Two months ago, Sara Ebers opened an art gallery in an apartment on Chicago’s North Side. The overhead is cheaper than a storefront, she said, allowing for most of the revenue her business generates to support exhibitions, rather than pay rent.
With a national unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, pinching pennies is a necessity for art venues, like “ebers b9”. For galleries, more unemployed Americans means less customers because art, unlike food or clothing, is a luxury item and individuals attempting to tighten their budgets are more likely to forego purchasing new paintings or sculptures when push comes to shove.
In Chicago, where the unemployment rate has climbed to 10.1 percent, many venues, like ebers b9, have been forced to reconsider their business models.
Madison Smith, associate director for the Judy A Saslow Gallery, said sales have slowed in recent months, forcing her to depend heavily on low-end sales.
“We offer a wide range, so we’ve still been making sales,” she said. “They’re just not the big, big sales we’re used to.”
The market looks even less promising for emerging artists, Smith said, because many commercial galleries will not review submissions from new artists. She added more distinguished artists draw collectors and offer greater financial security for galleries.
“People that have money are always going to have money,” she said. “The really high-end collectors are always going to be interested, so if they’re interested in a piece we have it’s not a problem for them.”
In order to combat sluggish sales, Smith has also started to offer more discounts. Galleries often grant a discount to buyers who ask for it, but these days Saslow is making a point to offer the price cuts as an incentive to get art out the door.
Ebers is keeping her prices low from the start. Ebers b9 is a commercial gallery, and the owner places a premium on promoting the sales of featured artists. But the gallery also seeks to let its artists experiment with new media and keep art accessible for middle-income buyers.
“I think everything is at a reasonable price that allows people who are interested in the work, but who don’t have the highest funding, to buy the art as well,” she said.
Kelly Kaczynski, a Northwestern art professor, said Chicago has historically offered alternative spaces for new artists to show their work and create a market for themselves.
“One of the things about Chicago that is dynamic in the art scene is that there’s a lot of youth as well as maturity,” she said. “In artist-run spaces, often times they show their friend’s work or work by artists they are interested in.”
The reduced demand for art has affected artists in other ways, as well. Rather than recent graduates exiting university programs and attempting to enter the art market, graduate programs across the nation are receiving more applications and enrolling more students, Kaczynski said. She predicts this will lead to a future spike in artist-run spaces, so that those artists have an established profile to continue their spaces on a higher level when the economy improves.
“[It’s] a Depression-era mentality,” she said. “Rather than becoming depressed about it, you can turn it around and say ‘let’s make this happen of our own accord.'”
