Gallery Sales Paint a Picture of Troubled Economic Times

The Westside art market is hurting.

Like most other small-business people, art dealers do not jump to share the specifics of their distress. But a few, such as Jack Buick, owner of the John Thomas Gallery in Santa Monica, are frank about the slump in the market.

“Something has caused our sales to drop sharply,” says Buick, who estimates that business is off at least 30% at his gallery, which specializes in the work of new or “emerging” artists.

A precise man, Buick is unwilling to blame the recession for the decline without more facts. But he says he first realized something was wrong last summer when walk-in traffic took a dip. Until then, the number of people who wandered into the gallery had been increasing, an economic boon that was widely attributed to his gallery’s proximity to the so-called art mall, the cluster of popular art galleries in the 800 block of Colorado Avenue.

“Last summer was the first time any of us noticed a drop-off in the traffic,” he says. “It’s been spotty and variable ever since.”

Things got worse. “All summer we were waiting for ‘the season’ in September, and it never happened,” he recalls. Instead, two of the four art galleries that shared his block went out of business. And walk-in traffic took an even greater dive. “If there are four or five galleries in a cluster, you’re going to attract more people than if you have one or two,” he says.

A few Westside art dealers have continued to do extremely well, Buick notes, but he thinks business is even worse overall than dealers are letting on.

“I think a lot of us don’t tell the truth. Sometimes you are talking to a dealer, and he tries to minimize the situation, and then you count his staff and there’s half as many as before.”

Gallery closings continue. “There are nice defensive things to say: ‘It’s not that I’m not making it, it’s just that I’d rather work out of my home.’ ” But, as Buick points out, the fact is that dealers who are making money rarely move to smaller quarters or close down.

Within the profession, the perception is that the current recession is every bit as bad as the economic downturn of the early 1980s, Buick says.

He also thinks a recession is a great time to buy art. “If I wanted to buy a Robert Motherwell, I’d probably want to do it right now before things got going again.”

Buick says he thinks gallery owners are less insulated from economic reality than they would like to think they are. “We try to appear to the world as if we’re above all this, but we’re not. We’re not selling commodities, but we have to sell enough art to pay the bills.”