Powerful Art Galleries Are Mega-Sizing Into Mini Museums

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When Hauser & Wirth opens its 36,000-square-foot flagship art gallery on West 22nd Street in New York next spring, it will be larger than the Parrish Art Museum’s new home in the Hamptons, widely considered one of the most gracious museums of the past decade. The David Zwirner gallery already has 30,000 square feet on West 20th Street, but it’s building an additional 50,000 square feet of exhibition space nearby—the same as the Whitney Museum of American Art a few blocks away. Gagosian’s 24th Street space just expanded to 33,900 square feet.

There have been larger galleries in the past, but never before have so many reached museum size. Not a single space in Chelsea had cracked 30,000 square feet 15 years ago. And this handful of art dealers in the Manhattan neighborhood are emulating museums in ways that go beyond square footage: Hauser & Wirth will have a bar; Pace Gallery (75,000 square feet, 22% devoted to exhibitions) has a performance space with an events schedule to go with it. Each has begun to aggressively hire museum curators to work on sales or programming. And each has a book publishing arm.

Large galleries have long held exhibitions featuring loans from collectors and museums where nothing is for sale. The shows amount to marketing expenses, simultaneously burnishing a gallery’s reputation while creating a halo effect for the art that does have a price tag. “We work for the artists,” says Pace’s president, Marc Glimcher. “They make the art, and they hire us to sell it. That’s still our core mission.”

But now, “we are absolutely modeling ourselves after museums,” he says. “Our audience has exploded. And even though we’re not monetizing that audience, we know how important it is.” David Zwirner expects more than 100,000 visitors to its Yayoi Kusama show in November.

Proudly commercial galleries do their best to put on shows that highlight larger historical and curatorial conversations so they can position their artists as part of the zeitgeist. “We’ll always have straightforward shows of artists we represent, which will hopefully sell, and other shows that have a more historic nature,” says Marc Payot, a Hauser & Wirth partner and vice president. “It’s about how our program reflects today’s society.”

That also happens to be the mission of many contemporary museums. The difference is that galleries are free; it cost an adult couple $50 to see the recent Whitney Biennial.

The biggest beneficiary of this trend is the art-viewing public, which can now visit museum quality shows on a whim. “We’re very lucky to be able to do something where everyone wins,” Glimcher says.