How Pace Gallery Broke Itself

Pace gallery is the Fyre Festival of mega-galleries: all branding, hype, ambition, and promises of a future that never arrives. Of the four mega-galleries, Pace is the purest expression of a 20-year art-world belief that scale equals significance. 

Yes, the gallery still represents great artists, mounts serious exhibitions, and sells important art. But more so than its peers, Pace feels as though it is built around a fantasy of endless growth and hype and the assumption that bigger automatically means better. Every year has brought another expansion, a cockamamie initiative, dodgy platform, or some form of reinvention. These are often followed by closings, restructurings, or strategic retreats. The vision was always just over the horizon. 

Now the reckoning many saw coming has arrived. With a thud. 

The story recalls the TV show Succession. In this case, the trouble started in 2010 as the patriarch, Arne Glimcher (whom I do not know), handed over the keys to his son, Marc (whom I have never met). Things immediately went off the rails. Suddenly, the whole enterprise seemed to be about size: new offices, new departments, new initiatives, new artists, new ventures. The gallery website once listed more than 135 artists and estates! (Keep in mind that by my unofficial tally at the other mega-galleries, Gagosian lists around 250 artists, Hauser & Wirth about 100, and Zwirner between 75 and 80.)

Unlike Arne, who discovered artists over the long haul and shepherded their careers, Marc has only acquired. Everything he did seemed meant for measuring. Metrics. But what gets measured gets managed and what gets managed is soon mistaken for what matters. That’s Pace under Marc Glimcher. 

It didn’t work out. Last Friday, Pace announced it was cutting roughly 50 artists and 50 staff members. Reportedly, many of the staffers now out of jobs learned it from the announcement in the New York Times. The gallery spun it as a return to fundamentals. It isn’t. It’s an admission that one of the defining ideas of the contemporary-art world — scale for scale’s sake — has run amok at Pace. Obsession, love, risk, and conviction gave way to growth as an end in itself. More artists. More cities. More fairs. More mergers. More departments. More “experiences.” More everything. Expansion itself became the self-justifying, self-perpetuating product.

It was a regrettable era, one that saw Pace chasing immersive experiences, NFTs, blockchain platforms, experiential entertainment, a Silicon Valley expansion, and “Superblue.” I still have no idea what this last one was. It was gallery as theme park, technology company, and Instagram backdrop. Pace chased almost every art-world fad and growth strategy of the last decade. 

In a better time, the great galleries of the 20th century possessed distinct identities. You knew what Leo Castelli represented. You know what Paula Cooper represents. Not so at Pace. 

Many are tempted to decry all mega-galleries. Maybe. Yet the other three giants all have recognizable sensibilities, schemes, and strengths. Again, not Pace. It was more like a clearinghouse. The elder Glimcher built a great program rooted in passion for artists, art history, and culture. It was an aging gallery, but it was a gallery with a mission and ideas. That gallery is gone.

The most devastating assessment of Pace’s announcement that it was dropping artists came from one of the ones cut loose, Glenn Kaino. He observed the gallery’s model had been “optimized for a vision of the art world that never materialized.” 

The West 25th Street headquarters is a perfect symbol of that sentiment. Opened in 2019 after a renovation costing more than $100 million, the eight-story black-brick structure was presented as a triumph. Yet walking through it often feels less like entering a gallery than entering an infrastructure project, a future luxury condominium. It is architecture of projected importance, not intimacy, a place where the art looks terrible. Today it costs around $9 million a year in rent alone.

Marc Glimcher himself admits that his gallery had reached a point where it became “virtually impossible to have a program that presents a strategic, unified vision.” Perhaps he deserves credit for saying this — but then, who was responsible for Pace’s current state of affairs? Arne, for his part, told the Times, “I think this whole mega gallery thing is ridiculous and also unsupportable.”

The most shocking part of Pace’s downsizing announcement was the callous way it was made. A list of artists no longer represented by the gallery was circulated in the open. It felt like a public execution. I cannot recall another gallery handling a separation on this scale in such a visible, impersonal way. One couldn’t help feeling sympathy for artists who suddenly found themselves transformed into statistics in a restructuring plan. 

Galleries are supposed to protect artists. Even difficult separations are usually handled quietly, privately, respectfully. Instead, dozens of artists found themselves effectively listed in a public accounting and then left to explain the situation to the world. Whatever the intention, the move felt much like the current Pace itself — chaotic, careless, and a little undignified. 

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