art had grown so much in New York, that it became possible to be an influential art dealer without being a very successful businessperson. Steiglitz was notoriously ambivalent about sales, once asking a collector who had sought the gallery out to buy a watercolor what made him think he deserved to own the piece. Levy worked hard but had both the Great Depression and the slowness with which Americans warmed up to surrealism to contend with. After closing his gallery briefly to enter the army in 1942, Levy eventually closed for good in 1949. A lack of funds forced Stieglitz to close 291 in 1917, but he continued to organize exhibitions and eventually opened another gallery, An American Place, in 1929. It lasted until 1946, the year Stieglitz died.

Two illustrious galleries were also opened by women better known for their passion and visions than their ability to make money selling art. After her first failed attempt in London, with Guggenheim Jeune gallery, Peggy Guggenheim opened her second gallery in New York in 1942 to incredible acclaim. Named Art of This Century, her Fifty-Seventh Street space was considered itself a work of art, with highly innovative installation and lighting systems designed by the architect Frederick Kiesler. Art of This Century heralded the dawn of New York’s rise to art capital of the world with the first solo exhibitions of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, and Clyfford Still, to name but a few. Despite her considerable personal wealth, though, Guggenheim insisted that visitors pay an entrance fee and was reportedly upset when she learned her secretary let students and artists in for free when she wasn’t there. By the time she left New York for her new Venetian palazzo when World War II ended, most of her artists had already left her gallery for newer spaces hoping for more sales of their work.

One of those newer spaces was owned by Betty Parsons, who is the first art dealer interviewed in a book we can’t recommend highly enough: The Art Dealers: The Powers behind the Scene Tell How the Art World Really Works by Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones (Cooper Square Press, 1984) and revised by de Coppet in 2002. Edward has given this book to new dealers as a present many times. Although it is now somewhat difficult to find in bookstores, you can get it from online booksellers with ease. It would be indulgent of us to continue in this history of art dealing up to the present day, when nothing we could tell you would be anywhere near as valuable as what you will learn from reading these concise, supremely helpful interviews with the people who are that history.

LEARNING FROM OTHER DEALERS’ EXPERIENCES

Because most successful approaches to running a gallery are as individual as they are innovative, there is much about art dealing you could learn from reading just about any dealer’s biography. Even before you dive into the eye-opening stories found in de Coppet and Jones’s interviews, I would recommend the wonderful overview found in Malcolm Goldstein’s remarkably researched book, Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2000). In addition to more information about many of the dealers I noted in the section above, Goldstein’s history includes a detailed inventory of innovations and changes in business practices.

When you’re ready for even more details, a few must-read full biographies include those of

Joseph Duveen: either Duveen: A Life in Art by Meryle Secrest (University of Chicago Press, 2005) or, for a more sensationalist account, Duveen: The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time by S. N. Behrman (Little Bookroom, 2003)

Edith Halpert: The Girl with the Gallery:Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market, by Lindsay Pollock (PublicAffairs, 2006)

Julien Levy:Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery, edited by Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs (MIT Press, 1998)

Peggy Guggenheim: a bit more scandal than business, perhaps, but this combination of Peggy’s biographies offers insights into the mindset of the dealer as patron—Out of This Century: Confessions of An Art Addict, by Peggy Guggenheim (Universe Books, 1979)

Leo Castelli: an in-depth look at the life and career of arguably the most influential art dealer of the twentieth century—Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, by Annie Cohen-Solal (Knopf, 2010)

LEO AND JASMIN: TWO AUSPICIOUS BEGINNINGS

Each of the biographies above is chock-full of lessons for the established art dealer and beginner alike, but the focus of this chapter is getting started in the business, so with that in mind, we wanted to recount the beginnings of two dealers representing the opposite ends of the spectrum for what kind of connections or involvement with the art world it takes to open a space. One of our favorite interviews in The Art Dealers is that with one of the most beloved and truly influential art dealers of the twentieth century: Leo Castelli. Charming, energetic, and extremely graceful, Castelli would eventually represent some of the giants of American contemporary art, including Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Stella, Bontecou, and Rosenquist.

Born in Trieste, Italy, but having lived and worked all over Europe (making him eventually fluent in Italian, French, English, and German), Castelli began his first gallery because artists he knew in Paris had asked him to do so. Among the artists he knew there were superstars like Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, so he was already moving in pretty impressive circles when he started. But history interceded, making his first exhibition there in 1939 one of only two before war consumed Europe.

Castelli moved to the United States shortly after World War II. Here he was again encouraged to start a space by artists he met and others who had also emigrated, but he resisted, explaining in an interview conducted by the Smithsonian Institution that everything was going very, very badly. No money, nothing. No market, zero.¹ But Leo Castelli had art dealing in his blood, and through the contacts he had made in Europe, plus a bit of being in the right place at the right time, he ended up with a huge opportunity when German-born gallerist Karl Nierendorf passed away unexpectedly in 1947.

Nierendorf’s inventory in his New York gallery (he also had a gallery in Berlin) included a large collection of work on consignment from one Mrs. Kandinsky (widow of modernist painter Wassily Kandinsky), who lived in Paris. Those administering Nierendorf’s estate in New York wrote to Mrs. Kandinsky asking what they should do with the work. A telegram came back right away saying, Give everything to Castelli. With this windfall of valuable paintings, many of which would end up in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, Castelli was back in the art business. Of course, Leo’s story is not likely to be your story. Unless you already personally know some of the world’s most important artists or just happen to be the only person a legendary artist’s family knows in a foreign city when asked what to do with their world-class collection on consignment there, you might have to blaze a slightly different trail to the opening of your own space.

A smaller scale but equally remarkable beginning is illustrated by the story of New York Lower East Side dealer Jasmin Tsou, who opened JTT in 2012. Having spent a few brief years working for Dennis Kemmerich’s Tribeca gallery and as an assistant at Maccarone, Tsou became eager to work independently and after briefly considering independently curating, the advice of a close friend, Matthew Higgs, led her to quickly decide to take the plunge and open her own space at the young age of twenty-seven. Tsou had an immediate group of artists from her time at New York University, including Borna Sammak, Becky Kolsrud, and Charles Harlan. She tells of these relationships, Becky, Charles and I used to organize exhibitions in Bushwick together—we all pooled money to buy a keg, and essentially hosted parties that centered around weird performances. It’s funny looking back because I was always the one making sure that everyone chipped in for the keg while Charles and Becky were performing. I guess those archetypes make sense now.

Tsou began her gallery on a shoestring budget with the kindness of her community’s support. She built her first space out with her artists and relied on them for support, advice, and occasional labor. In 2016, Tsou moved to a new, larger space, but the sentiment of her community remains the same. She exemplifies this new model of building a family, and she has steadily grown alongside her artists. The artists that I represent, all of them, are incredibly generous. The ones in the beginning and the ones that joined later. That is the only way JTT still exists—the generosity of the artists. That might sound a bit abstract, but the belief that the artists have in JTT in order to be represented by JTT is the most support I could ever receive.

Whether it’s a deep investment in your artists as your core community or a gift for communicating with both artists and collectors, the most common traits among successful dealers are a passion for art and good business sense. This book is designed to give you as much information about the business side of running a gallery as we can. Unfortunately, I can’t be there in person to answer all the questions you might have that I have not anticipated, though, which is why you might consider some of the more interpersonal education and work experience opportunities available, although admittedly obtaining them may require a bit of searching or willingness to work for little money.

EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

We are breaking the gallery business educational opportunities discussed in this section into two categories: formal education and real-world experience. While our basic assumption is that you may choose one over the other as right for your goals, some combination of both may also make sense. The formal education opportunities we’ll discuss include in-person continuing education courses, online continuing education courses, and advanced degree programs (both in person and online). The informal, or real-world experience opportunities to learn what you need to know to start and run a successful commercial art gallery include what we’ll call apprenticeships and finding a mentor you can turn to for help when needed.

Formal Education Opportunities

There are many more formal education options for budding dealers than there were when the first edition of this book was written. That may be in part due to the increase in people across the board looking to further their education after the financial collapse in 2008 or to the resilience of the art market during the recession, but whatever the reason, the opportunities seem far greater and wider to get an advanced degree, supplement existing knowledge with continuing education courses, or now even to take courses online that deal specifically with the business of running a commercial art gallery. The discussion below is not designed to be comprehensive or steer you toward one course or program over any other, but rather to give you a better sense of what to look for in such a program and how much such programs generally cost.

In-Person Continuing Education or Undergraduate Courses

If you don’t have the time or funds to get a master’s degree but would still like to learn about running a gallery in the classroom setting, a non-MA course or certificate program might make sense for you. Before delving into any specifics, however, we would first like to share some overarching observations, discerned from the offerings we have researched. Many continuing education courses seem to come and go without much notice. Even programs that are basically steady may have a course or two that’s somewhat sporadically offered. And what’s on the educational institution’s website may not always be entirely up to date, so do call and check before building your entire business plan around taking a particular course. Finally, we perhaps artificially delineate between continuing education and advanced degrees along the line between certificate programs and master’s degrees, mostly because the gallery world seems to do so as well in practice.

Having said all that, one of the programs described in the first edition of this book seems to have been fairly expanded in the interim, perhaps again pointing to the overall increase in opportunities for formal art business education. What was in 2008 a new one-year certificate in art business at New York University (NYU) seems to have evolved into a full-fledged Diploma in Global Art Business, a two-year program with more focused required courses, including some on art fairs, building collections, art valuation, and so on. By late 2018, however, this program was no longer discoverable on NYU’s website. Even so, NYU expanded its individual continuing art business education (www.sps.nyu.edu/professional-pathways/topics/arts/art-business.html) to include courses ranging from Starting a Successful Art Business to Art Fairs and Biennales Demystified to "Art Markets and Sales Channels:

Reviews for How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery (Second Edition)

[Yevgeny Frolov · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A well written, practical overview and a guide with additional personal insight from interviews of artists, gallery owners, collectors.

Well worth to read before writing a art gallery business plan or invest in one or work with one.