A few weeks ago, White Cube sacked 38 of its invigilators in London and replaced them with security guards. The Art Newspaper reported that the restructuring, in the words of a White Cube spokesperson, ‘follows a general trend across similar galleries that are moving away from visitor engagement to visitor management’. At the beginning of August, news broke that David Zwirner had fired about ten members of its digital team – staffers who were hired to boost the gallery’s online presence.
Such restructurings seem to suggest that major galleries are no longer convinced of the value of making their spaces, real or virtual, as inviting as possible. Which leads one to wonder: are commercial galleries turning away from the public? The larger contemporary art galleries such as White Cube and Zwirner, with their many outposts and research and publishing arms, have increasingly positioned themselves as akin to museums. Staging exhibitions at a purportedly institutional scale, and in command of considerable online resources, they are hardly short of ambition and their cultural clout has only grown in recent years.
But this summer’s redundancies are a reminder of their raison d’être : the goal of a commercial gallery, above and beyond its role in the cultural landscape, is to sell art for profit. So where does the public fit in? At first glance, catering to the public does not seem baked into galleries’ business models at all. Appointment-only spaces have long been a fav.