Opening Your Own Gallery (Part I)

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Well, Eager to Deal, I like your gumption about wanting to start right at the top: in New York’s gallery world.

How to go about opening a gallery is a fascinating question, and, as usual, I started researching a response by talking to experts—people who have a hands-on, practical knowledge of what the pros and cons of the gallery business are.

Once again I was delighted to discover how willing to share their experience these gallerists are. So, because of their generosity, and because of the depth in which they have addressed your question, it’s going to take me a couple of columns to cover this one. Be sure to read each one, because I’ve got a lot of good advice for you.

Let’s start with someone with a vast amount of experience: Renato Danese is one of the most respected dealers on the New York scene. He was director of the Pace Gallery from 1981 to 1995 and was then senior partner at C & M Arts. He has operated his own very successful gallery in Chelsea since 1997.

When I explained your question to him, he began by talking about your background in business and about the advantages that this will give you in the commercial aspect of galleries.

“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’.”

But then—and I must say that this was true of everyone I spoke to on this subject—Danese stressed that your reasons for entering the gallery world needed to be more than just commercial and that your art-world knowledge needed to be extensive as well.

“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.”

He pointed out that his own background wasn’t in the business world. “My training was as an English major, and then as an art historian, and I began my career in the tax-exempt arena—the National Endowment for the Arts and the museum world. Between my formal education and my professional experience, this gave me a good grounding.”

Why is this historical grounding so important?

“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.”

So, I asked him, if someone doesn’t have this background, what should they do about it?

“If he’s not formally trained, he should definitely read, and he should do it voraciously, and of course spend a lot of time in museums.” He also stressed the importance of the skills of the people you have working with you.