Monday, August 26, 2024

Art Economist Suffers Scarcity

In New Book, Art Economist Contends Gallery World Suffers Scarcity of New Collectors

January 31, 2024 11:46am

An art fair showing many white booths and large circle lights above them in a hanger-like setting. — Artissima 2023 art fair on November 2, 2023 in Turin, Italy.PHOTO BY STEFANO GUIDI/GETTY IMAGES

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

Eight years ago, art economist Magnus Resch collected a wide-ranging set of data from art galleries operating across the world. In the numbers, he showed a reality well known in the trade, that many of them were privately grappling with financial challenges as revenues stagnated and new buyers remained limited. Now, in a survey of interviews conducted with nearly 200 collectors and gallerists for his new book, How to Collect Art, Resch, a professor of art management at Yale, contends that the problem persists nearly a decade later.

“The art market has long faced a shortage of new buyers,” Resch told ARTnews in a recent interview. “Despite the global number of millionaires doubling in the last decade and record attendance at art events, the value of the art market has remained only stable. This discrepancy points to a conversion problem, wherein the newly affluent aren’t seamlessly transitioning into art buyers.”

How to Collect Art, which was released Wednesday, categorizes galleries that operate on the international stage based on four profitability types, taken from findings that Resch has previously published. More than half of the 20,000 galleries cited in the book operate in the biggest art centers of the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, but only a quarter of them achieve annual revenues exceeding $1 million. Financial challenges are especially pronounced for smaller galleries that pull in less than $1 million annually, as they often struggle to turn a profit. Resch says that landscape makes the role of an art patron an obligatory one. “Galleries heavily depend on a few collectors who make substantial purchases.”

At different points, the book acts like a recruitment manual, arguing that new buyers are needed to support a gallery system that is transactionally bound to a small group of people, leaving it vulnerable during economic downturns. In a number of interviews, Resch prompted museum trustees and gallerists—Pamela Joyner and Jeffrey Deitch, for example—to sound off on how people can transform a casual interest in art into a serious philanthropic endeavor without sacrificing their financial interests. Joyner explains that, over time, she developed some decision-making power to influence a “correction” of the canon after issues of equity became more pronounced for museums.

The book highlights the pivotal role that advice plays in this arena. Deitch, now in his 70s, attributes his long career to a wide network and a “perpetual curiosity about what’s new,” while top adviser Amy Cappellazzo urged departing from one’s “usual orbit.” The book delves into negotiations that artists and curators often make with the industry commerce, using MacArthur grant winner Tavares Strachan as a case. As a trustee at the Rhode Island School of Design, Strachan navigates the art world’s ambiguous directives with circumspection, saying, “the thing is, the industry is filled with people who are good at telling you what you should think and be interested in. No serious human should give up their own point of view to end up with art someone else told them to buy.”

Ahead of the book’s launch this week, ARTnews spoke with Resch on his findings and asked about new and recurring challenges impacting artists, collectors, and gallerists as they find themselves increasingly intertwined.

(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.)

ARTnews: In the book’s foreword, collector Pamela Joyner, a museum trustee in San Francisco, emphasizes the significance of being part of a class of serious collectors and the role of access to creative circles in supporting artists, museums, and gallery programs financially. Can you elaborate on the dynamics of this relationship, which seems to involve a mix of transactional and social elements, i.e., a desire to be in proximity to artists?

[Joyner] openly highlights the significance of connecting with curators, fellow collectors, artists, and friends throughout her collecting journey. This is a recurring theme among the 200 collectors I interviewed for this book: engage in conversations, immerse yourself in art, connect with artists—advice that numerous collectors wanted to impart to my readers.

The notion of ethical collecting is highlighted in the book, suggesting that it has become a more critical part of a cultural philanthropist’s mindset. The idea seems to align with trends seen in other industries, such as environmental, social, and governance investing and sustainable fashion. Can you discuss the significance of this moment and how it impacts the art market?

Most people purchase art for aesthetic and emotional reasons, often with a belief in its investment potential. However, art as an investment tends to be effective for only a select group of artists. So, why invest in art if you may never recoup your money? My response centers on what I term “responsible buying”—the concept that acquiring art isn’t merely a financial transaction, but also a philanthropic gesture. Rather than viewing it as an investment, I consider it a donation, acknowledging that I may not likely resell the piece. By making this purchase, I am supporting the artist, enabling them to continue creating art, thereby inspiring the broader artistic community. For me, it’s a way of doing good, with the added benefit of owning something I love and a story to share. This concept lies at the heart of my book: understand why you buy art and be informed how to buy. Prominent collections tend to bear out these findings. For example, singer Alicia Keys and her husband, Swizz Beatz, are active collectors. Their Dean Collection focuses on supporting primarily African American artists, including Kehinde Wiley [and] Mickalene Thomas.

There is a strong emphasis on the financial obligation of collectors to consistently support an artist’s practice year after year. What happens when this dynamic becomes strained, especially for small galleries that rely on a limited number of collectors for support? How does this affect emerging players in the art scene?

Galleries heavily depend on a few collectors who make substantial purchases. These collectors are shaping the market by driving demand and injecting funds into the cycle. Disruptions in this delicate balance can swiftly impact a gallery’s revenue, as observed in 2023 when buyers were hesitant. Smaller galleries, which cater to a significant number of first-time and new buyers, are the first to experience the impact. Their buyers, being relatively new to the program, are often the first to disengage. Larger galleries, with a smaller but more dedicated collector base, may endure initially. But if fewer collectors enter the cycle, even they will face challenges in the long run. That’s why my new book focuses on new buyers entering the market. It also represents the next logical step in my trilogy of books with Phaidon. After delving into the world of galleries in Management of Art Galleries and exploring the realm of artists in How to Become a Successful Artist, I felt the need to analyze and cater to collectors—the final significant player in the art ecosystem.

This is your third book in a series for the management of the arts. In Management of Art Galleries, you highlight that 30 percent of galleries operate in the red, with only 18 percent having a healthy profit margin of more than 20 percent. For smaller galleries, a substantial portion of sales, an estimated 45 percent, may come from a single leading artist. For those smaller programs, how critical is the funding of a few collectors to their long-term survival?

The connection between collectors and gallerists holds immense importance. Every major gallery is built on the support of a few significant collectors. And galleries play a significant role in the ecosystem by fostering artists’ careers and aiding collectors in navigating the art market. This relationship is only emphasized by a comprehensive data study where we analyzed 100,000 galleries and museums. The findings are unequivocal: Galleries are pivotal in driving the success of artists. Therefore, for collectors, forming and maintaining a relationship with a gallery is essential. However, not every gallery is the right fit for everyone.

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, ARTnews may receive an affiliate commission.

librarian scorned

ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS

Hell hath no fury like a librarian scorned in the book banning wars

A dark haired woman in glasses and a dark colored shirt holds a book next to shelves full of books.

By Jeffrey FleishmanStaff Writer

Aug. 22, 2024 3 AM PT

Amanda Jones is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads.

Threats against her began two years ago after she spoke out against censorship and was drawn into the culture wars over book banning. She was condemned as a pedophile and a groomer and accused of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The Christian right targeted her, and she found herself in the news warning that conservatives in her state and across much of the country were endangering libraries and intellectual freedom.

“I never expected any of this,” said Jones, who lives in Livingston Parish. “It’s a huge weight to feel all that attention. I’m just a school librarian from a two red-light town.”

Jones’ cautionary and disquieting testament to the nation’s divisiveness is told in her new memoir, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” a blunt, angry, searching and redeeming story about a woman engulfed by forces and designs she never imagined. It is a glimpse into a family and a small town that reads like a chapter out of “The Scarlet Letter” or “The Crucible,” narratives whose themes of fear, superstition, rage and religion are again permeating the nation’s political moment, including Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s recent comments that “Democrats want to put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries.”

“Our presidential election will determine how far it goes,” Jones said in an interview. “If Trump is elected, Project 2025 [a 900-plus-page conservative manifesto] will take root. It will ramp up the hate. We’ll see a large flight of educators and librarians from their jobs. Trump’s made it OK for people to hate and attack. I noticed it right after the George Floyd protests. People started saying the quiet part out loud.”

Amid rumors that a Livingston Parish Library board member was questioning the stocking of LGBTQ+ books, Jones stood and spoke against censorship at the July 19, 2022, board meeting. She told the crowd that titles often targeted for banning were about minorities and LGBTQ+ people, or books on sexual health and reproductive rights. She did not mention specific titles, saying that “no one portion of the community should dictate what the rest of the citizens have access to.”

People hold signs about book bans at a school board meeting in Florida.

She added that removing or relocating books on LGBTQ+ themes could be harmful to children and young people seeking to understand their identity. “I grew up in this parish being taught that God is love,” she said. “What I’ve come to realize is that what many people mean is that God is love only if you have the same religious and political beliefs as them... no one on the right side of history has ever been on the side of censorship and hiding books.”

The attacks were immediate, fierce and confounding. She was labeled a “sicko, pig, trash,” she writes in the memoir. “The sense of betrayal was overwhelming.” One message was particularly alarming: “Continue with your LGBT agenda on our children cause we gunna put [you] in the dirt very soon ... You can’t hide. We know where you work + live... you have a LARGE target on your back.”

“All I did was make a statement on censorship,” she writes, noting that her comments were made at her parish public library and that she never mentioned her school library, “but people were posting like I was handing out copies of Hustler magazine at my school.”

Jones fell into depression. She said she cried so hard that her eyes swelled shut; she had panic attacks, and her blood pressure spiked. She wondered how to explain the furor to her teenage daughter. She went to a therapist and took a leave of absence from the middle school for a semester. But Jones found it difficult to escape the vitriol aimed at her, including from friends, who, like her, grew up in Christian homes in a town outside Baton Rouge, where kids swam in the creek and the local branch of the library was once “in a room next to a washeteria.”

A growing number of librarians, like Jones, have been targeted nationwide, including Martha Hickson in Annandale, N.J., and another in Michigan who received abusive phone calls and was tagged as a pedophile in signs posted around her town. State legislatures have proposed bills that would hold libraries accountable to obscenity laws and would make it a crime for librarians and educators to stock books containing sexually explicit images.

“That Librarian” is an interrogation of self and a community in a deep red state that in June passed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom. The book resonates with a rustic knowingness that coveys the intricacies and suspicions of tightly bound lives. The descendant of slave owners, Jones struggles to understand a history of racism and prejudice that still unsettles the country.

A woman holds up a dark-colored shirt that reads, "That Librarian."

As a white, straight woman, who as a child read Judy Blume — one of America’s most banned authors — to navigate the tricky crosscurrents of youth, Jones said books are a refuge and a map for those wanting to empathize with people different from themselves.

The men instigating the outrage against her, she writes, were Michael Lunsford, executive director of Citizens for a New Louisiana, and Ryan Thames, who runs the Facebook blog Bayou State of Mind. Such organizations, along with Moms for Liberty, which has the support of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and other groups seeking to ban books in school libraries, have pressured local officials and have been at the center of the nation’s cultural wars. Some conservative groups have led campaigns to cut library funding and harass board members.

The American Library Assn. reported that more than 4,200 unique titles were targeted for censorship in 2023, a 65% increase from the previous year. Among the most challenged titles were books on race and sexuality, some with explicit images, including “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe and “This Book Is Gay” by Juno Dawson. Classics such as “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison have also been targeted and removed from circulation.

Jones filed a civil suit against Lunsford and Thames. The case was dismissed after the judge ruled that the online statements about Jones were opinions and not defamatory. In an interview, Lunsford said that the suit was frivolous and that “for her to say we damaged her in some way is ridiculous.” He said his organization’s focus is to prevent libraries statewide from allowing children access to what it considers erotic or pornographic materials.

“Nobody is putting pornography in children’s sections of the library,” Jones said in the 2022 meeting in Livingston Parish, where she was raised a Southern Baptist and has been a librarian and teacher for more than 22 years. “Stop that false narrative.”

Thames’ lawyer, Joseph Long, was quoted in the Hill after the dismissal as saying that Jones was part of the “radical left” and couldn’t take “the heat of criticism.” Jones wrote in her memoir that Lunsford, who questioned what kind of influence the librarian would have over children, peddled conspiracy theories and espoused “typical far-right nonsense.” She said Thames, whose blog accused her of advocating teaching anal sex to children, was a man “who hides behind his keyboard.”

“That Librarian” is a raw and disarming exploration of a writer confronting her own anxieties and wrath — one chapter title reads “Hell Hath No Fury Like a Librarian Scorned.” “I was very angry when I was writing,” said Jones, referring to Lunsford and Thames. “I punched away at the keys. This is what your actions have cost me. I know they’re going to read it and listen to the audiobook. This is my way of telling them.”

“I say I have no regrets,” writes Jones, an award-winning former president of the Louisiana Assn. of School Librarians, who during the online bullying against her used an expletive to describe a parish councilman, “but I do have one, and that is the fact that, try as I might, I didn’t always take the high road.”

She has another regret too. She voted for Donald Trump in 2016. “I was,” she writes, “a contributing factor in the growing movement of white nationalism.”

A display at a public library with a sign that says, "Read Banned Books."

Her family’s conservatism made it difficult at first for her mother to accept the premise of her daughter’s book. “I just can’t finish it,” Jones quotes her mother as saying after she gave her an early copy of “That Librarian.” “She took a fit to the term white Christian nationalist. But she did finish it and she said she was proud of me. But we don’t talk about politics in my family.”

Still, as in many politically divided households across the land, Jones needs answers: “When it comes to my parents,” she writes, “I want to ask them this question: Who exactly is the big bad wolf, or is it a mythical creature created in their own heads based on” what Tucker Carlson once told them on Fox? “I know they don’t think it’s their own child.”

Jones received support from many corners. Oprah Winfrey praised her in a speech at the 2023 National Book Awards: “Amanda Jones started getting death threats, all for standing up for our right to read.” One person wrote: “Stay strong sister.” An educator told her: “You are a brave warrior!” A veteran from New York sent an encouraging note: “A hell of a lot of children need people like you to help them find the hero within themselves...”

Such sentiments, she said, represent a growing push against book banning and censorship as moderate and progressive factions that were slow to mobilize have been winning in recent school board elections. “It’s not just the books,” said Jones, who has stressed that titles should be listed according to age appropriateness. “It’s a larger agenda about what we can read and what’s in our schools. It’s an attack on knowledge. ... But people are starting to realize what’s happening, and they’re starting to fight back.”

Jones co-founded the Livingston Parish Library Alliance, a citizens’ group that supports the local library, and is a founding member of Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship. She started a Facebook support group for others who have been harassed and intimidated in school districts across the country. “I’ve personally had conversations with more than 100 librarians,” she said. “I’ve had them cry on my shoulder.”

Jones has begun a new year at her school library. She is also preparing for a national book tour. Not long ago, she received an advance copy of her memoir. She turned to the ISBN number beyond the title page; she scanned the copyright line. “I’m a librarian. I’m excited about things like that,” she said. “It’s not something I ever dreamed about. To write a book. I just wanted to put it on the record.”