Opening Your Own Gallery

Here are a few passages from an article on artinfo.com by Robert Ayers.

“He’s a businessman, and a businessman will understand a great deal. He must have a business plan and a budget. And that budget has to include every cruel little element that people love to ignore but really can’t—down to garbage collection, city taxes, sales taxes, bookkeeping, advertising, shipping costs, insurance—the list goes on and on. And he must have enough resources to withstand some ‘quiet times’.”

“A lot of people come into the gallery business for the wrong reasons or without the sort of art experience that will really help. There are a lot of young dealers who don’t have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. Anyone who’s going to open a gallery shouldn’t only be a businessman; he or she should be well-versed in the history of art—and not only of the last 15 years, or even the last century, either, but art’s entire history.”

“History informs the present,” he replied, “and it allows you to work with artists, and it helps in comprehending their work. I’m not preachy about it. I just feel this is what separates many contemporary dealers from the others. If I know about Mondrian, I can speak about Warren Isensee [a gallery artist] a little more convincingly.”

And why does that matter?

“The best dealers are not salesmen in the classic sense of the word,” he said. “Their passion and their connoisseurship and their knowledge have to combine to convince someone to acquire something that has no ostensible function in life, and that’s not always an easy thing to do. It is distinct from the normal business world because of that.”

This is really alot for me to think about. The more information I can gather at this point the better.