Not all gallery closures mean the same thing

Why we shouldn't confuse the shutdowns of Blum and Venus Over Manhattan

• James Gillray’s Doublûres of Characters; – or – Striking Resemblance in Phisiognomy (1798). Image credit: Yale Center for British Art

Dealing art day-in, day-out is an unforgiving business in all but the frothiest times, and this summer the trade is still miles away from being a seller’s market. But since two high-contrast examples of recent gallery closures have been smudged to fit the same trend line over the past few days, separating them again feels like a necessary move toward understanding whether art dealing in 2025 is just a daunting challenge or an utterly doomed enterprise.

Let’s go in chronological order. As many of you know by now, Tim Blum announced via Artnews on July 1 that he will “sunset” the LA-headquartered gallery bearing his last name more than 30 years after he and former business partner Jeff Poe launched it as Blum & Poe. The duo started off with “a grand total of $25,000 to their names,” Sarah Harrelson writes in the intro to her recent exit interview with Blum at Cultured. In other words, the co-founders had to make the business work from day one, or else they were screwed.

Fortunately for them, Blum & Poe became a driving force in the evolution of LA’s gallery sector between its 1994 founding and Poe’s departure in 2023. (I saw a good chunk of it firsthand when I was working for other Angeleno dealers between 2005 and 2017.) Their shows and their roster helped recalibrate the wider industry’s perception of the city’s commercial spaces as worthy of international attention, not least because of the pipeline the co-founders built for multiple generations of Japanese artists under-recognized outside their home country.

But the reach the gallery achieved appears to have backfired over time. Blum has been consistent and emphatic in saying over the past 10 days that systemwide problems convinced him to call it quits, including in a New York Times feature published on Thursday (July 9). “We had been complicit in building the art market at this unsustainable scale,” Blum told Zachary Small there. “It had become the equivalent of having a large container ship and trying to turn it around in the Panama Canal.”

His message was the same in his original interview with Daniel Cassady at Artnews: “This is not about the market… This is about the system,” Blum said, adding: “It’s not working. And it hasn’t been working… Even when it looked like it was.” The Cultured interview covers similar ground, only with a truly impressive number of F-bombs, including one that was laser-targeted at another sector:

“The art fair system is totally fucked. People keep doing it because they’re afraid to step off, because they’ll be penalized.

“There’s that leverage that the system has over the individual gallerist, whether you’re a young dealer trying to make your way in the world, or make a name for yourself and your artist and compete with the bigger ones. Because if you don’t do it, the bigger galleries will absorb your artists and do it. It’s self-eating, like an octopus that eats its own leg, right? It’s just like, chop, chop, chop, and then it grows another one, of course, and keeps eating away.”

Although Blum’s decision to close would have been seismic even if he’d stayed silent, he’s only strengthened the impact by voicing criticisms that a lot of other dealers have kept under wraps, especially when talking to the art press. In fact, his comments have been so powerful that they may be distorting other parts of the news cycle.

Vanishing Venus

This brings us to Adam Lindemann, the investor, entrepreneur, and longtime collector turned dealer. He announced on Wednesday that his New York gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, is shutting down for good after an almost 14-year run. Rather than calling a reporter to get the message out on his behalf, Lindemann wrote a longform essay for Artnet News headlined Goodbye to All That: I Am Closing My Gallery and Returning to Collecting.¹

Every cultural business has its own versions of this trope, whether it’s a personal essay like Lindemann’s, an exit interview (or three) like Blum’s, or even just a terse Instagram post (à la the celebrity styling guru Law Roach). In all cases, the audience is encouraged to believe that what the subject is going through represents something much bigger than a little mythmaking about one person’s challenges and emotions. Instead, their move is a symbol of structural shifts, or systemic rot, or the death of a more utopian age, or [👉🏻insert your Big Idea of Choice here👈🏻].

I’ve seen a lot of people online cast Lindemann in the role of brave truth-teller since Wednesday—which is odd to me, because he’s not actually playing it in his essay. That’s wise on his part, because one trait separates him from most of the other dealers who have typed out a bruised farewell essay (or could have) over the past 15 years or so: he’s always been wealthy enough to keep his gallery going for as long as he wanted, no matter how tough the market got. That advantage doesn’t make him a villain, but it does reframe his decision to shut down Venus Over Manhattan as first and foremost a personal one.

To recap quickly: after graduating Yale Law School, Lindemann became the senior vice president on the arbitrage-trading desk of the investment bank Oppenheimer & Co., then founded his own fund, Lindemann Capital Partners, while getting seriously into buying (and periodically auctioning) art along the way. His next act, according to his entry on the 2001 edition of Crains New York’s “40 under 40” list, involved using seed money from his billionaire father to launch a Spanish-language radio network called Mega Communications, which Lindemann sold for an undisclosed amount in 2007. He opened Venus Over Manhattan five years later—against the unanimous advice of people close to him.

In his farewell essay, Lindemann writes this about his ambition to launch a gallery and curate shows: “Everyone told me not to, so of course I did.” He went into much greater detail about his defiance in a 2014 interview with Andrew Goldstein. “Everyone was uncomfortable with the concept of the collector becoming the dealer, but I really don’t see myself as being any different than I was before,” he said at the time. When asked whether the resistant parties included his art-dealing wife, Amalia Dayan—then a co-founder of the esteemed gallery Luxembourg & Dayan, now a founding partner of Lévy Gorvy Dayan—Lindemann added this:

“She didn't want to me to open a gallery either—she was very against it, as was her partner and all of our friends. And all of our artist friends, and the curators too. They were unanimously against it. The collectors and dealers don’t like it either. Nobody likes it.”

If you’re wondering what the problem was, he had thoughts on that too:

“Generally speaking, just to put it very politely, galleries are organic things that are well looked-upon and digested by the system when they grow from a very small seed over a long period of time, after many years of hard work[…]

“A very established dealer friend of ours said to me when I complained that our shows weren't getting any reviews: ‘Well, come on, what do you expect? You just dropped in from outer space.’ In the art world, it was frowned upon for me to just to open up shop as usual. The only person who has been in my position is Bobby Mnuchin.”

“Bobby Mnuchin” is better known to the art world as Robert Mnuchin, who retired from his perch as a partner at Goldman Sachs after 33 years before co-founding C&M Arts, his first gallery, with LA art-dealing legend James Corcoran in 1992.² Several decades and a few partner changes later, Mnuchin Gallery has been ensconced on New York’s Upper East Side since 2013. It’s fair to say he made a good role model for Lindemann.

To his credit, Lindemann never pretends his decision to close his own gallery stems from anything like the structural faults Blum has called out. The main motivations outlined in his Artnet essay seem to be a belief that Venus Over Manhattan deserved more attention (and implicitly, more profit) than it’s generated, that the work of selling art was harder than he expected, and that—just as everyone warned him in 2012—a bunch of people in the industry who welcomed him as a collector turned on him as a dealer. (“Suddenly all the big hugs and air kisses evaporated. I was up against seasoned veterans with sharpened skills and razor-sharp elbows,” he writes early on.)

Most of the rest of the essay consists of a long recounting of his favorite exhibitions, a reminder that the gallery ultimately got 40 New York Times reviews, and one line of thanks to his “great young team who did a lot of the heavy lifting.” Now he just goes back to being a rich guy buying (and selling) art for fun and profit—the same identity he had before he opened his gallery in the first place.

One of these things is not like the other

Although the circumstances between the two galleries are 180 degrees different, a lot of the public art-industry discourse to date has treated the closures of Blum and Venus Over Manhattan as conjoined tragedies caused by the same macro forces.

They are not. One is basically a retirement after 30+ years of bootstrapped gallery-sector empire-building that eventually threatened to collapse under its own weight; the other is the end of an ambitious midlife vanity project that nevertheless outlasted and overachieved external expectations at the start. People who see the two as equivalent are just getting tricked by the timing and circumstances, like believing the odds on a new coin toss aren’t 50-50 because the quarter being used came up heads a few times in a row right before.³

None of this is to say that the gallery system at large is healthy as it stands now. It isn’t—not by a long shot—and the overarching problems are definitely generating enough pressure to crumple dealers across different tiers of experience and market power.

But that’s why it’s crucial to avoid assuming that every gallery disbands for the same unavoidable reasons, that every dealer’s departure will have a meaningful impact on the industry overall, and that therefore they should all be treated as fallen heroes.⁴ These tendencies just reinforce the notion that no one can win in the gallery sector, no matter who they are or what they do, and that everyone in the game might as well just fire up their own ‘Why I’m closing my gallery’ drafts tomorrow.

I don’t believe every new dealer is dead on arrival. At least, not if they’re willing to look as critically at the present as the past, and think expansively about the future. My frustration is that too few people seem willing to do either, let alone both, in 2025—and seeing Blum and Venus Over Manhattan get flattened into the same familiar narrative only heightens it. I may very well be wrong to stay hopeful about the gallery sector’s prospects, but I’d at least like the judgment to come from a jury I can trust to review the evidence with clear eyes.

1. Lindemann also operated a downtown LA outpost, dubbed Venus Over Los Angeles, from 2015-17.

2. Disclosure: I worked with Corcoran for almost nine years before leaving LA to become a journalist.

3. Multiple people have suggested to me that this is precisely why Lindemann might have chosen to shut down Venus now, while Blum’s carpet-bombing of gallery-sector dynamics gives him favorable cover for a decision that he could have made at any time.

4. Although this doesn’t apply to Blum/Blum & Poe or Venus Over Manhattan, the art trades regularly run stories lamenting the loss of galleries whose programs rarely if ever got any coverage while they were actually operating, and every time it happens it makes me want to tear an encyclopedia in half. Even worse, it’s not uncommon to find out some time after these mournful stories run that the gallery being wound down still owes artists money for works sold months or years earlier; ironically, scandals like these are the adhesive in the very few ‘Why I’m closing my gallery’ missives that still stick in my mind years after reading them, precisely because what was originally intended as a candid and principled truth bomb suddenly mutates into a dark joke.