The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 8: Barbara Gladstone
Legendary art dealer Barbara Gladstone joins us for a very rare interview from the studio in New York. What would she do differently if she started a gallery today? “I probably wouldn't do it,” she says.
Barbara has been at the top of the business since the 1980s and now represents more than 70 artists and estates. She tells us how she started out with a small print business, and how things developed from there. We talk about art now, the future of the gallery, and what she would change about the art market, including the “idea that collecting is shopping, because I think that there is something that art adds to life,” she says. “What is really interesting is that it's not over,” she says. “It's not even over when the artist dies because there's constant evaluation and re-thinking going on. And when you put one work in proximity to another work 50 years later, something new can happen. I mean, I think that's why it's important.”
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! A podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns.
[Audio of guests]
This time we’re bringing you a rare interview with the legendary art dealer, Barbara Gladstone. It was fantastic to be able to get together in the studio in New York.
Barbara has been at the top of the business since the 1980s and now represents more than 70 artists and estates including Matthew Barney, Maureen Gallace, Philippe Parreno, Ed Atkins, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jannis Kounellis, and more recently David Salle and Carrie Mae Weems. She tells us how she started out with a small print business and how things developed from there. We’ll talk about art, the future of the gallery, and what Barbara would change about the art world if she could.
After so many years reporting on the art market, I really enjoyed recording this conversation because, for me, it gets at what drives a true art dealer—the passion and obsession, the absolute unwavering focus on the art, the artist, and a life spent in pursuit of solutions and the discovery of extraordinary artistic secrets.
Let’s go.
Charlotte Burns: Barbara, thank you so much for being here. I'm really, really thrilled that we're here together in New York today. Thank you very much for joining me.
Barbara Gladstone: At long last. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: At long last. I thought I'd start with a ‘what if.’ What if you were starting a gallery today? Would you do it differently?
Barbara Gladstone: I probably wouldn't do it. I probably am a creature of my beginnings and what it meant to me then and how much everything has changed. I'm still very traditional and I have traditional values, which once you introduce social media and the internet and all of the technical advances that have taken place, the business has completely changed as it would, but I never foresaw that and I never thought about that. I always thought about a person coming in and looking at something and being engaged or not engaged by it. And that it was my job to introduce it as best I could to work with the artists who exemplified, as best they could, whatever it was they were depicting. And that one-on-one relationship was very essential and important. And that is something which exists far less now.
Charlotte Burns: Do you think that is because of technology, that that's just got further away?
Barbara Gladstone: I think it starts with that because I think that there was no way to look at art without looking at art. You had to actually go and stand in front of something. You had to do the travel. You had to be faced with the scale, with the surface; if it was sculpture, walk around it. You don't have to do any of that. And I am constantly amazed that people actually spend very real money on things that they're not seeing directly.
Charlotte Burns: Does that change the way that the artists make the art?
Barbara Gladstone: I think it changes the way young artists make the art. I don't think it changes the way artists that have always been making art do. But you can't not be affected by the technology that's available to you. So when we were starting out, we used to have the photographers come and they would make these very glamorous 8x10 transparencies. And they were beautiful because they were backlit. You'd put them on a light table, and the light would come through the back, and everything looks translucent and beautiful. But everything is backlit on a screen so you don't have to do that. Therefore, I think that some things are enhanced so much by the presentation on a screen that you're not seeing the true quality of what it is to be in front of it.
Charlotte Burns: It looks better than it does in reality?
Barbara Gladstone: Well, it certainly looks different. It looks…it's somewhat enhanced. It's like putting makeup on or something. I think it makes objects look more desirable.
Charlotte Burns: And to some extent, are we living in a world where that matters less? That the reality of the object matters less than the image of the object?
Barbara Gladstone: I think that's what we're getting to, yes. Yes, I think it's inevitable because one becomes the substitute for the other. I remember that I heard a lecture by Jean Baudrillard one time, and somebody had asked him to define postmodernism, and he said, “Let's see. Picture Central Park, picture a bench in Central Park, picture an older woman sitting on the bench, minding her grandchild. And a spectator walks by and said, ‘What a beautiful child.’ And the grandmother says, ‘You should see the pictures.’ And I think that was probably 1984 when he said that. But this is the reality.
Charlotte Burns: So often when you talk to dealers, they say you become a dealer with your generation, you find the artists of your generation, you find the collectors of your generation, and then you kind of all grow up together. And you are often described as being a dealer that's part of a generation of dealers. But if you look at the stable of artists you represent, you're not really defined by the artist that you came up with. You work with all of those artists and they're still there, but you also represent for instance artists working at the cutting edge of AI. So even though technology shifted around you and that's changed the way that the experience of showing and dealing art has changed, your curiosity for artists working in that technology seems to have shifted the program of the gallery significantly. How do you stay so connected to the art of today?
Barbara Gladstone: What has always interested me is that whatever we see from a historical view was very new at the time it was done, otherwise it would not have stood the test of time. And I have always been fascinated to observe that artists should be the ones who are holding a mirror up to our culture and showing us so that we learn about ourselves from artists, I believe. I think that's always been true. I think artists presage the camera, artists presage a lot of things because their minds run ahead. Therefore, if Dan Flavin found beauty in a fluorescent light bulb, nobody did that before. It was a purely utilitarian object, therefore, that's interesting because he's of his time. If Bruce Nauman does neon, he's of his time. Also [Lucio] Fontana, who was not young at the time, was of his time when he did neon. So people, artists who find beauty in what's around them, not necessarily sable brushes and oil paints, but whatever the material of that culture is—that's why animation is somewhat prominent today, that's why a lot of the things that we see are tools that were never thought of as art tools. But to the artist's brain, it's something that they can work with and that makes it into something else. And that something else is art. So that's always interested me because I think it was always true.
Charlotte Burns: What was the first work of art that did that for you? That you looked at and thought, “Oh, that's made me see something in the world around me that I couldn't have got to myself.”
Barbara Gladstone: Hard to say. It's hard to say because I was interested historically…could I say Giotto? Could I say that I would say Quattrocento Italy because they were figuring out perspective. They were figuring out 3D space. And you can see in every decade of that century that they get a little closer and a little closer and a little closer until they get to the high Renaissance. And I think that was what always interested me. If you studied that period, you could look at a painting that you've never seen before, and I would say you would know within 10 years what decade it was painted in. Because before that they didn't have the ability to do it, and then suddenly somebody did. And everybody did.
So I think it's progressive, it's a series of discoveries. I think, in other words, using AI now is going to turn into something artistically, there's no question in my mind. It has to because artists look at a tool. Painters are using AI now. We have one painter who's using AI, and it's really successful. And I can't wait to show them because I think they're really eye-opening because if I think of AI, I am horrified because I think it will take over the world, it will change everything, and it will change everything, and not necessarily for the better, but some artist is going to use it only as a tool to make their art and somehow turn the intention of it into something else. And that something else is, I think, what's interesting. And that's always happening.
So there's always something to get turned on by because there's always somebody who's doing something for the first time that you never thought of or I never thought of.
Charlotte Burns: So there's a kind of through line for you of this connection to progress, this connection to some kind of advancement, that's an interest.
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, hate to say it, but I think it's called the avant-garde. It's like before the rest of us. It's artists see with eyes that are ahead of my eyes.
Charlotte Burns: What are the right ingredients in developing artists? What criteria help you reach clarity about someone who can make it, someone who can sustain it in terms of their vision and their art practice?
Barbara Gladstone: It's not so much my clarity. There are different ways to judge art. There are artists who I think deserve more than society is willing to give them because I think they have a very serious program and I think that they're doing something and I think that what we see right now are a lot of resuscitations of careers that were ignored because for some reason they just were not at the cutting edge or in the limelight. But when you look at certain painters and it happens throughout history, like El Greco was not popular for a long time because they look too modern. But then modernism caught up and then he became very acceptable. And I think that happens regularly with artists, that there are some artists who just do what they do and deserve more from the time that they live in than they may ever get. And there are some who get too much. Because they're exactly pleasing the public.
Charlotte Burns: How do you balance that in How do you balance that in a commercial program?
Barbara Gladstone: I don't know. I don't know. You try. You try. You do the best you can. I can't influence someone else to do something, to see something if they really don't want to see it. Or sometimes you have to wait a long time until that happens.
Charlotte Burns: Patience.
Barbara Gladstone: Salvo, for instance, who changed from arte povera to these slightly kitschy landscape paintings in the 70s, was more or less laughed at. And then you get to the past 10 years, and there are a lot of things that are looking at him. A lot of painters who are young and very prominent are clearly influenced. So it wasn't for nothing. Artists are always looking at other artists. It just has to fit into a kind of social construct as well as an aesthetic one.
Charlotte Burns: You also produce artists’ work at a level of complexity and production that most galleries just don't these days. And this commitment as a producer stands out as complex against a market that often feels conservative. How do you think about that in terms of the gallery's program, in terms of the business, in terms of supporting the artists, when you're taking on complex production? How do you think it through?
Barbara Gladstone: I usually don't. I usually just do it. Hang on to your seat and do it. I believe it will all work out in the end but it's certainly more chancy than selling beautiful paintings. But I like beautiful paintings too, so there’s a balance and there's also a desire to support that kind of work because I think that the artists who do that kind of work, that requires production and uses technology, are teaching us something about ourselves that I find worthwhile.
Charlotte Burns: Are there shows that artist stage that, at the time you're like, “Eh” and then afterward you think, “Oh yeah, maybe.” Does that ever happen that you didn't take much from it at the time, but maybe a few years later you saw more in it.
Barbara Gladstone: I don't know how to answer that because I think that somehow for me it has to make some sense historically. I mean it has to fit into something that I understand or come to understand, that maybe perhaps I didn't in the beginning or when I first saw it. And there are things that do grow on me, and I like those things a lot, sometimes best of all. And sometimes I see something which has the germ of something which turns out in the fullness of time to really be something else but something fabulous.
I'm thinking now because our next show on 24th Street is a painting show by Victor Mann. I saw Victor Mann at the Romanian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 18 years ago, perhaps. And he wasn't even doing paintings. He had a little radio, he had a little figure, he had this little vignette. And I don't know why but there was something about it that was interesting, really. I met him, I started to talk to him. He turned away from installation and really, really, really toward painting. In terms of technique and the way it's painted, the way it's under painted, the whole history of painting, the whole study that he made of historic painting, and he's completely a painter at this point. And when he first appealed to me, it wasn't anything like what he does now, but there was something about it that had a kind of personality.
Charlotte Burns: So maybe that's what it is. Some something that just stands out to you.
Barbara Gladstone: Something, yeah. There's just something that makes you notice it. And it's the thing itself that makes you notice it. And sometimes, I've had the experience where I've been on a trip to Europe and doing something every minute of every day and seeing several museum shows and I see a lot of things, and it all looks good, but it all dissolves into the stuff of the entire experience. And six months later, I'll wake up one morning and in my mind's eye is this photograph that I had seen six months before, and it's like in my head. And then I have to go and look where I saw it, what it was, who it was. It happens. It happens that the image works on my brain in a way that it comes back to me. And I always pay attention to that because it's very often the strongest impulse because if it won't let me alone, then I should pay attention to it.
Charlotte Burns: Do you catalog things? Do you take photographs? Or is it just your mind's archive?
Barbara Gladstone: I hardly ever take photographs because I'm a terrible photographer. I'm terrible with digitization. I'm terrible. I can talk on the phone. That's the level of my technology. And anything that I can't do that way, someone else has to do for me.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Okay. I'm going to ask you a personal question. So, you opened your gallery when you were 40, twice divorced with three sons—which I find immensely inspiring. You'd been interested in the law when you were young, you were an art history professor when you started the gallery, and you'd once said that very few of your friends had career ideas for themselves when you were growing up. What made you open your own gallery? What made you think, “I'm going to do this now?”
Barbara Gladstone: I don't, I can't actually answer it because I don't know that it was so much a conscious decision because I think in those days I didn't really take responsibilities for making decisions on my own behalf. I had a friend who was a print dealer who introduced me to someone else who ran the print department of a larger gallery. As a collector with my limited funds at that time, if you, well, you don't remember the seventies, but, there were a few very important artists. Period. And then those artists made prints. So if you couldn't have a Frank Stella painting, you could have a Frank Stella print. Or you couldn't have a Jasper Johns painting, you could have a print. There were very active, very good prints that were made. They were a few thousand dollars. And so I collected prints because that was what I could do. And so I started to work with this other person and sell prints. But there was something called the Print Newsletter that someone named Jackie Brody ran and I used to subscribe to it. And you could list in the back the prints that you had and people would buy them. And so I bought a print, I listed it, someone bought it, I rolled it up, I put it in a tube, I sent it, I bought another. Very boring. And at a certain moment, I thought, “There have to be other artists, there just have to be.” And at that time, Artists Space was very nascent and the Drawing Center and they used to have slide registries. So I would go and look and see artists who were unaffiliated and just came to New York and in those days artists could afford to come to New York and every September you'd have an influx of artists who had just graduated from various colleges all over the place, and they would go to Tribeca or someplace like that, and take some rotten place and turn it into something livable, and work, and sleep. And I would go visit them, become friendly with them, talk with them, eat with them, and started to have a works on paper gallery, which, I never thought beyond that because I didn't think of myself as being in business. I just thought “This is what I can do.” And it just developed that way, out of curiosity and seeing more and knowing more and meeting this person and making a studio visit and the world was much smaller then, it was much more available. Everyone was more or less together.
Charlotte Burns: When did that shift for you? Because you said you didn't think at first you could run a business yourself. So you started it with this other woman. When did you start conceiving of yourself as a person who was running a business?
Barbara Gladstone: Well, we didn't last very long because I was so opinionated and I realized very quickly that I wanted my own way. We broke up and I started a slightly larger gallery where we showed unique work. Life was much more intimate in those days. I liked the work of Nancy Grossman and I went to visit her and she allowed me to show some heads that she had made, clad in black leather. They had a kind of S and M feeling but they were very classical at the same time and I was always fascinated by them before but didn't know how to know her or meet her, but somehow once I was in the swim, so to speak, it was easy.
And Nancy said to me, “Would you mind staying late one night because my friend is a photographer, and he's the one I would like to have take the photographs,” and I said, “Sure, I'll stay.” I had a staff of two, by the way, so I was the one who stayed. And the door opened and the photographer was Robert Mapplethorpe. He was in full leather. He worked at night. He worked until about, I would say, midnight. And then he said to me, “Do you want to get something to eat?” So we went out and we talked until probably two or three in the morning—and I am not a night person. And the next afternoon he called me and he said, “I think we're going to be friends.” And he introduced me to a lot of people. So, life was very accessible then.
Charlotte Burns: And so you started to think, “I can do this,” then. And how did your vision for the gallery grow from there?
Barbara Gladstone: There was no organized plan. It was at a certain moment. So my first gallery was on 57th Street and we used to have to get the photographers to come photograph the show. And they couldn't park their car between 4 and seven, everything was difficult. And so I just said, “It's better to go downtown because, first of all, the artists live downtown.” I lived uptown. The artists live downtown. Everything seemed to be happening there. The galleries that I like to go to were there. So I found a space downtown. In no time at all, I ended up moving downtown because it was a commute to go from 83rd Street, where I lived to Soho. So everything happened in a kind of organic way that wasn't planned but was serendipitous. Doors opened and you walk through them. I think.
Charlotte Burns: You followed the opportunities.
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: And you made them.
Barbara Gladstone: I don't think I made them. I think that I took advantage of them when they presented themselves.
Charlotte Burns: But something in you must have wanted that life, to pursue it in that way. There must have been something in you that felt that you wanted more. To have even gone and looked at those slide libraries, to gone and have contacted those people. Other people around you weren't doing that.
Barbara Gladstone: Yes, I think, on the other hand, it wasn't like a wild ambition. It was more a kind of curiosity because I don't think I would have taken credit for actually saying that was what I wanted to do.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, it's an instinct. Are you still following that same instinct now?
That same curiosity?
Barbara Gladstone: More or less, but now I have a fabulous staff and a lot of young people who are very tuned in to everything that's happening and I hear a lot from them. I mean it's quite different now because it's the whole world. There are artists everywhere and there are opportunities everywhere. Globalism has taken over. If you think back to the 80s, there were very, it was a lot of white men and I do remember that the 80s female artists, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Simmons, a lot of them were the beneficiaries of the struggles of the 70s feminists who really had a battle. But they weren't necessarily making work that was about being a woman. They were just making work.
Charlotte Burns: There was an article about women art dealers in W Magazine that you were featured in and there was a quote by Marian Goodman in that article that I thought was quite interesting. In the article, it said that all these legendary female dealers, including you, “That for all their contributions, clout, and staying power… female gallerists have historically been under-recognized and overshadowed.” And Marian Goodman said, “Men are more impressed by men than by women when it comes right down to it.” Do you agree with that?
Barbara Gladstone: Not, not completely, not completely. I think along came Mary Boone and that was the end of that because she felt entitled to the attention, entitled to the ambition. And she was the first woman that I could think of who admitted it. Because it was a very polite thing to do. When I was just in graduate school, I would look at Eleanor [Ward] at the Stable Gallery, I would look at Virginia Zabriskie, I would look at Ileana Sonnabend, I would look at people like that with huge respect, but they were all very genteel, and I think that for a lot of very well educated women, having a gallery was something that was not seen as a business, per se. It was like a salon more than anything else. It was harmless and lovely for a dilettante, but not a serious thing. When we look back now, when you think about somebody like Peggy Guggenheim, they were powerhouses, these women.
Charlotte Burns: But you could get away with it.
Barbara Gladstone: You could get away with it because there wasn't a lot of money involved. It wasn't banking. But when Mary Boone came I remember what a huge effect that had because I think that brought out the ambition in many women who wouldn't have owned up to it before. It was almost unseemly to be that ambitious.
Charlotte Burns: You've said something about there wouldn't have been a Larry Gagosian in the same way if Mary Boone hadn't have been around because she was a kind of brand. She made art dealing sexy. She was unabashed. She…
Barbara Gladstone: She wore the most expensive shoes and the most expensive clothes, and she rode in the back of a limousine, and everything that happened later, I think she started because she was brazen about it.
Charlotte Burns: When you saw that happening, what did you think? How did you feel?
Barbara Gladstone: I was looking at it from a distance because it's not me, it's not the way I ever would be. But I like the fact that she startled people and I like the fact that somebody had the guts to do that.
Charlotte Burns: Do you think it's easier for women in the art world now than it was when you started?
Barbara Gladstone: Absolutely. Look how many women there are. Look how many women artists are very well represented. Look how many galleries are run by women. Yeah, I think that the opportunity is there. I don't know if there are as many women who want empires as there are men. But that could be something else.
Charlotte Burns: What do you mean?
Barbara Gladstone: The idea of a mega gallery is not my goal. It's not my desire. But I think if a woman wanted to do that right now she could.
Charlotte Burns: You have a huge gallery. You have more than 70 artists, estates, and foundations that you represent—which is an enormous stable of artists from where you started and you have galleries in different countries around the world. But it's not like you say a mega gallery, but how do you define a mega gallery? For you, what's the difference?
Barbara Gladstone: I can define it more by what it isn't. I think that we still follow the traditional model of representation. I think we represent artists the way artists have always been represented, individually, and I think with a mega gallery, there has to be such a division of labor that whoever's gallery it is can't possibly be talking to all of the artists. That's impossible. I'm talking to the artists. That's what I want to do. And so are the senior partners and directors. It's still a very personal connection that we have and that I would not ever want to change.
Charlotte Burns: 70 artists is still a lot of people to manage. How do you manage that scale?
Barbara Gladstone: They're all very busy by the way. My first gallery had probably 12 artists and they would have a show every two years so you knew exactly what was happening. Now we're lucky if we have certain shows every five years because the artists are very busy. They have a gallery in Germany and they have a gallery in California and they have a gallery someplace else. So that they have a lot of obligations and we have five locations. So we have a lot of opportunities for shows happening simultaneously. And sometimes someone wants to use one space or they have an idea for another space because the spaces are all very different. So it's a question of, I think, having good backup, having good staff, being efficient, being responsible, and being available.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: You recently opened in Seoul. Why did you decide to open in Asia?
Barbara Gladstone: Seoul presented itself as a possibility because one of the partners of the gallery is Chinese American and introduced us to Asia because she worked at UCCA [Center for Contemporary Art] in Beijing, a museum, for six years and was very familiar with the Asian territory, which we knew was interesting from art fairs and from information, but we were not completely familiar with say 10 years ago. And she really opened up that area by traveling with us and pointing out important places, important people, and artists were becoming more prominent from Asia as they were globally. And it became interesting to go to Korea because Seoul is on the cutting edge of everything, whether it's clothing, whether it's music, Seoul is culturally very active, in a way that's very visible in the art world. Japan is heavenly but more reticent. You have to go to it, really, to feel it. China, in the same way. But Korea comes to us, comes to art fairs. There's many museums, many collectors, many artists, many, lots of everything. And it's a young culture and very open to new ideas and new concepts and it is exciting.
Charlotte Burns: How does it work with the partners? There are four partners at the gallery, but they're not all, some are equity partners, some are partners in a different way. Can you talk about how that works and how you structure the gallery in terms of how it's run and how you think about the management of the gallery going forwards?
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, I think it's about teamwork. For us, all of them have been with the gallery at least 10 years and have distinguished themselves all along as being willing to contribute more than the job description. It wasn't only sales or it wasn't only artist relationships, as it was always, “What if we did this, did you ever think of that?” And I thought, “This is new blood. This is exciting. This is interesting. This is feeding me and helping the artists.” So there are people who brought themselves to the position by their own participation and curiosity and all work well together, all like each other. So it's a very, I think, a really good situation.
Charlotte Burns: More recently Gavin Brown joined—that was a kind of merger with his gallery that closed—and he bought 11 artists and one estate from his former gallery, Gavin Brown's Enterprise. There's lots of talk about what that meant for the industry at large because it was a kind of consolidation and possibly a new way of working. We're a few years on from that now. That's a big thing to manage that kind of merger that kind of and for artists, LaToya Ruby Frazier spoke about at the time. She has a big show coming up at MoMA. She's gonna be a guest on the show—we're very excited about that. She said she was a beneficiary of that. She got these two dealers.
For you managing that, can you talk about it a couple of years on? The kind of challenges and opportunities of bringing those businesses together?
Barbara Gladstone: It was a very good thing to do. If I look at the landscape of galleries as I know them from the time that I've been working, one of the people that I always respected, always, was Gavin for his innovation, for his originality, for his eye, for his just existence in the art world. I don't really feel that about anybody else, but I just think that he is so active and alive that it's like, who wouldn't want that? It was a fortunate thing, for me certainly. And I think it was fortunate for the artists too, because at Gladstone, we have a kind of very sensible and clear approach to how do things. And Gavin, bless him, is all over the place. He's an idea person and he's got an idea a minute. You can't buy that, you just can't buy that. So it added enormously. Obviously, we couldn't take all the artists, but we did the best we could to do the ones that would fit together with what existed. And I think that we filled in some corners and some of these were artists that I always wanted to get my hands on. And he was there first.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. What did you learn from that experience?
Barbara Gladstone: From, of merging? What I learned is it's good to work together. And that two heads are better than one. And it's more than two heads because the opportunity to work with some of those artists is so interesting. And you, everyone has artists that they wish they could work with. Everyone. And there's still artists that we wish we could work with, and maybe we can sometimes. Maybe we can't. We don't know. But Gavin is an original and there aren't that many originals.
Charlotte Burns: Would you consider more kind of collaborations like that? Do you think that's a future model for the business? For the industry?
Barbara Gladstone: Not necessarily for us. I think there's a limit to it. I don't think you can have too many committees doing things like this because I think it'll all get neutralized and not retain the kind of individual spirit that you want.
Charlotte Burns: So it has to be the kind of people that you bring together? Of course.
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, we're as different as two people could be, but I think that we work well together.
Charlotte Burns: And how do you think about the future of the gallery? Do you think about how the gallery will continue with you taking further steps back?
Barbara Gladstone: I think it will be fine because I think that these people are all working together now very well. I don't go to art fairs anymore. They do perfectly beautifully without me. Everybody has developed their own relationships with artists, their own relationships with collectors. These things are bigger than one person. Way bigger. I would never decide at this point to take on an artist that the others didn't think was a good idea. If they all said, you're the only one who has any feeling for this, I wouldn't do it because that wouldn't be fair to the artist. So I think there's a lot of discussion that goes on before taking on an artist and feeling whether it fits with the construct that we already have, whether it's competitive, whether it's favorable, whether it's advantageous.
Charlotte Burns: So it's now a sort of, it's a different thing, it's a different vision.
Barbara Gladstone: It's, it is and it isn't because I think that…Gavin and I agree on just about everything. It's not like I never, it's not like his program was alien to my program. It wasn't and I think like I was interested in LaToya, I was just too late. He was interested in Philippe Parreno, he was too late. We were barking up the same trees in a way.
I tend to be a relationship person that I dig in with a few people very deeply because I'm fascinated and it's the way I am. But I think that we, everybody, we talk all the time. There are meetings all the time and there's a lot of camaraderie. And I think we have a really cohesive and good team.
Charlotte Burns: Do you like to think of the gallery having a legacy?
Barbara Gladstone: Only I think at a certain moment, if I don't make sense anymore, I should step back from it. So while I still have my mind, I think I'm there. I think that, I would certainly like to believe that yes, it has a legacy because it's built into the way we've done things and I think as long as everyone is participating now, and the artists are familiar with them. I think that some people have made mistakes by being the dominant person and, therefore, everybody has to scramble when they can no longer work or want no longer to work where I'm perfectly happy for other people to do whatever it is they can do. I'm not hogging the spotlight. I don't care. I just want things to happen in the best way possible and whoever has an idea and they should go with it.
Charlotte Burns: There's something you said when we spoke in preparation for this show, which I really liked and I wonder if this is the closest thing to a business plan. You said, “I ask myself, what if this fails? Could I survive that? And if I could, then I'd do it as an experiment.” Is that, do you think, the closest thing you've sort of had as a business mantra for yourself?
Barbara Gladstone: It's interesting because my ex-husband, who, we got divorced almost immediately when I had a gallery because I started spending too much time there. But he was a very good businessman. And when I was thinking of opening a print business, he said, “I will give you a piece of advice and if you follow it, you'll be okay.” His piece of advice was, he said that most businesses fail because they think about the upside. But they don't think about the downside. They think this is going to be great, I'm going to have this idea, everybody's going to love it. He said, “If you think every time you have to make a decision, what if it doesn't work? What will I do then? Can I survive? If you can survive, then you do it.” And I've just gone by that my whole life.
Charlotte Burns: You’ve preferred to be in the background and you've been wary of presenting yourself in a public way. Why is that? And what's compelled you to talk to me today?
Barbara Gladstone: You were so persistent. That's why.
[Laughter]
Because I don't like to speak in public. I don't think I necessarily add to the discussion because I think the discussion is about the artists. My job is to showcase them, not myself.
Charlotte Burns: Are there things that you would say now that you wouldn't have said a few years ago?
Barbara Gladstone: Too many yeah. Way that's too many. That's what happens with age. You become, you just start saying things because…
Charlotte Burns: Why not?
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, why not?
Charlotte Burns: Why not, why not. What would you say? What are the things that you've observed over these years of working in the art business? What if you could change the business? What would you change?
Barbara Gladstone: I would change the idea that collecting is shopping because I think that there is something that art adds to life, which is much more than acquisition, which is much more than, just having things, or being able to have things, which a lot of collecting has become. It used to be, when I started, that there really wasn't a huge resale value to art, therefore, it wasn't resold. People bought things and they had them their entire lives. And if there was a death or divorce, there would be a sale at one of the auction houses and these treasures would come up that had been sealed off for fifty years in somebody's house. And that was the intrigue of it in a way, is that they were private things, they were private pleasures. Everything is very public now. Everything is very driven by notoriety, by fame, by money, by all of these things. I miss the kind of eccentricities of the people who used to collect because they were successful, no question, but they also felt a little bit incomplete and they were searchers. They wanted to find something that gave them answers and they found it in art. Some people find it in music, some people find it in science and something else. But it was a merry little band and it was compelling and obsessive for many of them, very obsessive. And that was beautiful.
Charlotte Burns: Are you an obsessive?
Barbara Gladstone: It depends. I guess so. I'm not obsessive about many things, but I'm obsessive about certain things.
Charlotte Burns: With art, are you obsessive?
Barbara Gladstone: I'm, yeah, I'm obsessive about the things I own that I could never have be anywhere else but with me.
Charlotte Burns: That’s a yes then.
[ Laughter]
You have a collection obviously, actually I was reading, you just took on the representation of David Salle and you were saying that one of the things that you'd acquired in 1979 was a painting of his.
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, for a thousand dollars, and I bought it from Larry Gagosian who was operating out of a loft on West Broadway—a borrowed loft, I believe.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns: No.
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, and I still have it.
Charlotte Burns: That's so funny.
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: So what do you do with your collection? Do you live with everything?
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, I live with as much as I can, but I still buy things.
Charlotte Burns: Do you have plans for your collection?
Barbara Gladstone: That means thinking about the future, doesn't it? [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: It's a show about the future.
Barbara Gladstone: I know.
I have to make plans for my future.
Charlotte Burns: It's hard to think about the future.
Barbara Gladstone: It's just, I'm such a very present-thinking person. I'm a very today kind of person. I'm not sentimental, particularly about yesterday, and I'm not particularly thinking about the future. I'm always, I'm as much in the present as I can be.
Charlotte Burns: Have you always been that way?
Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, I've always been that way.
Charlotte Burns: I guess that's a helpful way to be when you're surrounded by art.
Barbara Gladstone: I can't actually have help it. Like if somebody talks about a show that's happening five years from now, I think…
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Barbara Gladstone: …I want to know what's happening now.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: If you're a person who's thinking about the present, what's the ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning? What's the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night?
Barbara Gladstone: Nothing keeps me up at night. I'm a good sleeper. I think just the day ahead. I approach most days seeing what will happen, seeing what problems will come up, what problems we can solve, what problems we can be mystified by. I mean I read the New York Times paper version every morning from cover to cover. And that's how I start my day.
Charlotte Burns: Are you a rational thinker? Are you a problem solver?
Barbara Gladstone: I like to be a problem solver. I like to think of myself as a problem solver.
My father used to say there are two kinds of people, those who solve problems and those who make problems.
Charlotte Burns: And you like to try and be in the former camp.
Barbara Gladstone: [Laughs] Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: That's interesting that's the career you've found yourself in. Do you think you solve artists' problems, in a way?
Barbara Gladstone: Artists solve problems, too. That's one of the most interesting aspects of doing this, is that I get to speak to the artist when the idea is a germ. And they start talking about it and then you see it start to take form and then you see it change form and then you see them adapt and then you see the final result and it's a beautiful process because I'm not an artist. I can't make art, but I could be as close to the process as possible. And I have the artists. They have my ear, and I can listen, and someone will talk about an idea that's just a little idea, and then two years later, it's this incredible thing, and I think, “Ah, I heard about it first.”
Charlotte Burns: When an artist talks to you about their idea, what sort of listening stance do you take? Do you always encourage? Do you ever edit?
Barbara Gladstone: It depends because every artist is different, every conversation is different. Some people want a lot of input, some people don't like any. It's up to me to be sensitive to what that person needs. Some artists want to talk about every aspect, the very beginning of an idea, and work through it and talk a lot during an idea—especially people who are production-oriented because in a way they have to work out very physical problems. Painters, maybe not so much, but to visit a painter's studio at a certain moment and then to go a couple of months later and then a couple of months after that is extremely interesting because something that I almost thought was finished, I realized was just the beginning of something. So to understand from the origin to the finish is a very interesting process for me.
Charlotte Burns: And how do you think about the career over the long term? Because you've talked about younger artists, saying a lot of artists get over-exploited at too young an age. And they reach a crisis four or five shows in, and they get sucked dry by the demand. Obviously, for each artist, it's different, but you've obviously had to sit down for each artist and think through the strategy of how to build that career.
Barbara Gladstone: I think the strategy unfolds as the work unfolds because sometimes, sometimes you don't know until it happens or sometimes, I don't think there's one answer to that because I think it's as different as the artists are different. And I like a lot of different kinds of art. The problems are different, and the solutions are different. And some artists need to talk so they can externalize the idea, but they don't need help at all. They'll figure it out themselves, but they need a sounding board. They need to run an idea past somebody and they'll say, “Oh, that doesn't work.”
Charlotte Burns: Do you ever need sounding boards yourself?
Barbara Gladstone: Sure, of course. Of course. I think I work in a world of opinions. A lot of things are opinion-oriented. You know that one person's opinion is worth somebody else's opinion, is worth more than somebody else's opinion. So that if a certain critic blesses something, people look at it slightly differently. Or a certain gallery blesses something, they look at it differently. The thing did not change. I think that everything is in process all the time and what is really interesting is that it's not over. It's not even over when the artist dies. It's not over. Because there's constantly evaluation and re-thinking going on and when you put one work in proximity to another work 50 years later, something new can happen. I mean, I think that's why it's important.
Charlotte Burns: I'm imagining in 1980 critics had more sway over who was important than now. In 2024, who gets to decide what's valuable?
Barbara Gladstone: If I'm really cynical, I would say social media gets to decide a lot of things just by weight of how many people it reaches and how many people are counting followers and all of that. Although I think at the end of the day, we'll see if it matters at all, but it's bound to affect something.
Charlotte Burns: How does that change the conversations you have for the artists that you have?
Barbara Gladstone: It doesn't.
Charlotte Burns: With the collectors?
Barbara Gladstone: With the collectors?
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Barbara Gladstone: I try to ignore it because I don't think it's germane to the art. I just think it's noise. But I think it's powerful noise. Nothing is a secret anymore. Nothing. And so if you value something because of the amount of attention it gets, you will be very affected by that. But it's necessary, I think, to look beyond that. But it's more difficult because there are still secrets. There are still beautiful secrets to be discovered.
If one is not…how can I say, is not overly influenced by the opinion of others. Because it's the opinion of others that prevails right now. The sheer number of followers that something has, the sheer amount of publicity—and it can be self-publicity. Anybody can post anything and have a lot of followers, and what exactly does that add up to?
Charlotte Burns: Do you think that's changing? We're in a market moment where the market seems to be slowing down when we look at new buyers. China's slowing down. We're in a generational shift in the US. Some of the heat is dissipating. Is that changing things, in terms of buyer behavior?
Barbara Gladstone: I think it certainly will. I don't know how much it has yet, but I think it certainly will because a lot of collectors were created during that period, and a lot of collectors were persuaded to follow the wave, in a way. And it could be that if you're following that kind of philosophy or that kind of impulse, that you find yourself four years later with a lot of things that you're no longer looking at because they don't actually have the content that the real meaty thing has.
I've learned power can be this big. It can be a very small thing. If you think of an On Kawara, it's very powerful. It's as powerful as a Richard Serra in its own way. It's as insistent and as important because it has an inevitability to it that marks important art, and that you don't know for a very long time. I think it takes at least 20 years before you can evaluate. You can evaluate the 80s now, you can probably evaluate the 90s, but you can't evaluate what happened after that in terms of what will remain. Because I remember in the 80s when painting came back after a long period of conceptual and minimal and different kinds of work that were prevalent in the 70s, non-object works, when painting came back, there were a lot of painters who were very prominent who are not prominent now. And it was because in the fever of discovery of all of these new things, a lot of people bought a lot of things, and not everything lasts. And you don't know which ones will last. You don't. Time alone is, I think, the judge.
Charlotte Burns: Where do you think we are in the market cycle right now?
Barbara Gladstone: I don’t know, because I'm not such a, I don't follow the market in that way. It's not, I'm not a secondary dealer. I'm dedicated to what I'm dedicated to, and I'm going to work for it as I do. And I think that for us, there are people who are interested in certain things, which are not necessarily market artists, and there are some who are, but I'm not going to change the way I behave because of the market. I can't do that. So I'm a little bit less conscious of it than maybe somebody else, but I'll survive.
Charlotte Burns: Are you competitive? Do you feel competitive with other galleries?
Barbara Gladstone: I certainly observe them. It depends what you mean by competitive. Sometimes there's an artist that I would love to have that somebody else has, and I'm competitive for a minute about that, but not the whole thing.
I don't want to be anybody else. I don't want to have anyone else's gallery. I guess we're all competitive in a certain way because we're all in the same marketplace and the same curatorial opportunities exist for all of us. And there are so many pieces of the pie and they're going to be distributed as they're distributed. But I think a lot of different people can exist very happily together. I don't believe in anything cutthroat because it's not interesting to me, because it's not my personality. But I understand it. I mean there's certainly individual artists who I admire and wish I had my hands on, but not whole programs or not, there's nobody directly. I mean, I do have colleagues who I like a lot and like to work with and that's nice.
Charlotte Burns: What if you could show any artist, who would you show?
Barbara Gladstone: Oh, I'm not going to answer that. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: Okay, we can talk about, we can talk about artists who are not alive if that makes it a bit easier. Artists from history. Your top three.
Barbara Gladstone: Oh, from history?
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Barbara Gladstone: How far back?
Charlotte Burns: As far as you want to go.
Barbara Gladstone: I would show Sigmar Polke, happily. He knew it. [Laughs]
I would show, I don't know, I would show Stuart Davis, that has nothing to do with anything, American Cubist, but I always loved Stuart Davis.
How many do I have to name? [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: One more, maybe?
Barbara Gladstone: One more. [Charles] Scheeler. That's a mixed bag, right?
Charlotte Burns: That's a mixed bag. What if you ran the art market, what would you change?
Barbara Gladstone: You can’t run the art market.
Charlotte Burns: This is our imagination. You just did for a day. You were in charge of the art market, what would you do?
Barbara Gladstone: I would ban the internet. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: Everyone had to speak on the phone.
[Laughter]
What if you could advise collectors listening to this show on how to think about buying and living with art? What would you tell them?
Barbara Gladstone: I would say what I say anyway, which is to learn, to read, to look, to study, to not buy it on impulse, unless you're prepared to act on impulse, if you really have, know a lot about a work about an artist and you see just the right work, grab it. But don't follow what other people say, follow your own heart and your own knowledge and your feelings, what it tells you, what it speaks to you about, what you want from art, what it does for you, not just what everybody else is doing.
Charlotte Burns: And what would you say to artists? If there was a piece of advice you were giving to a young artist now, what advice would you give them?
Barbara Gladstone: I'll tell you what Cecily Brown said a couple of weeks ago because I thought it was really interesting. She was on a panel that was full of young artists and it was a panel of women. She said, “I know that you could sell your work. I know that there's a very active market. What you should do is get another job, be a waitress, be anything, be a taxi driver, live off of that income, and do your work.
And don't sell your work now. Do your work. Just do it and do it. And you'll be ready when you're ready.” And I think I would say slow down and don't expect to have a career the minute you get out of graduate school. Don't expect to be a star right away, because you could be a star for three seasons and completely discarded. Take it easy and go slow is very difficult to do these days. You have to have very strong character and a very strong belief in yourself, which is what every artist should have. But it's very hard to resist the pressure of society and of notoriety and of fame and of glamour that exists in the art world. But I think she was 100 percent right and that would always be my advice, is to just slow down and do your work.
Charlotte Burns: And for you, Barbara, looking back, you said you probably wouldn't start a gallery if you knew then what you know now but knowing now, what you do, what piece of advice would you give to young dealers?
Barbara Gladstone: Opening a gallery? To be personal about it. To own it in the sense that it expresses their own views about art and not what's popular, not what sells—this is of course slightly ridiculous because you also have to exist in this world and to find some balance between what is easy to do because it's what people want and what you want may be a bridge too far. But I think it's very easy to start something and it's much harder to keep doing it and doing it and doing it. Unless it really means something to you, which is very deep and embedded and fulfilling because it's not that easy.
Charlotte Burns: Can I ask you in these years of running your gallery, what has been the most challenging time in these decades?
Barbara Gladstone: I think for me the most challenging time was the early years because I was making myself up as I went along. I was inventing myself in a way, I had no model, I had never worked in a gallery. I didn't have the experience. I never worked for anybody else, which I regretted my whole life. I wish I had worked for Virginia Zabriskie or somebody like that who was an example of a kind of morality and a kind of vision and a kind of commitment, that I had to learn on my feet.
Charlotte Burns: Did you have any other regrets looking back?
Barbara Gladstone: No. I have been lucky. [Laughs] Very lucky.
Charlotte Burns: I think that's a great note to end on. Barbara Gladstone, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much, Barbara.
Barbara Gladstone: Thank you, Charlotte.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: My enormous thanks to Barbara Gladstone for finally accepting our invitation to talk. Proof that persistence pays off.
Next time on The Art World: What If…?!, we’ll be talking to the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA [Museum of Contemporary Art Africa], Koyo Kouoh.Koyo Kouoh: We need to take the time to do the things that are urgent, that are essential, that are necessary and for me, building art institutions on the continent is a matter of urgency.
Charlotte Burns: I loved the conversation with Koyo and I can’t wait for you all to hear it.
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.