Commercial galleries and the racket
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| Commercial galleries and the racket | |
| Anders Härm | |
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Imagine a situation where you rent office space from an estate agency, set up a business there,
and then the same estate agency turns up and demands, in addition to the rest, a percentage
of your profit that may well reach fifty. You cannot imagine this?
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Not to worry - take a closer look at the system of commercial
galleries in Estonia, and everything will be clear,
because this is exactly what goes on. The situation, very
much resembling the good old roof-protection, is so
humiliating for Estonian artists that the proverb of peeling
seven skins off somebody does not seem at all exaggerated.
In my opinion, Estonian galleries are openly involved in
racketeering, just as was the case in the early 1990s.
The respectable western system of commercial galleries
functions according to exactly opposite principles. A
gallery signs a contract with an artist, actively promotes
him, and sells his work at art fairs, i.e. is busily marketing
him everywhere, occasionally even investing in the production
costs. And naturally it takes a hefty percentage,
but it never charges the artist rent. This is so absurd that
the possibility probably does not even occur to the
gallery.
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Logically, there seem to be two possibilities: charge
an artist rent and not the percentage, or take the percentage
and not squeeze any rent out of him. The latter
version, which operates in the West, encourages galleries
to promote and sell, as their income depends on it. This
version has won out, firstly due to pressure from artists
who are not agreeable to paying rent, and secondly due
to purely business reasons - by being active it is possible
to earn more. Estonian galleries, on the other hand, want
to earn their share even if they don't sell anything and
take it for granted that, since they deal with such a noble
phenomenon as art, they should be automatically supported
by the state. The Cultural Endowment [state-budget
foundation supporting culture on the basis of applications
- Ed.] is thus compelled to cough up the rent of the
galleries, besides creative and project-based grants to the
artists, and they simply cannot afford to pay the galleries.
There is much groaning about the non-existent art market
in Estonia, although galleries should be precisely the
institutions to work towards creating it. Establishing a
good gallery naturally requires some capital investment,
and on the whole this is a very long-term process until
the name of a gallery starts meaning something to art
collectors. Indeed there is no national art market in
Estonia, although our cultural space and potential buyers
of Estonian art do not necessarily have to be all
Estonians. Besides - who says the Estonian galleries only
have to deal with Estonian art and Estonian artists?
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The non-profit infrastructure of art in Estonia is relatively
well developed: the Tallinn Art Hall, the Art
Museum of Estonia with its exhibition halls of contemporary
art, the Tartu Art Museum and the Tartu Art
House, plus the Pärnu Museum of Modern Art. However,
they are chronically under-financed and have no budgetary
means to carry out exhibition projects. At the
same time our art landscape almost totally lacks any kind of
alternative non-profit exhibition rooms, such as artist-run
spaces, which are normal for any normal art life and actually
provide it with a base. The commercial side of art and
the subsidised institutionalised art world are drifting
apart, but they nevertheless form opposing poles that create
preconditions for a normal art culture. In the current situation,
where the small commercial side is hobbling on one foot
and the institutional side on the other, any adequate
organisation is alas totally impossible.
Anders Härm (1977), critic and curator, presently curator of the Tallinn Art Hall. In 2005 he curates the exhibition NU PAINTING: New painting art in Europe at the Tallinn Art Hall (20 May-10 July). See also www.kunstihoone.ee |
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| Estonian Art 2/04 (15) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2004 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 | |
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