The room is cold now and you’re so far away
From L to R { Adam Cvijanovic | Ellen Altfest | Marc Swanson }
It has been a tumultuous year for Rebecca Smith, 43, who owned a well-known contemporary art gallery until last June.
The recession delivered an economic shock to the art market, and Becky’s New York City gallery struggled for months before she decided to shutter it. In the process, she came into conflict with some of the artists she worked with — she owes them money, they owe her. She moved out of her apartment and borrowed cash from her parents. She was too poor to visit her family in Pittsburgh for Christmas. (…)
Shortly after she founded the Bellwether Gallery in Brooklyn, in 1999, Becky, was the subject of a profile, in The New York Times Magazine, titled “How to Become an Instant Art Star,” and she did, indeed, become a star.
She moved her gallery to Chelsea in 2004, and maintained a frenetic pace on the international art fair circuit. She hired a gallery director, a manager and an art handler. “I felt like I was one of the members of my generation who could become one of the next representatives to major artists,” Becky said.
She specialized in emerging art, finding and cultivating cutting-edge new artists like Adam Cvijanovic, Ellen Altfest and Marc Swanson, building their careers up through gallery shows, and selling their pieces for increasingly large sums of money, mostly to rich financier-collectors. Buying the work of unknown young artists was especially appealing to Wall Streeters, because it was an accessible way to start building an art collection and it offered the possibility of “discovering” artists and making a fortune as their work shot up in value — not unlike the thrills of the stock market.
Becky ran through some numbers for me: her gallery’s rent was about $10,000 a month. Her highest overhead, when she had four full-time employees and was maintaining a hectic pace of exhibitions, ran to $75,000 — in a lean month it might have been closer to $50,000. The revenue came through the sale of art; a gallery usually takes 50 percent of the sale price.
Once sales dried up by the fall of 2008, Becky called three of her largest collectors, pleading for some business — “I tried playing it cool, and then I tried playing it direct,” she said. She recounted a typical conversation: “I need to sell you something to continue to be here,” she would tell a collector.
“I’m just not buying,” was the reply.
