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Even though 2020 was not the year James Fuentes had
bargained for, when he tallied up his New York gallery’s prof-
its and losses he was stunned to discover that his business
was doing great.
“I need to stress that we were all hustling so hard,” says
Fuentes, whose small space on the Lower East Side has five
employees and represents 10 artists. “It felt like a fight for sur-
vival, and then, come January, we looked back at the last year
and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ It was surprising.”
After almost a year of Covid-19, galleries large and small have
discovered that their industry is apparently coronavirus-proof.
“It turns out that even with galleries closed and travel non-
existent, collectors all over the world wanted to buy art,” says
David Zwirner, whose Chelsea outpost in New York is showingan exhibition of Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi. “I’m not an
anomaly. I heard other folks really did business.”
That’s an understatement. “The market is raging,” says Los
Angeles gallerist François Ghebaly, who adds that 2020 was
his best year ever in sales and profits. “It’s almost too much.
The last few shows have been sold out.”
This was by no means a guarantee when it all began. At the
onset of any crisis, “there’s always a moment of flat-out exis-
tential panic that lasts, frankly, for a relatively short period of
time,” says Sean Kelly, who runs his namesake 22,000-square-
foot space in New York’s Hudson Yards neighborhood. “We
were back in business, as it were, within 10 days.”
When his staff began—delicately, discreetly, appropriately—
to contact clients, “we weren’t just shouting into the void,”Galleries are doing great. Museums? Not so much. By James Tarmy
At Least There’s One Covid-
Proof Business Model in Art
Installation of Albers and
Morandi: Never Finished
at the David Zwirner
gallery. Opposite: Monir
Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s
Square Maze at the James
Cohan gallery.