If you spend more than 20 minutes on a gallery crawl in Tribeca, Bloomsbury, or Kreuzberg, you’re likely to overhear someone talking in hushed tones about the worrying state of the art market.
But such doom-and-gloom threatens to overshadow another equally relevant truth: The past five years have seen a flourishing new crop of ambitious galleries taking root in cities around the globe. The pandemic ushered in a wave of experimentation, of why-not-now, that has enriched the art world tremendously. Some arts workers moved back to their hometowns and decided to take advantage of lower rents to open their first galleries; others haggled, bartered, scrimped, and saved in order to afford a space in more established commercial art hubs.
Young dealers play an essential role in the art ecosystem, scouting artists who often have not yet developed steady markets and building careers from the ground up. In many ways, the entire rest of the market hinges on their willingness to take risks...
