Time’s running out for Cork Street, one of the world’s pre-eminent venues for the fine arts. Take a moment and append your name to the e-petition and let’s do whatever it takes to save something unique in the art world.
What was strongly hinted by friend and colleague Elliot Lee is now official- art galleries along vaunted Cork Street have been told by the new property owner that their leases will not be extended beyond June of next year. Although it is reported that the effected dealers, including that most venerable of modern art venues Mayor Gallery, will be offered some sort of compensation, whatever the offer it will only amount to a token compared to the damage done. In a fickle business like the art and antiques trade, anything that interrupts trading is for all intents and purposes a death knell.
As with so much of the West End, as with Madison Avenue in New York, dealers are displaced by mass market retailers, mostly clothing, nearly all of whom are outlets of chains publically owned whose volume of business and stronger capital structure enables them to pay far, far greater rent than galleries, nearly all of which are privately owned and single outlet.
One has to ask the question how many Fendi stores are needed in the world? Mind you, I’m not trying to deprive Karl Lagerfeld with a way to make a living, but the original location in Rome seemed, as it had for the first 75 years of its existence, adequate to serve the beau monde. The proliferation of international couture functioning as it does now to push out locally distinctive business, ultimately yields to shopping venues that might be seen anywhere. Why visit Rome to shop the Via Condotti when one can go to the local mall? Givenchy at Wal-Mart? The mind reels.
I hate to consider the prospect of London, in the current case, moving toward losing its identity as arguably the world’s leading art market city. What provides more for the ferment of the cutting edge than leading private galleries whose ownership maintains the vision and courage to mount exhibitions that might otherwise remain unseen? Where would post impressionism be if not for the groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914? City planners, certainly in London, realize that any number of specific urban characteristics- and that prominently includes art galleries- contribute to the benefit of the commonweal by their presence, consequently yielding development of conservation areas as a safe haven- but in the short term, who can stand up to the financial onslaught of mass market retailers?
A further irony here, more apparent perhaps in the US but moving inexorably toward Europe, the advent of internet shopping has thinned the bricks and mortar presence of all manner of storefront, even luxury retailers. Witness the vacancies along vaunted thoroughfares like our own Post Street in San Francisco, a victim to the inexorable phenomenon of the virtual displacing the actual. Though vacancies now ostensibly making leaseholds more affordable, the predations of the last several years have now rendered galleries to fill in the gaps the status of ‘former’ and nothing but a memory.