This weekend the Dallas Art Dealers Association celebrates its 25th anniversary. The Valley House Gallery’s Kevin Vogel has been a leader in the organization since it was founded in 1985. We sat down with Vogel and asked him about the changes in the North Texas art scene in the past two-and-a-half decades. Here are his thoughts:
“There’s a difference between a gallery and a merchant. A merchant is in the business of buying and selling art – or representing artists. If the artist isn’t selling, they say, ‘thank you very much,’ and then they go find an artist who will sell. And there’s nothing wrong with that – it is just one approach.
“A dealer, on the other hand, normally goes out and hunts for artists that they believe in personally and think there is something special about someone. They say, ‘I want to take that person to the next level,’ ‘I want to promote that person,’ ‘I want to generate a price structure for that person and protect it,’ ‘I want to be able to generate museum exhibitions of that artists work – I want to do all those things for the artist.’ At the end of the day if you have sold enough work to make a living, you are lucky. If you have an exhibition that doesn’t necessarily sell well, it doesn’t mean you ditch the artist. You may have two shows, three shows before the work takes off.
“Galleries are really the first line in finding really talented people. A lot of people think, ‘oh, the museum curator found that really talented artist.’ In all honesty, a museum curator often never looks at an artist that doesn’t have a gallery – they are not on the radar, even. I’m not saying in every instance, I’m just saying in 95% of the instances. It is the dealer who is on the front line finding the talent, and the museum says, ‘there’s something special there.’
“The original DADA members all fit within that concept of gallery, but each is also an entrepreneur with their own vision, doing their own thing. To get all those independent people together is kind of huge. It is just a difficult thing to do, and what happens is it becomes almost like a giant museum unto itself. I mean it could be looked at that way – all these people are open and free to the public.
“So, in actuality what happens is the health of the art scene in a community is reflected by the number of galleries there are out there. Each gallery is like a mini-free museum for people to go, and instead of shows that change every three months or so, the shows change about once a month. They are actually test beds for the art world – what’s going on, what’s happening, who are the new creative artists.
“There were about 15 to 16 [DADA] members originally, and that was a real cross-section of the Dallas art scene – that was pretty complete at that point. We have added more galleries, and the Dallas Art Dealers Association thought to fulfill the mission there are non-profits out there and museums, and we are better as an entire unit than we are as a group.
“The art scene itself is difficult. It’s about the evolutionary process in the growth of a city. There are good parts and bad parts of it, and there things that happen that are wonderful and things that happen that aren’t wonderful. But it is all evolutionary.”
