What’s behind the rise of the ‘museum-quality’ gallery show?
Why are so many commercial businesses rushing to hire star curators and pull in major loans? By Madeleine Kramer
Monet, Picasso, Freud, Bacon, Kusama – these are all names usually associated with blockbuster exhibitions, with timed entry tickets, at prestigious museums. But in the past decade all of these artists have had major exhibitions with outstanding curatorial input and lauded critical receptions not just in museums but also in commercial galleries. From single-artist retrospectives to thematic cross-genre shows, galleries now compete head-to-head with museums and public collections.
Often, big-name critics and curators are brought in for the occasion. Just this past year we have seen major shows curated by the likes of Hilton Als at David Zwirner (‘Toni Morrison’s Black Book’), Legacy Russell at Hauser & Wirth (‘The New Bend’), and Andrew Bonacina at Michael Werner (‘Interior’). Throughout the 2010s, the late art historian John Richards curated a series of Picasso exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery, reported to have drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors. Starting with ‘Picasso: Mosqueteros’, focused on the artist’s late works, Gagosian secured loans from such institutions as MoMA and Fondation Beyeler as well as members of the Picasso family. Even more impressive were rooms filled with paintings owned privately, by major collectors like Steven Cohen and Jan Shrem. Such heavyweight exhibitions demonstrate the strength of connections that elite galleries foster between collectors, curators, and clients. But to what end? The benefits of such complex, expensive endeavors are manifold. Reputation, thought leadership, sales and market development are all spurred by these so-called ‘museum-quality’ exhibitions.
Particularly following the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, many art institutions were left unprepared and poorly positioned to face this cultural reckoning. But in an industry heavy with ‘male, pale and stale’ leaders and artists, younger generations have been pressuring the art world to diversify. This push for diversification has led to some of the most interesting gallery shows in the very recent past. These private businesses, unlike many museums, have both the resources and the flexibility required to respond in a nimble fashion. Exhibitions like ‘Toni Morrison’s Black Book’, based on a collage-like book published by the African American author in 1974, have allowed galleries such as David Zwirner to shift focus to artists and curators of colour, lending a progressive perspective to platforms that have been built on white European generational wealth. For that exhibition, Hilton Als gathered over 20 artists ranging from the canonical (Jacob Lawrence) to established market darlings (Julie Mehretu) and millennial up-and-comings (Walter Price). The exhibition was a public-relations success, with coverage in such wide-ranging publications as Vogue and Hypebeast. It’s worth noting that, in contrast to these high-profile curatorial initiatives, regular programming at galleries has in many cases remained business as usual. In November 2022, for instance, just one of Zwirner’s nine global exhibitions featured an artist of colour (Tau Lewis, a star of this year’s Venice Biennale).
Shifting from press and positioning, curatorial exhibitions also allow commercial galleries to trial new artists. For example, of the 20 artists featured in ‘Toni Morrison’s Black Book’, only two are represented by Zwirner. Exhibitions organised by external curators can lend galleries the gravitas needed to bring in major artists, or provide the leeway to work with emerging names, testing the market with their collectors. They may also establish a fertile relationship with the artist and their studio – leading perhaps to more permanent collaboration. The painter Julie Curtiss, for example, got her start at White Cube in ‘Dreamers Awake’, a group exhibition exploring the ongoing influence of Surrealist women artists, held at White Cube back in 2017 – not long before Curtiss joined the gallery’s rosters officially in 2020.
The most significant and perhaps most obvious benefit of these shows is financial. Organising blockbuster exhibitions comes with heavy costs: coordinating loans with multiple museums and private collectors, hiring curators, bringing in artists and producing lavishly illustrated catalogues. To offset these costs, galleries have one tool unavailable to museums: sales. There might not be prices in the exhibition pamphlet or any captions distinguishing between loans and works for sale, but that doesn’t mean that money isn’t changing hands. In fact, in the back room or perhaps only by discretion of the gallery director, some of the works on loan may actually be on consignment. For the economics to make sense, it’s no wonder that the biggest museum-quality shows at galleries often focus on artists who carry hefty price tags.
Consider the ‘Picasso: Mosqueteros’ exhibition at Gagosian: while few of the paintings (10%) were actually for sale, they ranged in price from $2m to $10m. More interestingly, the show had a considerable long-term effect on the late Picasso market. Roberta Smith’s review of the show for The New York Times heralded its tide-turning importance: ‘One of the best shows to be seen in New York since the turn of the century, it proves that contrary to decades of received opinion, Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch […] the mid-1950s have been generally accepted as the point of no return. That stance has steadily eroded over the last 25 years, and should finally bite the dust here.’ The top ten prices at auction for post-1967 Picassos have all taken place since 2011 and at prices over £13.7m, far above Gagosian’s prices in 2009. And these are just the publicly available prices, while the private sales market for Picasso continues to be among the strongest, dominated by Larry Gagosian. Richardson’s exhibition reignited interest in a period that was previously considered minor within Picasso’s creative output and helped reposition the late-period Picasso market.
From market-making sales to reputational gilding, then, museum-worthy exhibitions confer social, cultural and monetary benefits on commercial galleries. To quote Andy Warhol, ‘Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.’ For gallery visitors too, such exhibitions can offer educational and visual enrichment with few of the roadblocks encountered at traditional museums. The exhibitions are free and generally require no pre-booking, registration, or tickets. Such an experience can be a relief from quickly sold-out, expensive blockbusters at major museums. Does it matter that a museum-quality show is held at a commercial enterprise? It could be argued that audiences are spoon-fed a constant meal of blue-chip names with less room for ‘difficult’ or non-commercial art. While museums are bound by their missions to educate and serve the public, the galleries may only serve their own bottom lines. Audiences searching for truly outside perspectives and conceptually challenging environments may want to look elsewhere.
Madeleine Kramer is a consultant and client strategist who has worked at Sotheby’s, White Cube, and Gagosian.