Unfortunately this association doesn’t exists. It belongs to the same fiction genre than “The Lord of the Rings” or “Harry Potter”.
However, if taking part on such utopia were possible, the members should comply with these conditions
1. Not attending to Art Fairs
Not as sellers, buyers or glimpsers. Art fairs have a lot of negative effects in the quality of art, in the perception that general public has of art, in the cultural life of cities, in the justly conditions of competition between artists and galleries and, last but not least, in climate change.
Art Fairs decrease the quality of art by a combination of factors:
• As everybody know the conditions to see art works in fairs (from the point of view or art) are very bad, due to the concentration of works and people, the lack of space, etc. When art fairs become an important way not just to sell but to legitimise artists, only certain type of art that is favoured by this conditions succeeds. The legitimation by art fairs finishes bounding museums and curators, due to the pressure that put on it people that have spent money on certain artists and galleries that expect to sell more of those.
• People go to fairs with the same mind frame that to a shopping mall. The information about art that comes to the media through art fairs always associates the works directly with the price, before any other consideration. This system pre-selects the audience, and then the audience pre-selects the works, which could be very good in certain way (what is from Caesar goes to the Caesar). But in the art fairs there is massive waste of energy and resources that are drawn from other less aggressive sectors of the art scene.
• Art fairs put the decision of who is going to be seen and who isn’t in the gallery owners. Their criteria could be as good as any other, if were not marked by the fact that the main priority is to sell (to survive). This affects directly of how works are conceived and shown because the need of the system of objectuality, style and repetition and the consequent rejection of experimental approaches. It must be repeated that, as the museums are bound more and more to the rankings in art fairs, artists not represented by a gallery (we may say “not under the pressure of market priorities”) are not likely to be seen neither inside nor outside the art fairs.
Art Fairs have a negative impact in cities cultural life.
• The effect of an art fair in a city is devastating. It tends to concentrate in few days of activity the efforts of all the art agents of the city. An art fair encourages corporate collectors to make all their purchases in the same days (due to the promotional effectivity); it makes a strong call for international visitors, who in a healthy cultural environment would be visiting regularly during the whole season and that now only attend to the city and its exhibitions during the fair. Therefore it pushes the public and private art galleries to allocate most of the resources on those days to catch all the international visitors and collectors, letting the rest of the art season unattended and underfunded. The media only find noticeable things happening during the fair, to the spectacular disproportion with the rest of the year events. All those conditions feed back each other.
Art Fairs are filthy, destroy a lot of natural resources and have an embarrassing CO2 footprint.
• Recycling and reusing policies are not considered in packaging, production of booths or installation of works in art fairs.
• Works and people are travelling here and there like if they where going to see new art or to show new art to other people.
• What’s the point of a work made in New York, for a Spanish gallery, which brings it to an art fair in Beijing, to be bought by a Los Angeles collector?
2. Promoting the selling and buying Local Art
A gallery in a town should sell mainly artists living and working in the physical and cultural area in which the gallery is located. This would benefit people involved in many aspects.
• It prevents franchising, having galleries in small towns depending of the decisions of the main galleries, receiving second class art works to be sold to the so-considered second class collectors.
• It allows a unique art scene in each city, with its interests and particular views.
• It increases the equal access to the market of all artists and galleries. Therefore promotes diversity and more space for artists for which experimentation is a key aspect of practising art.
Curators and collectors travelling to see the works in different places would be more efficient than works, always by the same artists, invading every single corner of the art empire, like if it were Hollywood blockbusters.
3. Galleries associated to the AGFASD should sign the Pedestals Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Every pedestal put under or around and art work decreases the chances of surviving of galleries and artists no belonging to the international art lobbies. Examples of pedestalization are: 400 grams invitation cards, to send by FedEx information that can be emailed, luxurious spaces in the high value real state areas, bulky constructions for minimal results (if you are guilty, you know what all this means). Only good art survives in a no frills art environment.
Pedestals are used by lobbies to increase the bet up to a point in which small galleries more adventurous in their decisions cannot cover. Why there is not an Art Antitrust Commission, an institution to prevent dumping and predatory pricing practices in the art market?
Good art works are like juicy vegetables: no fertilizers, pesticides, packaging… Avoid big producers…
Pedestals maintain artificially the value of objects that do no have one anymore. When the object lost its value, what keeps value is the “way” in which is presented. “Style” becomes a value.
4. Promote “patronage” against “investment”
Art ecology responsible galleries should appeal to patronage instead to greed. The collector should be encourage to take part in the art in the present time, in the action of creating it, regardless what the value of the work could be in the future, regardless if the work will exist in any form after the art event has happened.
This association has to remain the realm of fiction because gallery owners accepting these premises will perish as gallerists and will become artists, making impossible the association.
Please send adhesions, proposals of collaboration and militancy, insults and threats to savetheart.com
Art Galleries for Art Sustainable Development is not endorsed by the GGOPG (Greedy Gallery Owners Pressure Group)
