By F. Lennox Campello

All galleries everywhere, including fabled places like New York and LA, struggle to survive and sell work in order to pay the artists, pay rent, pay for publicity, pay for openings, pay for electricity, pay for the plumber the 2-3 times a year that somebody flushes a sanitary napkin (or one of those indestructible hand towels) down the toilet at an opening and clogs the pipes, pay for websites, etc.

Galleries in the DMV face an especially arduous task in the art of selling art…. Also, art fairs! Every time that someone has tried to do an art fair in the DMV, it has generally been an abject failure.

Selling art is not an easy task for the most adept of galleries and gallerists. The tales of sold out shows and shows that sell out before the openings are sometimes true, but also sometimes exaggerated as a publicity stunt. I know for a fact of a former DC area gallery (no longer around) that used that storytelling line to create this “sold out” aura around the gallery that was fabricated most of the times.

Selling art in the Greater DC region is an especially difficult task, and a hard one to understand because our region has than its share of very, very wealthy people; in fact, according to the IRS, it has the second highest concentration of millionaires in the United States (after Silicon Valley).

Families residing in Bethesda and in Potomac have a median income of $250,000 per capita Income and the average income per single resident stands at $120,363. The median household income for Montgomery County is $132,450.

The average annual household income in Georgetown is around $199,908; around McLean it is around $250,000. Thus… disposable income is not the issue here.

And you can research your head off and find out that generally speaking, the Greater DC area is making more money than most of the rest of the country. But cracking the code and getting most DMV people to actually buy a piece of original artwork is a very difficult process, and unfortunately for the galleries and for artists, they only control a small part of it.

The most difficult part is getting people to actually know that there are galleries, and openings, etc. Getting the potential buyer to the gallery, or aware of the gallery or artist, is the key, and of course the most difficult part.

And because most galleries can’t afford the rents right on the main commercial streets (say M Street in Georgetown, or Bethesda Avenue in Bethesda), they’re were once upon the time (mostly closed now) usually found in clusters just off the main drags (like Canal Square in Georgetown, R Street in Dupont Circle, or to the side of East-West Highway in Bethesda). And galleries, hungry for low rents and bigger spaces, are usually the first ones that begin to revitalize a sketchy neighborhood, such as the former Fusebox Gallery once did for 14th Street corridor, and the Torpedo factory did for all of Old Town Alexandria decades ago.

Yep! let’s not forget that a few decades ago, a handful of artists took an abandoned building in boarded-up Old Town Alexandria, removed forty truckloads of garbage from the building, refurbished it and created the Torpedo Factory and kindled the birth of a new tony neighborhood and destination.

That means that you usually do not have the luxury of “walk-in” traffic of people walking around the nice shops, boutiques, restaurants that line up high end commercial streets like Bethesda Avenue or M Street, etc.

Why are these potential DMV area collectors so hard to bring in from the dark side? A while back I submitted this thesis:

Because they were not exposed to art in their upbringing. Not because their parents were bad, uncultured people, but because their parents were hard-working stiffs who worried about the rent, the electric bill, the food bill and paying for junior’s college so that junior could get a Computer Science degree and go on and invent Amazon or Google.

And in college, junior probably was not exposed to art other than the two or three peripheral courses that he needed to get his electives; certainly not to buying art, or even aware that art was for sale.

And then junior works hard and becomes a millionaire, and now has disposable income out the yingyang, and looks around for expensive toys, because as George Carlin was fond of saying, we all love to collect “stuff.”

And he/she sees ads for expensive cars, expensive furniture, expensive cigars, and he/she reads tons of reviews for the latest trendy restaurants, etc. But he’s never really made aware that there’s also art out there, for our local media has a spectacular sense of apathy towards the visual arts in our area. For decades, while at least they still had a “Galleries” column, The Washington Post was the only major American newspaper that had a freelancer deliver around 25 reviews a year to cover an entire year of DC area gallery shows, and to this they allow their chief art critic to review only museum shows. Very little attention is placed upon our art galleries by the newspapers, certainly not commensurate with the amount of print space that they give theatre, music, dance, fashion, food, etc.

I’m looking at you Bethesda Magazine or Washingtonian.

So junior doesn’t know that the DC area has a really good and creative visual arts scene… granted that about 75% of the galleries which were around a decade ago have long closed.

Thus, when junior takes a stroll through the city’s main shopping streets, he doesn’t know about the side streets where the galleries are, but sees the furniture stores passing for art galleries that sell the pretty, expensive wall décor “pictures,” and then junior assumes that this “stuff” is art.

And he drops a ton of money for a pretty “picture.”

But instead, it is the art galleries that go out of business: Veerhoff (after 125 years), eklektikos, Fusebox, Fraser, Alla Rogers, MOCA, Parrish, Marsha Mateyka, Irvine, Baumgartner, etc. And only superheroes like Margery Goldberg’s Zenith Gallery continue to survive.

Every once in a while, junior – usually by accident – discovers a reputable art gallery, and sometimes a real collector is then born. But for every one of those, thousands of others remain on the dark side, or worse still, think that they have to go to New York to find contemporary art.

About the Author: F. Lennox Campello’s art news, information, gallery openings, commentary, criticism, happenings, opportunities, and everything associated with the global visual arts scene with a special focus on the Greater Washington, DC area has been a premier source for the art community for over 20 years. Since 2003, his blog has been the 11th highest ranked art blog on the planet with over SIX million visitors.