“This art space seems to intrinsically resist digital services” — Anonymous gallery employee

Of all the spaces within the art industry that I explored, the well-established commercial galleries that litter Chelsea proved the most nonreactive when it came to using new media technology. I focused on the big names: Lehmann Maupin, Matthew Marks, David Zwirner and the Gagosian and tried to contact their marketing department or anyone who could shed some light on their communications processes. With no luck when it came to email and tweets, I visited each of these gallery spaces and experienced them for myself — and attempted to talk to anyone working there about the gallery’s use of new media.

These visits, some (cold) conversations with admin staff, talks with others involved in the commercial art world (at various gallery openings in New York I attended) and further academic research uncovered several reasons why the commercial aspect of the art industry remains underdeveloped when it comes to adoption of the ‘new’.

These included:

• Tradition (they are used to operating a certain way and have done so successfully for decades)
• A lack of demand from their audience (i.e. the art buyers/collectors)
• Uncertainty of what the ‘new’ may result in (i.e. affects on profits, longevity of the new technology etc)

The buying, selling and collecting of art is a traditionally offline and luxury market. New York’s well established commercial galleries may have a website, may use Facebook, may even have a Twitter account but their activity on these platforms are minimal. Their marketing, PR, advertising etc is not focused on digital technology — they continue to mail invitations to gallery openings.

It is a notoriously prickly niche market which refuses to adopt new technology in any hurry. It will be interesting to see where the future will take these spaces and whether or not they will begin to use new media on a more active level and whether or not they’ll take up the digital services offered by start-ups such as Paddle8, Artsy and Arthena.

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NB: These are the galleries I visited and based my finding on:

Lehmann Maupin Gallery

540 W 26th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.lehmannmaupin.com

Matthew Marks Galleries

502, 522 and 526 W 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
www.matthewmarks.com

David Zwirner Gallery

537 W 20th Street New York, NY 10011
www.davidzwirner.com

Gagosian

555 W 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.gagosian.com