Slow Sales
When a commercial gallery closes, it sends a certain kind of ripple through the art scene--a different kind of ripple from when a really good artist decides to leave town, or when an alternative space finally throws in the towel. All of them have to do, however subtly, with the failure of an investment (work, time, money) to return anything (fame, an audience, money), and the actuality of such a failure causes a little rip in the fabric of the denial that lets us believe that art is only about ideas, craft, spirit, whatever.
Perhaps this is overstating things. In other cities, galleries close without the handwringing and keening that happens around here. But when Esther Luttikhuizen and Brad Claypool announced last week that they would be closing, after four years, the Esther Claypool Gallery, I got that same old sinking feeling: How could it be that, in a city that seems to love art so much, there aren't enough serious collectors to keep a good gallery open?
Luttikhuizen told me, during a somber chat we had following the announcement, that when she drew up a list of all the people who had bought art from the gallery, the sheer number of them astonished her; but the fact was that none of them bought art in sufficient quantity to keep the place open. In any case, there it is, the fragment that completes the circle: it's all very well to go to openings, talk about art, profess to love it. But someone has to buy it.
All of that having been said--and without eulogizing too very much (they're not dead, after all)--Brad and Esther were some of the damn nicest people in this art scene: generous, smart, interesting, up to date. Theirs was one of few galleries in Seattle to throw weight behind regional art without insisting on any brand of regionalism. Not every show in their gallery made my socks roll up and down, but it was there that I discovered Alexander Schweder's philosophical toilets, Nancy Blum's obsessive patterns, and Pam Gazalé's salt sculptures. I learned a lot from Brad and Esther, and I'll miss their gallery very much.
