Museums provide the first draft of art history. They decide which artists get to share wall space with masters like Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Picasso.
Choosing which artists to exhibit requires museums to consider ultrasubjective questions about, say, the artistic merit of a painting or the historical relevance of a sculpture. The task has traditionally fallen to curators, who maintain their scholarly independence and grapple with the complexities of mounting shows.
But in recent years, museums have increasingly turned to another source for logistical and, at times, financial support for their shows: major commercial art galleries.
The scale of these partnerships was largely unexamined until now. This morning, The Times published an analysis by my colleague Julia Halperin and me of more than 350 solo exhibitions by contemporary artists in New York’s biggest art museums over the last six years.
We found that nearly a quarter of those exhibitions featured artists who were represented by just 11 major galleries. These were no ordinary mom-and-pop dealerships but “mega-galleries,” as professionals call them — an elite slice of the art world that accounts for a sizable chunk of the $57.5 billion art market.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how the increasingly close relationship between museums and commercial galleries is shaping whose work is shown to the public.
Painting by numbers
Mega-galleries emerged as a phenomenon of the ascendant market for contemporary art in the early 2000s, when wealthy collectors became less interested in buying up old masters and more interested in cozying up to living artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Some dealerships rapidly expanded as a result. The best known today is owned by Larry Gagosian, whose global network of galleries represents more than 100 artists and estates.
Museums have typically downplayed their relationships with mega-galleries. But as traditional corporate sponsors pull back and attendance has yet to rebound from the pandemic, they are increasingly turning to galleries for support.
Some experts said that the overlap between mega-galleries and major museums was to be expected, considering both groups are eager to spotlight the field’s most influential figures. But others warn that such collaborations can raise questions of a conflict of interest, since museum shows typically lift the reputations of artists and the prices that their works command — which can help their gallerists profit handsomely.
A New No. 1
The spring season offers a particularly stark example of how a single gallery can dominate New York’s major museums.
Four of the city’s most prestigious museums are mounting exhibits showcasing artists who are represented by a single gallery: Hauser & Wirth, a Swiss juggernaut with 19 locations around the world, including three in Manhattan.
Their artists are now being shown at some of the buzziest exhibits of the season:
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the Whitney Museum of American Art’s survey of works by Amy Sherald, the painter behind Michelle Obama’s official portrait
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the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Rashid Johnson show
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the Museum of Modern Art’s Jack Whitten retrospective
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and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming Lorna Simpson show.
Some in New York’s art world have taken to calling this “Hauser spring.”
The gallery has provided logistical support to most of those shows and financial support to some — only the Museum of Modern Art said it had a policy of not accepting funding from art galleries. Gallery officials said that museum support was a key part of their long-term strategy to promote artists.
That strategy has clearly been successful. Our analysis found that Hauser & Wirth is now the most influential gallery in New York’s museum scene, despite the fact that most Americans would be unable to identify its founders, Iwan and Manuela Wirth, from a lineup.
Marc Payot, the gallery’s president, struck a humble tone when I asked him about the development. “It is way less about our influence but really a testament to the artists,” he said, explaining that the artists had their own relationships with each of the museums. “It’s easy to be cynical, but it’s sincere.”
THE LATEST NEWS
Pope Francis’ Funeral
Pope Francis’ funeral, which took place on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica, was solemn and majestic, Jason Horowitz writes. A homily by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, captured Francis’s humility and inclusivity. “He was a pope among the people,” Cardinal Re said. “He was also a pope attentive to the signs of the times.”
World leaders and monarchs descended on Rome to pay their respects. Zoom in on an annotated photo for a closer look at who was in attendance.
International
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A man plowed a car into a Filipino street festival in Vancouver, killing at least nine people. The police have taken the driver, who is 30 years old, into custody.
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A large explosion at a port in southern Iran killed at least 25 people and injured over 1,000.
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After a terrorist attack in Kashmir last week, India appears to be building a case to strike Pakistan. The world’s major powers are distracted and doing little to reduce tensions.
Immigration
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In Florida, ICE and state law enforcement officials arrested nearly 800 migrants in a four-day operation.
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Pam Bondi, the attorney general, defended the arrest of a Wisconsin judge accused of shielding an immigrant from federal agents. Read what we know about the arrest.
More on the Trump Administration
Other Big Stories
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A Times investigation revealed how complex failures led to a fatal plane crash above the Potomac River in January.
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A Florida judge sentenced a former Disney World employee to three years in prison for hacking menus to change prices and remove allergen warnings on some items.
THE SUNDAY DEBATE
Did Francis’ modern approach help the Catholic Church?
Yes. His liberal speeches presented a more tolerant and open church. He also sought to forcefully tackle child sex abuse. “Francis was something new and, for the church, badly needed — a man who saw clearly that a new century had dawned and that the world had evolved,” The Washington Post’s editorial board writes.
No. He focused on modernizing the institution at the expense of traditional faith, which weakened the church. “The church should go back to the beginning, shift from modernity to eternity, ask the world to train its eye on Christ,” The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan writes.
FROM OPINION
In Turkey, protests against the arrest of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political opponent have filled the streets. World powers must speak up as well, the Editorial Board argues.
Here’s a column by Ross Douthat on “blackpilling,” a nihilistic worldview.
MORNING READS
Trending online yesterday: Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who sued Prince Andrew for sexual assault, died by suicide at 41.
Lives Lived: Jed Gould was an influential Los Angeles disc jockey, known as Jed the Fish, who used his off-kilter sensibility and deep musical knowledge to shine a light on artists like the Cure at the groundbreaking New Wave and alternative rock station KROQ-FM in the 1980s and ’90s. He died at 69.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
“Hope,” by Pope Francis: Pope Francis’ death was all over the news this week, as was analysis of his legacy, his funeral, his blind spots and his connection with believers of all faiths. But if you want to know what the pontiff made of his own life, look no further than his best-selling memoir, which came out in January. The book opens with the story of his grandparents’ emigration from Italy to Argentina in 1929, a legacy of struggle and tenacity that imprinted itself upon Francis until the end of his life. “I too could have been among the outcasts of today,” he writes, “so that one question is always lodged in my heart: Why them and not me?” He weighs in on war, environmental crisis, social policy, technology and the future of the church with humility and candor.
More on books
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In “More Everything Forever,” Adam Becker scrutinizes Silicon Valley’s “ideology of technical salvation.” Read our review here.
BELIEVING
A passage from a book has lingered with me for a decade. In the National Book Award winning “Let the Great World Spin,” Colum McCann writes of a character named Corrigan who wants “a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday.”
I’ve always wondered whether that was something McCann wanted himself. His description was too real, too knowing. I was curious what life experiences had enabled him to write that line — what moments had shaped his beliefs.
So when I set out to report “Believing,” a project about how religion and spirituality shapes people’s lives, I asked him. He wrote an essay in response. It’s about biking across America, searching for a faith. In the essay, “The Church of the Open Road,” he writes of a “quarrel with God under the bullet-holed stars.” He also describes what he found in the dust and grime of his own journey.
Read the essay here.
For more: Sign up to receive the latest installments of “Believing” in your inbox.
THE INTERVIEW
This week’s subject for The Interview is the writer Isabel Allende, whose new book, “My Name Is Emilia del Valle,” will be published on May 6. Allende talked to Gilbert Cruz, who is filling in for Lulu Garcia-Navarro this week, about writing as an act of remembering her mother, her daughter who died young and her home country of Chile.
You had to go to Venezuela, because there was a military coup in Chile. What was the moment you knew, “It’s time for me to go”?
Although things happened very quickly in Chile, we got to know the consequences slowly, because they don’t affect you personally immediately. So you think: Well, I can live with this. Well, it can’t be that bad. So you are in denial for a long time, because you don’t want things to change so much. And then one day it hits you personally. For me, it was several things. At the beginning, I was hiding people in my house, because we didn’t know the consequences. We had no idea that if that person was arrested and forced to say where they had been, I would be arrested. Maybe my children would be tortured in front of me.
But you learn that later. By the time I was directly threatened, I said, OK, I’m leaving. And my idea was that I was going to leave for a couple of months and then come back. So I went alone to Venezuela. And then a month later, my husband realized that I shouldn’t go back. And so he left. He just closed the door, locked the entrance door of the house with everything it contained and left to reunite with me in Venezuela. We never saw that house again.
Read more of the interview here.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Click here to read this week’s magazine.
IN THE COMMENTS
My story about a woodpecker who has broken the side-view mirrors on at least 20 vehicles in a small New England town captivated readers, many of whom have themselves encountered pesky birds. They offered all manner of D.I.Y. hacks for residents of the Squam Hill section of Rockport, Mass., who have resorted to wrapping plastic bags, towels and sweatshirts around mirrors. Some even dabbled in avian psychology.
“It is so refreshing to hear from people who understand and appreciate the foibles of nature,” one reader wrote. “Rather than a demand to remove or kill, they are bonding together over a bully of a bird.”
A reader from Virginia recalled their own experience with a towhee — a fancy name for oversized sparrow — “who decided our car mirrors were his enemy.”
“Ended up putting hair bonnets over the mirrors and he gave up,” the reader said. “We still keep them under the front seats. Just in case.”
A homeowner in Maine fretted about a pileated woodpecker that had drilled into an old maple tree and shared the wacky deterrents he found online, including “an electronic spider that drops down in front of the bird” and “a Mylar balloon with the image of an eyeball.”
Some readers took the woodpecker’s perspective. “He is looking for food,” one noted in an email. “He is just doing it in the wrong place. Poor little bird.”
In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Margaux Laskey shared some of her favorite recipes of late including mie goreng — sweet-smoky-salty Indonesian noodles — salmon burgers, and cheesy ham and tomato soup.