Art Talk w/Jeffrey Gillespie

This spiel about the gallery: we have 25 artists, 4,200 square feet, and we have a jury during the center with ten additional artists right now. And we have one of the biggest venues probably comes from Newman's School of Art University. Original Adams lifetime is this wonderful young manifest which is all new artists to the galleries at 10:00 per month over there about 200 you submit it and there's tanning body in which is fairly typical of Santa Fe. There's a lot of them, very, very strong artists, and as a result you end up with the situation where even really strong artists, Ernest, so they get into the gallery. So it's a very challenging climate, these little adobe houses, but it's just like being in New York City in a lot of ways. So it's interesting, it's an interesting, very high-pressure environment, and it doesn't even look like that from the outside. Looks like a fun touristy place to come and.

Well, because you're in one, you're in the second biggest art market in the country after New York, and it's certainly 80,000 people. So this is really strong intensification that happens with a lot of the clients and love the artists and love the competition being, you know, well contained in a very small space. So what you end up with is this kind of pressure cooker situation which actually doesn't happen in New York because it's more spread out than this kind of Mormon open-ended environment here. There's this local versus international vibe. So our business is very international, some of that, but also artists are international that are based here, and there's a lot of egos involved and there's a lot of big money involved. But you see that we have face time with gallery owners, got our directors and artists at an international level which you don't get when you go to New York. You know, it's like they're the high priests of the art business. You have to get buzzed in. You never really see Larry Gagosian or, you know, Pace, you see people at a leadership level. But here you walk in and you have access at that level all the time. So it's a very interesting combination of small town and large scale operations in terms of the amount of, you know, cluster running, are you what it takes to sell here and the kind of numbers that are coming in. Sounds like you, but you have access. So it's a very different climate.

My giving day, basically my function is to operate a sort of an overarching strategic plan for the gallery through a social and economic lens. In every aspect of my work and my social life within this small town, I have to operate from the standpoint of the gallery's members. So my personality as such is sort of separate from my real personality. That's another thing. You're very visible all the time. It's so small, so you have to have the polish constantly, as opposed to being able to just, you know, get on the subway, go downtown and not see anybody that you deal with downtown. Here it's like this constantly. There's always clients, there's always dealers, there's always people who can make or break a business. Your commitment is very different. So my job, I have two responsibilities: one is to sell consistently at a level of just the doors open, and the other is to be a very visible presence. Our assistant directors was very active in that way, but she also does all the advertising administration, which is gigantic as well. So my main operation is sales and social, which correlate.

Generally, you're looking at the mid to high five figures to six figures a month operating. So that would be, I'm not gonna say specifically to this space, but your average operating is probably forty to two hundred thousand dollars a month, depending on what level. When you have a little, you know, a dirty place like this, people freak out with the other staff members. It's very much that sort of range. My average sale is eight to fifteen thousand, and that is about... I don't want to say it's all about numbers. It's very much about the bars. You have art galleries, and in here what I call money galleries, it's really easy to identify as a collector when you walk in the door with a money gallery, yes, because they approach you from the standpoint of money before they approach you. If you stand apart, they're very eager to discuss numbers versus aesthetic. Those things are very hard to get away from in the art business because it's so hyper-competitive. My work from an aesthetic standpoint first, and then look at the numbers later. And the clients like that as well, because if a person has ample funds to buy art and comes into an art gallery, the last thing they want is money. Money is not their issue. Aesthetic and experience is their issue. So you're going to get away from the money, have it almost be an afterthought.

It's absolutely random. That's the one thing that's the hardest part of being in this business: that some artists will, you know, have three or four months with nothing, and then it will sell for pieces in two days. Sometimes also one major piece, like for example a fairly recent year, a wonderful sculpture by a federation artist named Dmitri German for about thirty eight thousand. Other times, lots of little sales. So that it always ends up working, but there's no sort of specific formula that happens. It just ends up always working because we, I guess, the people that I work with that I have reached sort of critical mass in terms of knowing the business, so we don't go into a flop sweat, we don't go into hysteria when things are slow for three weeks. We realized that it changes and it's a kind of like an organic thing. So, you know, sometimes it's five pieces for X amount of dollars, sometimes it's one piece for a large amount of dollars. Again, the focus is always on correlating the aesthetic experience with what the client's actual needs are in terms of their space. Money is critical, but it's important.

I have probably 35 or 40 paintings and maybe eight sculptures, seven or eight sculptures. I collect, I think, very effectively. I have no interest in buying into a specific formula. The first instinct is always the right instinct in terms of everything: in terms of falling in love, in terms of seeing a painting. If you don't have that gut instinct and that butterfly thing going on, then you really buy the piece, you know. Those things are irrelevant. The emotional response is the first thing you should look for. Every piece of art that I've ever, never, never sell. Their value I can use them to leverage other things, but I wouldn't sell them. But yes, I've been buying art since I was 18. I write and I played, you know, and I studied opera, so I sing, you know, a degree. But for me, my main creative and artistic process is in human relationship and in an energetic relationship between people and between artworks. And I see myself as like the third in that dynamic. And actually being in a room with one person who's a collector or a couple is collecting a piece for myself is more poetic and more exciting to me than being in a romantic relationship. That to me is like my ultimate: that triangle of beauty and newness and all of those things. One of the great things about being in this business is that you can always, it's always like in your relationship, it's very exciting. And the glue under this business is always kind of on that upward swing of any relationship, because you're meeting people for the first time, you're selling on something beautiful, and then it's consummating over. So it's like this intensified form of creativity which I really enjoy.

But yeah, at some point we could probably, if we see watching the process or having a camera in the room or having another person in the room changes the entire dynamic. In fact, where you're sitting in the room changes the dynamic. If you're standing in a doorway versus not standing in a doorway, it changes the dynamic. If you're sitting down versus standing up, changes the dynamic. And whenever I'm training these salespeople, I always say it's kind of like downhill skiing really fast having to look, but also like brain surgery procedures, my nude manipulation with your hands. It's a combination of those things. So it's very, very minutely subtle, but at the same time it's very intense and fosters a lot of speed. The first piece of advice I give to new salespeople is: never, ever, ever focus on how much money is involved. Always, always focus on the emotional experience. In life and in this business, it's critical that the gut response, the emotional authentic response, before and it's a lot about consciousness and it's a lot about spirituality and it's not enough. And that's why I'd say getting away from money, the money will always come in this business. But the people who are unit to hustle are not gonna survive. Love and compassion and conscious person are the things that are relevant to everything in the world, but especially to a highly charged emotional space like being in the art business. The ones who are going to survive. Everyone is emotional in this interaction. The artist is emotional because they love making the piece. The seller wants to steward the piece properly. And the person is buying it because they love it, hopefully. So that's all well for me.

Because I was born with an artistic impulse, but I'm not an artist. And I studied opera, which doesn't make any money, so I changed to art history because I knew I need to make a living. So for me, it's about being as close to the creative process as possible and stewarding my portion of the greater process in the same way that an artist does their work. So it is for me an artistic process. And the best people in this business are in a vulnerable way, and their skin is off, and they're real. Otherwise, you're just selling cars. You might as well go and sell cars. Art is very different. It's permanent, and it's a timeline, an aesthetic timeline of human history. And you want, and there's a lot of important elements to that, because what you're actually doing is like an aesthetic DNA strand. You have a responsibility to steward beauty through generations and generations of art, and you're part of that thread. All the way back to, you know, Myra caves and the Venus of Willendorf, all the way up to the post-postmodern, you know, a piece of string on the wall with a tag through it. I mean, all of it is relevant. It exists. It's real to the creative process, and you can carry.