Art Galleries Face Pressure to Fund Museum Shows

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Galleries have always provided scholarly support for museums exhibiting their artists’ work.

Now they’re expected to provide money, too.

In today’s exploding art market, amid diminishing corporate donations and mounting exhibition costs, nonprofit museums have been leaning more heavily on commercial galleries for larger amounts of money — anywhere from $5,000 to $200,000 each time — to help pay for shows featuring work by artists the galleries represent.

The increasingly common arrangement has stoked concerns about conflicts of interest and the dilution of a museum’s mission to present art for art’s sake. Such cozy situations raise the specter of a pay-to-play model and could give galleries undue influence over what the public sees.

“It’s really gotten out of hand,” said Lawrence Luhring of the Luhring Augustine gallery. “It’s the brazenness of it — just the expectation of ‘How are you going to contribute?’ ”

Others say the galleries, which generally earn between 20 percent and 50 percent commission on each sale, shouldn’t complain, because the prestige of museum shows raises the value of an artist’s work, boosting gallery profits. “Museums are giving these galleries the best platform in the art world for free, where they can sell work to their clients on the walls of the greatest museums,” said Jeffrey Deitch, the longtime dealer and former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. “If the galleries can contribute, why not?”

Maxwell Anderson, who has served as the director of institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Dallas Museum of Art, said: “Gallery-supported exhibitions commingle inventory that may be for sale with museum inventory. The self-interest of the gallery can compromise the independence and integrity of the curatorial voice.”

Examples of gallery support abound. For the Whitney’s recent popular Frank Stella retrospective, the installation of two outdoor sculptures was made possible in part by funds from the Marianne Boesky and Dominique Lévy galleries, which jointly represent Mr. Stella.

In listing contributors to its current exhibition on the New-York-based German photographer Vera Lutter, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, names the Gagosian Gallery, which represents Ms. Lutter.

And when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a Pierre Huyghe show two years ago — billed as the first major retrospective of that French artist’s work — sponsors included the Marian Goodman Gallery, which represents Mr. Huyghe.

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