The case of Chelsea
David Halle and Kim Robinson
Much social-scientific writing on specific cultural phenomena has tended to foreground one or two analytic frames of reference from the variety of those that have been developed in the field. Here we draw on findings from a case study of a local art scene in a global context—Chelsea, Manhattan, the most important contemporary art-gallery district in the world. We argue that our empirical material concerns a highly complex situation for which one or two analytic frames cannot alone do justice. We further suggest that this may be true now of many other central cultural phenomena, partly because of the increasingly “global” context in which they exist. As complex phenomena (like art worlds) change over time, the analytic approaches that work best also change, with new ones coming to the fore and older ones needing modification in key ways.
We pursue these points via a discussion of four main analytic frameworks—globalization, market theory, analysis of the meaning of the cultural works for those who view them, and class and status theory, especially the debate between the “class homology” and the “omnivore” hypotheses. Overall, our approach is consistent with that of other cultural analysts (e.g. Griswold 2004; Battani and Hall 2000; Mann 2007) who have likewise stressed the need for theoretical complexity and eclecticism to do justice to a complex and changing empirical situation.
Chelsea, on Manhattan’s Far West Side, became the most important contemporary artgallery district in the world with startling speed. Between 1996 and the summer of 2008, the number of commercial galleries in Chelsea grew from 12 to at least 270, dwarfing other art districts in the United States and elsewhere and supplanting SoHo, once the most dynamic gallery neighborhood in New York City (of course, the number of galleries in Chelsea began to decline in the fall of 2008 as a result of the economic crisis, dropping by 10 percent by February 2009). One indicator of Chelsea’s predominance in the contemporary art world is the number of Chelsea galleries exhibiting at Art Basel, the world’s leading annual fair for contemporary art, which operates a ferociously competitive admissions process for galleries that wish to exhibit there. At Art Basel 2007, the 31 galleries from Chelsea comprised by far the largest contingent selected, with the next largest contingent, from Berlin, way behind with 22 galleries, followed by London with 18. Marveling at the Chelsea phenomenon, the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith (2004) wrote that “a contemporary art scene on this scale has never happened before, and it’s hard to imagine it ever happening again.”
This mega-gathering of publicly accessible Chelsea galleries offers a magnificent opportunity for systematic research on contemporary art—on the art works, their audiences, the galleries, and the artists. At the same time, in today’s world, a local case, however important, obviously cannot be properly understood outside a “global” context, which, in the world of contemporary art, certainly includes the internet, international art fairs, and international auction houses.
In this account, therefore, we first view Chelsea in the context of the international contemporary art market, looking in particular at art fairs, auctions, and the internet. We then discuss detailed material from Chelsea. We integrate into this account a discussion of the four main analytic frames mentioned above, and show how we need their various perspectives, and more, to understand what is going on.
It is hard these days to analyze cultural phenomena of major importance without drawing on the concept of “globalization.” Yet it is important at the outset to clarify the concept of “global.” It is not, for example, fruitful to classify everything with an international dimension as “global.” Discussing this issue, Michael Mann (2007) has usefully distinguished six geographical/spatial interaction networks, five of which are less than “global.” These include local (any sub-national network of interaction), national (networks bounded by states, though not necessarily organized by states), international (between national units), macro-regional (transnational but regionally bounded), transnational (transcending the boundaries of the national and potentially global), and global (the extension and intensification of social relations over the globe). In what follows, we argue that many relevant phenomena that are often referred to as “global,” such as international art fairs, are more accurately classified as “macro-regional.” On the other hand, in our discussion of efforts to sell art on the internet, we will suggest that the term “global” in its strict sense is probably appropriate.
The growth of annual international art fairs is one key development underlying the perception that the art world is becoming increasingly international and “global.” These fairs, with displays primarily by commercial art galleries, in principle allow galleries from any country to sell their art abroad during the few days the fair lasts, thereby promoting a gallery’s stable of artists in a market/country outside its home base(s). Art fairs, therefore, constitute one suitable terrain for examining “globalization” in the contemporary art market.
Art Basel (in Switzerland) bills itself as “the world’s premier modern and contemporary art fair,” and few in the art world would disagree. Competition among galleries for selection (by an admissions committee) at Art Basel is ferocious. Analysis of the geographic origins—by nation, city, and neighborhood—of the galleries selected for Art Basel in June 2007 is illuminating. Considering first national origins, there is a clear concentration of galleries from a handful of countries located in two regions— the United States and Western Europe—which together account for 90 percent of the 242 galleries selected. Although Art Basel’s claim to showcase galleries from all five continents is formally correct, representation is tiny from Africa (one gallery from South Africa), small from Latin America (just two galleries from Mexico and three from Brazil), and modest from Asia, despite the burgeoning economies of China and India (four galleries from Japan, two from South Korea, one from China, and none from India). Analysis of galleries at the Armory Show (New York) or Frieze (London) confirms this.
Turning from national to city data, New York City clearly tops the hierarchy. It accounted for 21 percent of all the galleries accepted at Art Basel 2007, over twice as many as Berlin, the second largest city represented, with 9 percent of all the galleries, followed by London (7 percent), Zurich (6 percent), and Paris (5 percent). Finally, analysis within New York City shows Chelsea’s dominance over other gallery districts there. Galleries located in Chelsea account for 63 percent of all New York City galleries selected for Art Basel.
These findings demonstrate that the world of art fairs basically involves circulation around a select group of fairs by a select number of art galleries, mostly from a few key cities in Western Europe and North America, with New York’s Chelsea gallery neighborhood at the apex. In Mann’s spatial typology, these relationships are “macroregional,” not strictly “global.” In a superb discussion based on empirical research, Quemin (2006) has generalized this point beyond art fairs and commercial art galleries. As he puts it, despite enormously increased international mobility,
the world of contemporary art thus clearly has a center, because it functions very much as a duopoly formed by, on the one hand, the US and, on the other … a few countries in Western Europe … In contrast to this emphatically Western center, there is an ‘artistic periphery’ that … includes all those countries that do not appear in the preceding list, and in particular the countries of the Third World, but not only them, as can be seen from the cases of Japan, Canada, and Spain.
(Quemin 2006: 542–43)
At the same time, some of the main attempts to sell contemporary art via the internet do seem truly global in Mann’s sense as “the extension and intensification of social relations over the globe.” For example, Charles Saatchi, whose 2008 Museum of Contemporary Art in London is one of the largest physical spaces in the world for displaying contemporary art, is now at the forefront of the movement to sell art on the internet. Starting in May 2006, his website, Saatchi online, allowed artists, free of charge, to create tailored home pages on the site featuring their art work. A central aim was to help little-known, typically young, artists to display their works. The site currently displays the work of 65,000 artists. The artists can field email inquiries from any potential buyers visiting their pages, negotiate directly and without any further Saatchi Gallery involvement, and keep all proceeds from any art sales. Purchasers around the globe with an internet connection can contact artists anywhere, on a 24/7 time-line. It is not clear how far this process will undercut the traditional role of commercial galleries as mediators between artists and purchasers (collectors), but the potential for significant inroads is clearly there.
This site, with its low—in many cases, almost zero—transaction costs for artists wishing to use it to sell their art, seems to fit the designation “transnational” (transcending the boundaries of the national and potentially global) and probably “global” (the extension and intensification of social relations over the globe). Our data thus suggest that the concept of globalization needs to be used carefully and with an eye to making distinctions between the “strictly global” and various situations that are somewhat less so.
We now set the previous analysis alongside the detailed Chelsea material. In this discussion, first we stress the analytic perspectives of market and organization theory. Later we discuss the content and meaning of the works for those who view them. And finally, we introduce class and status theory. Our basic argument, we repeat, is that we need these multiple perspectives in order to grasp a complex and changing situation.
Despite the presence of a sizeable contingent of elite, global galleries, Chelsea would not be the dense art-gallery neighborhood that it is without the plethora of small, boutiquesize galleries (owned by individuals not corporations) that make up the majority of the galleries. This co-existence of elite and small operations in the same environment has some parallels to dominant centers in other creative industries, for example Silicon Valley. Thomas Crow (1996: 34) too has commented on the fact that so much of the gallery system exists at the “artisanal level.” Our interviews in Chelsea found that gallery owners, often motivated by “art for art’s sake,” may be willing to settle for less profit than “humdrum entrepreneurs,” which also helps explain why there are so many small galleries. As the economist Richard Caves commented about art galleries generally, “The motivation of business owners makes a difference. Many art gallery dealers appear to share art for art’s sake preferences and hence are willing to settle for less profit than humdrum entrepreneurs. That factor probably makes for a denser population of galleries than if they were run by profit-seekers” (2000: 44).
Unlike the established art museums in New York City, which charge admissions (entry to the recently re-opened MoMA is $20), Chelsea galleries impose no entry charge, do not pressure onlookers to buy, and provide an open and welcoming ambience. Of course, most retail organizations such as galleries do not charge admission, but the Chelsea galleries have moved considerably in the direction of free museums in their modes of display. Data from our interviews with samples of the audience show that the vast majority (over 95 percent) come just to look, with absolutely no intention of purchasing art. The major purchasers (serious collectors) typically attend private showings arranged specially for them and even buy works based on photos via the internet. The overwhelming majority of the audience is therefore comprised of viewers but arguably not “consumers,” if that term refers to people whose role is to purchase goods in the market. Free admission runs counter to the strong tendency in the modern world toward the “commercialization of leisure life,” whereby a growing proportion of leisure time is devoted to events for which admission is paid. A large commercial locus such as Chelsea offers, ironically, a substantial, no-charge benefit for the public.
Further, in other cultural spheres when the “show” is free, audiences typically pay another price—for example waiting in long lines for admission or enduring second-rate performers. What is interesting, and perhaps even unique, about Chelsea is that the elite galleries are the ones that display the very best of contemporary art in the most easily accessible form. Audiences simply step right off the street into these galleries, whereas most (non-elite) galleries usually display their art on upper floors. This feature appears to distinguish Chelsea from other key “cultural enterprises” such as Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Whether Chelsea’s free-show approach is “rational” for the galleries or something that just emerged is not yet clear. “Buzz” theory suggests that it is rational. Several studies have confirmed the importance of “buzz” (defined as a critical mass of favorable, or at least involved, discussion) in the sale of creative goods generally. A favorable “buzz” is likely to reach many potential buyers and also influence critics (Caves 2000: 81; DiMaggio 1987; Collins 1979; Frith 1998: 4–5).
Although nearly every Chelsea gallery is commercial, almost all the artists, whether successful or struggling, say that the Chelsea galleries generally offer them far more freedom and opportunity than do nonprofit museums and other institutions, in New York or elsewhere. Artists mostly consider museum directors and curators to be more conservative—focused on established art and less open to new art and artists—than the typical gallery owner/director. Above all, the artists that we interviewed do not, on the whole, see the gallery system as a structure of dominance or oppression.
Chelsea is not a residential community of artists. From the time it started as a gallery district in the mid-1990s, few artists could afford to live there, and they certainly cannot now. (SoHo was, by contrast, an occupational and residential community of artists who produced art from their lofts/homes.) Yet Chelsea has developed into an occupational community of people who work in/run/own galleries, and a special term, “gallerists,” has emerged to characterize this phenomenon. Chelsea’s gallerists are not well described as an impersonal set of atomistic units locked in ferocious competition, to employ one stereotype of market relations. Rather, they arguably have many of the positive aspects associated with the idea of “community.”
Above all, every Chelsea gallery must deal with Manhattan’s ferocious real estate market. Indeed, Chelsea’s very rise was real estate-driven. Rents soared in SoHo from 1995–99, fueled by an influx of clothing boutiques, forcing a mass exodus to Chelsea of galleries that could not afford the new rents.
Not surprisingly, a much debated topic among Chelsea gallery owners and other observers is whether real estate developments will eventually cause a similar, SoHo-style debacle. Learning from SoHo, most of those galleries that came to Chelsea with sufficient capital bought their spaces so as to insulate themselves from the commercial rental market. The other galleries, the vast majority, signed leases and are at the mercy of the commercial real estate market, which, in Manhattan, has no controls. At the end of a typical five-year lease, plus a five-year option to extend, landlords can charge whatever they can get. Here, the huge influence of the real estate market in determining Chelsea’s future as a gallery district is apparent.
Chelsea, too, is a site where it is possible to study an emerging challenge by auction houses to the long prevailing division of labor in the art market between art galleries and auction houses. Recently, auction houses have begun to move into the galleries’ lucrative market for primary works. The brashest—and most successful—such challenger is located in Chelsea. Phillips de Pury, an auction house founded in London in 1796, in 2003 moved its headquarters to a spectacular space in Chelsea just north of the Meatpacking district on 15th Street. In 2006, Phillips began what it called “Selling Exhibitions,” where it displayed and sold brand new works that had never been on the market before. To emphasize its new, dual role as both gallery and auction house, Phillips repackaged itself as an “art company that does auctions” (of contemporary art, photography, design, and jewelry), not just an auction company.
The intrusion into the gallery world by Phillips de Pury was followed by Christie’s 2007 purchase of Haunch of Venison, a contemporary art gallery in London and Zürich, with plans announced to open a gallery in New York later that same year, in Rockefeller Center. This move was less drastic than Phillips’s, since Christie’s was not (yet) itself selling new works, and auction houses have owned galleries in the past, though never successful ones. Still, given Christie’s size, the move garnered enormous attention (and anxiety) in the gallery world.
The shift in the function of auction houses merits close study. For example, will the auction houses drive the gallery world towards the kind of oligopolistically structured industry long present in other creative industries such as publishing and movie production and of which the auction world, long dominated by the Sotheby’s/Christie’s duopoly, is an extreme form?
In summary, from the analytic perspective of market and organization theory, the overall picture is complex. There is an enormous literature discussing market and related organizational perspectives; our argument is that, to properly understand the gallery scene in Chelsea, we need to draw on much of this literature and use it in subtle and nuanced ways. Some important studies, in addition to those already cited, are Getty Research Institute (2004), Moulin (1967), Velthius (2005), New Museum of Contemporary Art (2007), and Miller (1987).
To understand the meaning of art works for those who view them—a crucial but exceedingly complex topic—yet a different perspective is needed. Here we challenge much popular discussion which collapses the issue of meaning into the topic of markets and money, implying that art basically appeals as a lucrative investment—an argument that might seem to find some support in Chelsea’s growth as an art-gallery district in the context of what was probably the most effervescent art market ever.
Content analysis of the art displayed in Chelsea galleries, combined with interviews of audience members about what the art means to them, suggests that people are drawn to art that speaks to ongoing issues in their lives. (Fiske [1989] presents a similar perspective in relation to cultural consumption more generally. He argues that cultural texts/objects of all kinds typically need to resonate with people’s everyday experiences in order to be popular.) In brief, five categories dominate the content of the art displayed in Chelsea. Each of these categories represents at least 13 percent of all the works in the sample.
The first category—depictions of landscapes/nature—constitutes 25 per cent of all the works sampled and it divides into three main types. There is the classic “good stretch of countryside/water/sky” type (15 percent of all works), which has been featured prominently in Western landscape art over the last 200 years and remains immensely popular.
The second type within the overall category of landscapes, constituting 5 percent of all works, we label “radical environmental.” These landscapes foreground concern, and often alarm, about the deterioration of the natural environment. This type is in many ways new since the 1960s and clearly reflects a widespread alarm, even social panic, at the environmental damage caused by humans. The third type of landscape is conceptual. It implies a narrative scene, and also constitutes 5 percent of all works sampled.
The second most common category (accounting for 23 percent of all works) is the decorative/mostly pure design. Grouped under the umbrella of “abstract” art, this category was considered by the “modernist avant-garde” in the twentieth century to be the apogee of art, superior in almost every way to all forms of representative or figurative art. Such claims are now widely seen as exaggerated (e.g. Kleiner and Mamiya 2005). In the Chelsea art scene, the abstract/decorative category has assumed a more modest, though still important, position as (just) one among five categories.
A third category is the nuclear family, typically depicted with a critical or satirical edge as a troubled institution (13 percent of all works). Serenely confident families and individual family members of the kind depicted by Norman Rockwell are so rare as to be almost taboo. This category—the problematic family—is a new genre in art history. Although troubled families have obviously existed in actuality throughout history, artists or patrons did not depict them in a sufficiently systematic way so as to make them a recognizable genre.
Sex is the fourth most popular category of contemporary art, constituting 8 percent of all those displayed. About half of these images depict sexual activity—most often intercourse between men and women. The other half of the images classified as “sex” here just depict people naked or semi-naked, usually women—akin to the classic nude of art history. Like “radical environmental art,” sexual intercourse is unusual in Western art, at least for the last two millennia. Although naked or semi-naked men and women pervade the history of Western art, they have rarely been depicted as engaged in sexual activity (exceptions include Indian art, for example, which has a well-known tradition of eroticism, as did classical Greek pottery). The remaining category includes the miscellaneous topics of politics, raw/basic materials, the poor and disadvantaged, religion, and mass/commodity production.
The general picture suggested by considering the five major categories does not fit the view that the art is primarily about trading and making money in a global market. On the contrary, the categories are mostly rooted in modern life and in the varied ways that people (artists and audience) experience today’s world. For example, environmental landscapes seem rooted in post-1960s alarm about the deteriorating natural environment. The troubled nuclear family mimics today’s high divorce rate and reflects a variety of adaptational challenges, such as the growing prominence of single-headed households, blended families, and same-sex relations. Sexual intercourse seems to mimic current interest in pornography, especially promoted by the web.
Interviews with audience members attending particular art shows likewise suggest that these themes flourish because they resonate with everyday life in an ongoing, creative, and interactive way. For example, audience interviews at shows where the works are abstract/decorative suggest that the main attraction of these works is their ability to brighten up people’s lives.
It is true that the small minority of audience members who intend to purchase art— namely the “collectors”—may do so as a financial investment. But even here, a conflation of the market-oriented analysis with an analysis of art’s meaning short-circuits the question of how certain works and artists come to be sufficiently attractive in the first place to constitute a promising investment. The central answer suggested here is that the works resonate with the lives of audiences.
We now discuss a fourth set of approaches: “class homology” and “omnivore” arguments.
Considerable cultural theory and debate have revolved around the “class homology” theory and its major rival, the “omnivore” hypothesis. We argue that both approaches are helpful, but that the data suggest a more complex situation than either perspective usually allows.
The homology argument basically claims that social stratification and cultural stratification map closely onto each other. Individuals in higher social strata prefer and predominantly consume “high” or “elite” culture, and individuals in lower social strata prefer and predominantly consume “popular” or “mass” culture—with, usually, various intermediate situations also being recognized. For a restatement of the argument, see Gans (1999). However, more elaborate versions of the homology argument exist, notably that developed by Bourdieu (1984).
There is certainly some support in the Chelsea data for “class homology.” For example, the audience and collectors for contemporary art are typically economic and cultural elites, comprising primarily managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and the independently wealthy, as well as individuals working in the cultural field (art students, art administrators, and artists). Strikingly absent are blue-collar workers and lower-white-collar employees. In this sense, the taste for contemporary art is class specific.
Yet the data are also consistent with the omnivore approach. The broad hypothesis is that, in modern societies, the homology argument is outmoded, not because cultural consumption has lost all grounding in social stratification but because a new relationship is emerging. Rather than cultural stratification mapping straightforwardly onto social stratification, the cultural consumption of individuals in higher social strata differs from that of individuals in lower strata chiefly in being much wider in its range—comprising not only more “high-brow” culture but more “middle-brow” and more “low-brow” culture as well. Thus, the crucial contrast is not that of “snob versus slob” but that of cultural omnivore versus cultural univore (Chan and Goldthorpe 2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). Further, the strong implication of omnivore theory is that omnivores pursue a broad range of cultural interests above all because doing so enables them to advance in a wide variety of contexts.
This argument is both supported by our data and incapable of really dealing with all the important complexities. On the one hand, those who engage with contemporary art could plausibly be classified as “omnivores” since they engage with this art and, probably, a broad range of other art too. Yet on the complexity side, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish “high” from “popular” art, and thus to differentiate the apparent omnivore from the apparent univore. In other cultural spheres, we can still probably construct high–popular differences (e.g. classical music versus the many varieties of popular music), but in the art world it is less clear what is “low brow” or “popular” these days. Also, it is unclear that people who engage with contemporary art are doing so primarily for reasons of status and/or class advantage, as the “omnivore” hypothesis strongly implies. On the contrary, many of those who engage with contemporary art just seem to like it, plausibly enough because much of it, as we have argued, resonates with aspects of their lives. Further, if high-status people—those who may be most likely to travel and interact with a variety of transnational individuals—consume a greater variety of cultural genres and forms than low-status individuals, this may reflect the variety of culture they encounter rather than a concerted effort to differentiate themselves from others, as older versions of status theory would have predicted.
A case study of Chelsea, Manhattan, the most important contemporary art-gallery district in the world, set in a “global” context, suggests a complex and changing situation to which one or two analytic frameworks cannot alone do justice and which demands new combinations of theoretical perspectives. “Globalization” theory, organization and market theory, the analysis of the meaning of art works as considered from the audience’s point of view, and “class homology” and “omnivore” theory can all illuminate some aspects of our data, but only when presented in a cautious form with many caveats and qualifications. Overall, we emphasize the need for theoretical complexity, flexibility, and eclecticism in order to do justice to a complex empirical situation. Although our topic has been the contemporary art scene in Chelsea as set in a global context, we suspect that a similarly eclectic and multi-dimensional perspective is needed for many other major cultural phenomena in the contemporary world.
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