FRONT DESK / BACK Office

FRONT DESK / BACK OffIce The secret world of galleries in xxx candid pictures and two texts. There’s something not quite the past five years, but allready right about commercial galleries. since the 1990s I look at the They are a kind of schizophrenic back rooms – the other side of space. On the one hand they the art machine – and became explicitly present things with an obsessed by the understatement intellectual and immaterial val- of the façades, the messy, clut- ue, while on the other hand it is tered desks in the small galleries clear that one could eventually and the cold professionalism of possess these things; the expe- the major players’ offices, and, rience has a price tag attached. above all, the uniformity of the They represent two different re- design. They all have the same alities or systems: the discourse MacBooks and iMacs, the same and the market. The discourse desk lamp by Michele de Lucchi is more at home in art institu- and the same designer furniture tions and artist- and curator-run by Charles & Ray Eames, Arne spaces, where looking at art is Jacobsen and Dieter Rams. not corrupted by finance. Selling Have you ever taken a good is, of course, the commercial look at the front desks? It was gallery’s main function, but the at Air de Paris that I first saw a discourse is equally important. gallery position its office partly It is for this reason that looking as a front desk in the midst of and buying are kept apart and the white cube. That might have that these activities take place been a statement of openness, in two discrete spaces. In the but perhaps more so a con- white cube one looks at the art scious staging of openness. and talks about the artist’s in- tentions and the position of the More and more galleries seem work within the discourse. Talk to be testing the boundaries be- of money is taboo here. That tween non-profit and the market takes place in the back rooms. – whether out of genuine interest or as part of a clever image, or The documentary photographs both. But artist- and curator-run in this book were taken during spaces are also edging towards that boundary from the other a period of five years – mostly simply about envy or sensa- Good Art – The Swiss Issue and direction. They call themselves without permission. The names tion seeking. But it has also found in his writing a context for an artist-run ‘profit’ space or of the galleries and a list of the simply become a marketing my photographs. In exchange for a Produzentengalerie and so artists they represent can be strategy: a style called ‘reality’. two of the photographs, Velthuis position themselves in the mar- found at the back of the book. It is now therefore even more has written a special adapta- ket, whereas the art fairs, with I adopt a hit-and-run method interesting to see how a gal- tion of his text under the title: their vast budgets and parallel in making these documentary lery stage-manages its back ‘Separating the Sacred from the programming look increasingly photographs. I took them all with rooms. What do they look like? Profane: the front and the back like biennales. The new style of the wonderful point-and-shoot Is the door open, ajar, or shut of a contemporary art gallery’. gallery has, at the every least, analogue Yashica T4 camera tight as in the galleries in a project space or incubator with Carl Zeiss Tessar 3.5/35 London? Is there a front desk Rob Hamelijnck, May 2010 where young, inexperienced lens, the same one that Terry or a semi-public back room, artists can show experimen- Richardson uses. The idea of which fulfils and displays some tal work. And those that have ‘observing and recording my own of the functions of the real back truly understood the market cultural group and habitat’ be- room. And if so, which ones? mechanism have a residency gan in 1997/98 when I saw the programme and run a ‘discursive films of Jean Rouch and David I asked my friend, the French space’ with evening screenings, MacDougall at a documentary architect Thibaut de Ruyter to lectures and debates. They dis- film festival. It was Jean Rouch interpret the photographs with guise themselves as artist-run in particular who made me aware an eye to the galleries’ style, spaces or art institutions. There that art, just like documentary architecture and design. He has are some that also publish a film or visual anthropology, written the text ‘A Suit Does magazine and artists’ books and could be a subjective form of Not Make a Man, But it Helps’ have their own bookshop. I know research: that making art is a about gallerists’ preference of one gallery – the largest and visual activity through which for modernist design classics. most fashionable in São Paulo you can critically question real- I asked the Dutch sociologist – that, alongside all the afore- ity and that the facts can mean and journalist Olav Velthuis, mentioned, also has a high- anything you want them to. who has undertaken years of class restaurant and rents out research into the relationship studios. It looks increasingly as In the meantime the interest between art and money, to in- if the large commercial galleries in the context and background clude the sections on ‘The Front are the new small museums or of the ‘unique’ and the decon- Room’ and ‘The Back Room’ centres for contemporary art. struction of myths is no longer from the first chapter – ‘The restricted to art; the popular Architecture of the Art Market’ Front Desk / Back Office media also has a fascination – of his book Talking Prices. Its brings together a selection with the ‘backstage’ and ‘the central question is: how do deal- of candid photographs of the making of’. In some cases this ers price contemporary art in a front desks and back rooms of is about institutional critique or world where objective criteria galleries in Amsterdam, Berlin, empowerment, in other cases seem absent? I bought it in 2008 Copenhagen, São Paulo and unmasking and establishing when we were living in Zurich Zurich, which I have taken over the truth, and sometimes it is and doing research for Fucking Separating the Sacred from the Profane: the front and the back of a contemporary art gallery Olav Velthuis Adapted from: Talking Prices. Symbolic meanings of prices on the market for contemporary art (Princeton University Press, 2005) Introduction In his classical work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), the French sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that every religion is based on the same principle: a radical separation of the sacred and the profane. Durkheim observed that every society prevents some goods from entering the everyday sphere of the profane, and in particular from treating these goods in terms of calculation and rationalisation. It is this radical separation, he argued, that ‘constitutes the essence of their sacred character’ (Durkheim 1914 [1964]), p. 335-336). To understand how the market for contemporary art operates, this Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and the profane is highly insightful. On the one hand, the art gallery’s world is a profane, capi- talist world. Like any other commercial enterprise, a gallery has to find art works that it deems marketable, it needs to attract potential customers, and make sales in order to keep its doors open. Also, in case the dealer depends on the income of others to run its operation, if it has bank loans or private inves- tors (so-called ‘backers’), it will need to hold itself accountable to these parties. In order to do so, the about artistic values, and speculators who see art dealer needs to negotiate with the artist about con- as a mere addition to their financial portfolios. tractual issues, he needs to determine a price for the works he offers for sale, and, if a collector is inter- Front room ested, he may need to bargain harshly over this price The separation between the sacred and the before the work is eventually sold. Afterwards, the profane can also be retrieved physically in the dealer will try to keep track of the art works, not only architecture of the art gallery: almost invariably, regarding its whereabouts, but also with respect to its a shop window is absent, while it is impossible in future economic value. In order to do so, he may pay many cases to view the inside of the gallery from attention to what appears at auction, to the work’s the outside because of the use of opaque, frosted pre-sale estimate, and the final price it is sold for. glass windows or because of thin curtains behind At the same time, however, dealers are enmeshed the windows. Neon signs or signboards that most in a sacred world, where art is seen as an object other retail stores have are absent, while some gal- that is essentially non-commodifiable, where the leries only display their name in small letters next to only appropriate discourse is aesthetic or critical, the entrance door. This entrance door gives access where plain commerce is considered taboo, and to the main exhibition space in smaller galleries, dealers instead claim to be ‘playing for history’, while visitors to larger galleries may need to pass as one of them put it when I was studying the New through a small hall or corridor before accessing the York and Amsterdam art market in the late 1990s.

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