The Con: Galleries Facing Squeeze by Office Space

Art galleries swallowed up by S.F. real estate boom

Downtown district transforming - dealers move or close up

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A former display wall at the George Krevsky Gallery stands nearly empty after most of the artworks were packed up for moving. The gallery is one of several leaving the downtown building at 77 Geary St.

By Kenneth Baker

February 26, 2014 | Updated: February 27, 2014 8:06am

In another blow to San Francisco's ailing downtown gallery district, several prominent art galleries have received eviction notices - the latest casualties of the city's commercial real estate boom.

The George Krevsky Gallery, the Rena Bransten Gallery and Patricia Sweetow Gallery, all occupants of 77 Geary St., will be leaving soon to make way for their high-tech neighbor, MuleSoft, an Internet services company that needed to expand.

"We live in a tough neighborhood," Krevsky said, "at the intersection of tech and greed. It's impacted the world I've been working in passionately for 30 years."

Several other galleries in the downtown area had already been forced to go dark in recent months, prominently those run by Eli Ridgway, who has since moved to Wyoming, and Don Soker, with more than 40 years in the business.

The Togonon and Marx & Zavattero galleries, also former occupants of 77 Geary, were edged out by rent increases earlier. After searching for a year for a suitable address to reopen, Marx & Zavattero announced the end of its business.

Working from home

"I planned after 22 years to change the direction of the gallery, but not like this," Krevsky told The Chronicle three months ago. "I've talked to my peers in Chicago and Los Angeles, and they're facing some of the same challenges."

Like many other art dealers, Krevsky, who will conduct business from his Oakland home in the near term, sees the very nature of the trade changing, with the waning of an audience devoted to looking at art in person. "Ten years from now," he said, "traditional galleries will be a thing of the past. The auction houses and art fairs will have taken over, and the Internet."

Prospective buyers of contemporary art are increasingly focusing on the purchases as a speculative investment. Art promotion and sales via the Internet have spurred this development. So has the proliferation of art fairs, where galleries vetted by promoters, often on the basis of their business prominence, set out their wares in booths before throngs of strolling visitors. Over the past decade, art fairs have accounted for an increasing share of art commerce, nationally and internationally.

Auctions affect pricing

Meanwhile, auction houses in the United States and abroad have used competitive bidding to drive up prices of what's called blue-chip art to stratospheric levels, leaving in the dust the lower tiers of the art economy.

As far afield as Toronto and London, mid-level art gallery businesses face extinction by fast-growing, cash-rich enterprises hungry for office space in top locations.

"It's not just that you go out and look for another space," said Patricia Sweetow, whose 77 Geary St. mezzanine space will close by summer. "It's about access - will you reach a new audience? What does it cost? Art fairs give you access to an audience that doesn't depend so much on location, if you can pull it off and you're accepted."

Jim Adler of Adler & Co., the sole gallery with a long-term lease at 77 Geary, said: "We're going into our seventh year here. We had an understanding going in that we could extend our lease, and we were happy to do so. ... I'm really sorry that Rena (Bransten) is leaving ... but the landlord is not Darth Vader, and anyone who characterizes it that way isn't being completely fair. They were predisposed to want to keep a cultural mix in the building."

Growing company

MuleSoft's CEO, Greg Schott, said the company has been growing rapidly and had spread into vacant parts of the building, owned by Yale Properties of La Jolla, before being offered the chance to expand in an adjacent space. "It opened up the possibility to continue growing our company in the same building with people who are passionate about living and working in San Francisco," Schott said.

Some former downtown galleries have already sought refuge on more hospitable turf. The Jack Fischer, George Lawson and Catharine Clark galleries - several forced out of the other downtown art showplace hub, 49 Geary St. - relocated in the fall to the area just northeast of Potrero Hill, now known as Potrero Flats.

The Hosfelt Gallery, displaced more than two years ago from its now-demolished Clementina Street quarters, had already staked out the Potrero Flats neighborhood as a potential gallery hub. But as commercial rents surge in that area, too, Hosfelt and the others may again face the dilemma of whether to stay, relocate or do business another way. Artists in the once-affordable area similarly face a rent squeeze.

"I feel the rise of the art fair phenomenon has damaged the local brick-and-mortar gallery model more than gentrification," said Griff Williams, whose Gallery 16 is on Third Street. "Buyers increasingly flock to these mobile art malls to buy, negotiate and cajole, rather than visit and support the local culture in their neighborhoods. And, too often, galleries willingly turn their backs on their one true asset, their role as a gathering place for people and rigorous ideas."

New chief of L.A.'s MOCA: refocus on the artists

New leader says mission is to resurrect the emphasis on the artists

Los Angeles Times

January 26, 2014

Carolyn Cole, McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Philippe Vergne takes over as MOCA in Los Angeles looks back at a tempestuous period in which it lost board members.

New York --

There are diverse references to art in the office of Philippe Vergne, the man who will be the next director of Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art: a framed photo of artist Walter de Maria's "The Lightning Field," a glossy picture of a work by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, and a porcelain toilet plunger, signed "R. Mutt," a reference to Marcel Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain" - a porcelain urinal.

That last one is a joke from a donor, but the pieces give some indication of what Los Angeles will be getting in the director of one of its foremost art institutions - experience with artists in both Europe and the American West and a wry sense of humor that touches on even the serious subject of contemporary art. Oh, and a healthy dose of ambition.

"This is the artist's institution," said Vergne, 47, paraphrasing the founding principle of MOCA: "The Artist's Museum." "For me, it has to be the most innovative institution in this country."

Turbulent times

The French-born Vergne will arrive after a rocky period for MOCA in which Jeffrey Deitch, an ambitious former art dealer untested in running a museum, isolated artists and staff with his managerial style and the type of exhibitions he chose.

Currently the director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York, Vergne has a collegial reputation. With his floppy blondish hair, French accent and tall stature, he looks the part of a rising star in the art world.

Though he was chief curator and deputy director at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before moving to Dia, Vergne said he has no plans to curate shows himself. Instead, he'll collaborate with curators, artists and board members to reestablish MOCA as it had been envisioned by its founders in 1979.

New York museum

"My role as a director is to enable curators to be what they are at the highest level. By doing that, you enable the artist," he said in his airy office in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. From Chelsea, he oversees operations at Dia:Beacon, the open, modern art museum built in a former Nabisco facility along the Hudson River outside the city, and is working to reestablish Dia in Manhattan in a building the foundation recently purchased.

Vergne was introduced to art by his mother, an art historian, and said that when he was young, seeing an installation by the German performing artist and sculptor Joseph Beuys as well as a Salvador Dali exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris helped open his eyes to the diverse potential of art. (The 1979 Dali exhibition was organized by the Pompidou's Pontus Hulten, who would become MOCA's founding director.)

But familiar as he is with Europe, Vergne said he appreciates how the Los Angeles art scene isn't oriented toward Europe in the way that New York is.

He knows Los Angeles and its art scene well. His wife, curator Sylvia Chivaratanond, is from Los Angeles, and the couple were married in nearby Topanga Canyon. Her family still lives near Calabasas, another L.A.-area town, and the couple take their 2-year-old son to L.A. frequently to visit his grandparents.

Vergne's first visit to Los Angeles was in 1995 to visit the artist Chris Burden in his Topanga Canyon studio. The first installation he curated at the Walker was by L.A. artist Mike Kelley, whose touring retrospective will open at MOCA on March 31.

Vergne said he's excited to revisit Kelley's "Pay for Your Pleasure," which MOCA acquired in 1988, when he arrives in Los Angeles, and grins a child's glee when talking about his favorite works.

Humor rocks

He even makes Los Angeles art jokes - when asked about the millions of Angelenos who have never visited MOCA, he said, "What are they, under a rock? And I'm not talking about LACMA," in reference to Michael Heizer's "Levitated Mass" at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a 340-ton rock positioned above a narrow walkway.

Catherine Opie, one of the artist trustees who resigned from MOCA's board in protest over Deitch's direction of the museum, knows Vergne from a residency at the Walker Art Center more than a decade ago. His personality and sense of humor puts artists at ease, said Opie by phone.

"He is incredibly gifted with being social, and his sense of humor, and he can talk to pretty much anybody," said Opie, who was on MOCA's search committee. Vergne will "be an artist-centric director," she said, and "restore the confidence of artists in L.A. that MOCA is a place to be excited about."

A first step in making MOCA more artist-centric would be to invite the four artists who resigned from the institution's board to rejoin it, said Cindy Bernard, a Los Angeles artist who co-founded MOCA Mobilization in 2008, when the museum came close to shutting down, as a MOCA watchdog of sorts.

Vergne hopes to strike a balance, enhancing MOCA's presence on the international scene while keeping in mind local artists and visitors.

But he'll do all of that alongside the staff and board members who make MOCA what it is, he said.

Institutional knowledge

"I need to work closely with the board and staff in place; they know the institution, they sustain the institution, and they carried it on," he said. "I need their expertise and their institutional history to make the right decisions."

It's his collaborative nature that is most striking to Yasmil Raymond, who worked with Vergne at the Walker Art Center, and then followed him to Dia, where she was appointed curator in 2009.

Vergne always tried to push the boundaries of contemporary art while not deviating too far from the museum's history, she said. He did that by talking frequently to artists, staff members and board members.

"Everything had to be questioned many times and debated, and that line of inquiry is wonderful," she said. "He was really trying to bring together both the vision of the artists and the mission of the institution."

But he has his work cut out for him at MOCA.

A year ago, MOCA was dealing with a series of financial problems. LACMA made an offer to take it over, and talk swirled about establishing partnerships with other museums. But in March the board announced it would remain independent and launched a fundraising campaign to lift the endowment to $100 million. The museum said this month that it had reached that goal and will proceed toward a new goal of $150 million.

Billionaire Eli Broad, one of MOCA's top donors, had been giving $3 million a year for exhibitions, but the five-year agreement in 2008 has ended. His own museum, the Broad, will open across Grand Avenue from MOCA this year.

The Broad will be free except for special exhibitions, while MOCA costs $12, though MOCA has said it is exploring the idea of adjusting its admission fees.

"I like the idea of free, but I don't know if everything should be free," Vergne said.