Previously: Parts I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X

The e-commerce-based shifts I’ve predicted over the course of this series represent disruptions of the art market at both operational and strategic levels. The macro result of those disruptions is a future gallery system true to my original inspiration, Tyler Cowen's Average Is Over: one in which the combination of technology and smart business will accelerate the fine art sales industry’s evacuation of the middle in favor of a Great Migration to the economic extremes.

However, as in any other industry, eliminating old inefficiencies often leads to the growth of new ones elsewhere in the sector. And every inefficiency serves up the potential for innovation. What I’d like to focus on today is how the future gallery system’s grand restructuring around online sales will create an opportunity for an entirely novel player to emerge in the field. 

Regular readers of this blog know, that whenever it seems warranted, I’ve been happy to pop up from my burned-out lair and lick a few shots at the industry’s ever-encroaching obsession with auction results. Today is another one of those insurgent days.

Yesterday, Charlotte Burns of The Art Newspaper reported that Richard Serra, the contemporary alchemist who has spent much of his career transforming lead and weathered steel into towering stacks of US dollars, has agreed to create a new large-scale sculpture for David Zwirner’s West 20th St space. It will be the renowned artist’s third solo project with the gallery since last spring.

Why is this news? Because Serra has been repped by Gagosian, whom Josh Niland of artnet rightly identifies in his reporting of the story as “Zwirner’s chief competitor," since 1991. During that stretch, Serra’s work has been included in 43 exhibitions organized under the Gagosian masthead: 17 group offerings and 26 solo affairs, with the two most recent one-man shows now running simultaneously in Larry's Brittania Street and Davies Street locations overseas.

While I was cycling through Twitter Monday morning, I found my timeline being carpet bombed with moment by moment updates from Sotheby’s regarding results in their Doha Contemporary sale. I had zero qualms about the practice in general. After all, what else are a major house’s social media accounts for than to flog the monetary successes thundering off their auction block?

But one wrinkle to some of the tweets did catch my eye. That wrinkle was Sotheby’s touting certain sales results as blue chip artists’ “Middle East records,” i.e. the highest prices achieved by gavel for said artists during an auction physically held within the region. 

A couple of weeks ago, artnet ran a short piece about the proactive way in which a consortium of galleries in Spain’s artistic epicenters have been combating a severe cut in government funding. The article seems to have been triggered by the announcement of a 41% decline in the Spanish government’s 2014 funding commitment to the (yes, for-profit) gallery sector, dropping the total shell-out to a mere 101,000 EUR ($130,000) from 171,000 EUR ($220,000) in 2013–both of which look anemic in comparison to the 1.2M EUR ($1.5M) in total government assistance handed to the nation’s art sellers in a brown paper sack back in 2011. 

The galleries’ collective answer has been, if not exactly novel, definitely based on a solid model. That answer was to unite in order to create multiple citywide art fairs along the lines of Gallery Weekend Berlin, which has now been humming melodiously along for a decade.

Previously: Parts I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX

Having used Parts VIII and IX of this series to trace the gallery system’s life lines to a future of vertically integrated e-commerce and blockbuster-dependent programming, I want to continue the palm reading session by turning to the role of the emerging artist in this new structure. Because my prior two premonitions lead to a third that heavily impacts art makers’ career arcs at the industry’s upper echelons.

“The best thing an artist can do is to work out how to survive without ever making money from their art.”

According to the always excellent Melanie Gerlis of The Art Newspaper, the above quote came from artist Rainer Ganahl during this week’s freshly concluded Talking Galleries symposium in Barcelona. Based on my backtracking skills, he seems to have made the comment while holding court on a panel discussion called “What Do Artists Want From Their Galleries?” It’s an interesting and valuable topic to explore, and I wish I’d been there to hear the whole conversation–especially because, if I’d heard the idea in its full context, I’d feel better machine-gunning it the way I’m about to here.