![]() What’s new is that, on many fronts - not just exhibitions - the megadealers are essentially imitating museums. ![]() Dealers including Acquavella Galleries, Pace, Gagosian and Craig Starr Gallery have organized these kinds of boutique shows (sometimes with loans from major museums) for decades, partly for the love of it, partly because they add luster to the gallery. It’s not new for top commercial dealers to mount historically important exhibitions. ![]() You can also find them in bespoke travel destinations including Minorca, Spain Gstaad, Switzerland Somerset, England Beverly Hills, Calif. These venues, some small but others sprawling, are scattered across such cities as New York, Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong, Seoul, Paris and Rome. Gagosian (not counting stores and bookshops) has 19 galleries, Hauser & Wirth 18, David Zwirner 11 and Pace eight. The Guggenheim Museum, in its most expansive phase under Thomas Krens in the early 2000s, had seven locations, but it couldn’t sustain so many and as of 2025 will have four. They also have more venues and mount more exhibitions. The big four represent more artists and artist estates - at least 100 each (although not always exclusively) - than other commercial galleries. Gagosian alone brings in more than $1 billion in annual revenue and occupies more than 200,000 square feet of very expensive real estate. Scale, as the term suggests, is their main distinguishing feature. (Keith Lubow/Stefan Brüggemann/Hauser & Wirth) Megadealers’ expansionĪlthough there are hundreds of commercial art dealers in Manhattan alone, and thousands across the country, there are only four megadealers. (David Needleman for The Washington Post) Stefan Brüggemann’s work at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. So that gives us a leg up.”įrom left: Marc Payot, Manuela Wirth and Iwan Wirth of Hauser & Wirth, which mounted its own Philip Guston exhibition after major museums postponed theirs. “They have to navigate and negotiate all this, and we don’t have to do that. “Museums have lots of constituencies: their staff, their audiences, their donor class,” says David Zwirner. These dealers are hugely dependent on museums, but they also have the freedom to do things that museums have lately found difficult. But probably not in the current climate.Įxpansionist, corporate, cashed up and ambitious, the megadealers are effecting changes that have drastically changed the art world, upending a delicate ecosystem, built up over generations, that links artists to commercial galleries, collectors, museums and the public. (Was she exploiting them or honoring them?) One of the hypotheticals raised by Zwirner’s restaging was: Would MoMA be eager to mount such a show today? But her photographs of subjects she affectionately referred to as “freaks” can also be controversial. ![]() The exact same show, a watershed in the history of photography, had been mounted 50 years previously at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The David Zwirner gallery recently restaged a Diane Arbus retrospective. But after the death of George Floyd, the worldwide racial reckoning it triggered and then the Guston postponement, there’s no way any prominent museum would dare show it. Christenberry (1936-2016), like Guston, loathed the KKK, and his work expresses that loathing. The show included Christenberry’s “Klan Tableau, 1962-2007,” a disturbing installation of scores of dolls dressed in Klan hoods, illuminated crosses and Confederate flags inside a cramped, makeshift cabinlike room. And they’re willing to go where museums have lately been too afraid to venture.Įarlier this year, an exhibition at Pace Gallery, headquartered in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, paired the White Southern photographer William Christenberry with RaMell Ross, a younger Black photographer. But there’s no longer any hiding it: They’re also trying to clone them, to do what museums do - just better. Hauser & Wirth is one of four megadealers, so called because they’re the world’s most powerful commercial galleries, working with some of the world’s most acclaimed artists the other three are Gagosian, David Zwirner and Pace. Guston’s imagery had generated heat and hostility in the wake of a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, but the Hauser & Wirth show focused precisely on the decade - 1969-1979 - that had proved too controversial for the museums. When the National Gallery of Art in Washington and three other major museums decided to postpone a Philip Guston exhibition in 2020 because Guston’s imagery included cartoonish Ku Klux Klan hoods, the commercial gallery that represents Guston’s estate, Hauser & Wirth, responded by mounting its own Guston exhibition.
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