Djelloul Marbrook

The job of art galleries is to sell art, not screw artists. It’s to make markets where there were none, push the aesthetic envelope, take risks, not importune the artists who have already taken bigger risks.

But there is a trend among once reputable galleries to exact tribute from artists and exhibitors rather than create a clientele for them. This cheap risk-management tactic, aside from its venality and intellectual bankruptcy, represents the abdication of the traditional taste-making responsibility of galleries.

The reason it isn’t being discussed, as it should be, in print pages devoted to art is that these pages are supported by the advertising of the rascals.

The rascals, of course, would argue that high rents and other escalating costs have driven them to this squalid dead end. But their risks are nothing compared to those of the artists they’re bilking.

Vanity presses and galleries aren’t new, and it can be argued that with so many artists and writers praying for a day in the sun they’re inevitable.

But that doesn’t well conceal the moral failure here, just as letting agents and marketers dictate what is worthy to be published doesn’t conceal the publishers’ greed and contempt for any cultural responsibility to the society they’re cheating.

—DM