If watching a Josh Baer and Jeffrey give each other reach-arounds at a panel discussion at Christies doesn't personify "art in the corporate age" then I don't know what. Contemporary artists represented by David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Marian Goodman Gallery, Pace, and Gagosian Gallery received 30% of the solo shows in NY. Unsurprising given that four of the five galleries in question are based there, is disproportionately New York-centric: Institutions in the Big Apple were 75% more likely to give an artist from one of the galleries a solo show than a museum in Los Angeles. The chief champion of the Big Five’s artists is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which devoted 11 of its 12 major solo shows between 2007 and 2013 to artists represented by one of those galleries. In the same period the Museum of Modern Art gave 45% of its large solo exhibitions to artists represented by the five mega-galleries. Yes this is art in the corporate age.
I suppose when people who declare themselves to be artists stop taping bananas to walls and ACTUALLY draw and paint something. Art has really lost its way.
