Pace's Marc Glimcher on How Tech Could Transform the Art Industry, Thursday, Live on Zoom
Sign up for this week’s live conversation with Pace's Marc Glimcher, a trailblazer at the intersection of art and technology.
Artwrld editor-at-large Andrew Goldstein will be hosting a live conversation with Pace CEO Marc Glimcher on Zoom this Thursday, September 26th, at 12:00 PM EST.
RSVP to join the discussion and take part in the community Q&A at the end—this newsletter is meant to help you get up to speed ahead of the talk.
In this week's email
- Meet Pace's Marc Glimcher: His mega-gallery is a lab for innovation
- Pre-Read: What to know before tuning into the conversation
- Podcast Drop: Hear last week's Artwrld talk with Matr Labs founder Ben Tritt
Meet Pace's Marc Glimcher
One of the thorniest conundrums of the art world—and arguably the greatest business opportunity—lies in the mismatch between the art audience and the art business.
While the marketplace for art, particularly avant-garde contemporary art, used to be a boutique endeavor that was well matched to its niche collector base, the past few decades have seen new art become relevant and exciting to a far vaster public. But no one has really figured out how to evolve the industry beyond its lucrative traditional formula—passionate demand from a small elite + scarcity of the most desirable work = nosebleed prices—to also meaningfully cater to today’s mass addressable art audience.
Can new technology help solve the puzzle? That’s long been the belief of Pace Gallery CEO Marc Glimcher. For over a decade, Glimcher has been simultaneously steering his gallery’s blue-chip operation—representing top contemporary stars alongside the estates of historic titans like Picasso, Rothko, Agnes Martin, and Calder—while also experimenting with high-tech artists on ways to unlock new audiences.
In 2014, Pace began working with the Japanese immersive-art collective teamLab, helping pioneer the notion of monetizing contemporary art via ticketing as well as sales. In 2019, he founded Superblue with Laurene Powell Jobs as a way to bring high-concept immersive art to a broader audience. In 2021, he created Pace Verso to sell artist-made NFTs.
It’s the nature of experiments that sometimes they don’t work as hoped. Glimcher has since stepped away from Superblue; Pace Verso is in a state of evolution. But teamLab? Today the collective sells four million tickets a year for $40 a pop, and that’s in addition to their art sales.
So, is it possible to arrive at a theory of a unified art market? How will new technologies like A.I. and blockchain remake the art world? And how do you navigate the perils of being too early versus too late on innovation? This week, for our fourth live Artwrld conversation, we are pleased to sit down with Marc Glimcher to discuss the above and more.
Pre-Read
ARE TICKETS THE TICKET?: For years Glimcher has been thinking hard about how selling tickets to gallery shows could square the circle of monetizing the non-buying art public to support experiential work, and in this conversation at Frieze Los Angeles that we had a half-decade ago he talks about everything from the history of the approach to its implications for the metaverse. [Artnet News, 5,124 words]
WHAT ABOUT TOKENS?: It's pretty clear that blockchain is going to play a substantial role in the art world to come, if only for the reasons outlined by the McCoys in our first Artwrld conversation, but the road to get there has been bumpy, as this Axios article about the panel I did with Glimcher and Dirk Boll at Christie's Art + Tech Summit this July suggests. [Axios, 850 words]
PACE'S EASTERN EXPANSION: Pace was early to predict the rise of Asia's art market, opening a gallery in Beijing all the way back in 2008 when still under the leadership of Glimcher's father, Pace founder Arne Glimcher, and then debuting a satellite in Seoul in 2017. Today, the gallery continues to expand its reach in the region, unveiling an ambitious new place in Tokyo earlier this month. [The Korea Times, 1,514 words]
TALES FROM THE BUMPY ROAD: Innovation is never easy, and disruption is not for the faint of heart—in fact, it can be downright messy, as this in-depth report on the early struggles at Superblue makes clear. The only thing to do is learn, iterate, learn, iterate, and eventually get at least a piece of it right. [Artnews, 2,400 words]
Podcast Drop
Missed last week's Artwrld conversation? Here's the podcast version below—and here's a link to last week's newsletter if you want the supplementary materials too.
About Artwrld
Artwrld hosts live talks every week with leading artists, technologists, art professionals, and entrepreneurs about the opportunities and challenges at the vanguard of creativity.
more at: artwrld.com
