Sorry, but Pace’s cutbacks aren’t the death of mega-galleries
Schadenfreude over the company’s retreat is clouding the view of the gallery sector.
This is the only time anyone will probably ever equate one of the world’s leading galleries to a sheet ghost in a field, but here we are. Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash
We humans suck at many things, but understanding the speed of meaningful change probably deserves a spot near the top of the list. It’s as applicable to the art business as to just about any other context, and that’s exactly what’s been playing out since Pace Gallery announced last Wednesday (June 3) that it would be laying off around 50 employees and shedding around 50 artists and estates from its roster.
In the time since, The Discourse™️ has gone heavy on one sentiment: Pace’s downsizing proves that the mega-gallery model is—and has always been—fatally flawed. Strangely, the first and loudest voices pushing this argument belong to Pace chief exec Marc Glimcher and his father, Pace co-founder Arne Glimcher.1
Explaining the downsizing, Marc told Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times that the gallery system has gotten “too big, too commercial, too impersonal, and too corporate.” He went even harder in a press statement, declaring: “The current gallery model isn’t only broken, it’s unfixable.” Arne, for his part, said of the staff- and roster-pruning, “It’s kind of like we’re getting our gallery back… I think this whole mega-gallery thing is ridiculous and unsupportable. I always thought that.”
Two major reactions have dominated the days since. First, a lot of people in the industry have dragged the Glimchers for making these proclamations because of how much Pace itself contributed to the elephantiasis that has afflicted apex-level galleries over the past two decades. And second, despite all that, a lot of the same people have agreed that the Glimchers’ diagnosis was nevertheless correct.
Here’s a counterpoint, though: “the mega-gallery thing” or, as some observers have put it, “the mega-gallery model” is something between a semantic device and an outright red herring. Believing otherwise will wrong-foot your entire approach to this story and its consequences.
The industry consensus is that there are only four mega-galleries: Pace, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner—and more importantly, each of them operates pretty distinctively. That’s not a model; it’s a handful of anomalies united exclusively by their sheer market power. Lumping them together would be like saying that Mothra and King Kong are the same species just because they’re both big monsters that at some point gave Godzilla a hard time.
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Let’s speed-run the taxonomy, shall we? Personality- and profile-wise, the two most similar mega-galleries are probably Gagosian and Zwirner, which is part of the reason the former is almost the only gallery that has ever managed to entice artists or estates away from the latter. But Gagosian has dramatically outscaled Zwirner, with 18 permanent spaces versus the latter’s eight as of this month, while Zwirner’s business has been more mass-market and digital-forward owing to moves like founding the print publishing imprint Utopia Editions and the collaborative-gallery-marketplace-turned-artist-licensed-merch-business Platform, both in 2021.2 Hauser’s owners, by contrast, have leaned into merging the art and hospitality businesses as intensely as a competitive cyclist in a velodrome, with permanent gallery complexes in atypical destinations like Menorca, Monaco, and Somerset as well as a complementary venture, Art Farm, that operates 14 restaurants, bars, hotels, and provisions shops around the world—all of them filled with work by the gallery’s artists.
Then there’s Pace. Since Arne Glimcher stepped back to anoint Marc the leader in 2010, the gallery has made a series of bets on the formation of a radically different kind of art business from its three nearest rivals. In 2019, it consolidated nearly all of its New York operations into a new headquarters and vertical “campus” on West 25th Street via a 20-year lease that yoked the gallery to more than $200m in estimtaed rent, renovation, and build-out costs; the move was made partly to accommodate Pace Live, an ongoing series of IRL events that quickly and quietly faded away.3 In August 2020, the gallery’s brain trust announced the launch of an experiential art business called Superblue premised on selling tickets to the masses, not high-margin artworks to the elite; by December 2022, the business was reportedly in turmoil, and Marc Glimcher distanced himself from it.4 In 2021, at the sweaty zenith of crypto fever, the gallery debuted Pace Verso, a dedicated NFT marketplace that has since gone the same sad way as every other NFT marketplace.
Although these dice rolls have all, to varying degrees, contributed to Pace’s present need to scale back and reorient, the larger point is that they were all dice rolls where Pace was alone at the craps table. None of them was essential to “the mega-gallery model.” They were all unique decisions made by Pace, specifically to differentiate Pace from its high-rolling competitors… and much of the industry has been waiting for the gallery to backtrack on them for years, because the paradigm shift in art consumption that Pace envisioned just hasn’t materialized.
This is why I would discourage anyone from holding their breath for “the mega-gallery model” to collapse: running a gallery of any size is an execution-dependent, choose-your-own adventure game. Saying that mega-galleries are untenable as a concept because Pace needed to scale back its particular supersized, Silicon Valley-pilled, contrarian game plan would be like saying weight lifting needs to be abolished from the Olympics because one of the four buffest dudes on the planet blew out his ACL after spending several years on some weird alternative training regimen.5 The details an execution matter.
It’s also noteworthy that even after Pace finishes its organizational bonsai job, it’s still going to employ around 200 people—around 50 more than it employed in 2019, as Julie Davich of The Appraisal noted—represent around 80 artists and estates, and maintain physical spaces of some type in the same seven cities as today.6 (Melanie Gerlis of the Financial Times reported earlier this week that Pace has already put its London space up for lease and is prowling for, in Marc Glimcher’s words, a “less corporate” home elsewhere in the city.) That will still easily make Pace one of the largest galleries in the world by just about any objective measure.
When I reached out to Pace to ask why this still-extremely-sizable footprint should no longer qualify it as a mega-dealer, a gallery spokesperson told me: “This is not about scale, but it’s about a change in our approach. We are reorienting the business to remove corporate overlay and prioritize relationships with our artists, estates, and collectors.”
Call me skeptical. I’m sure the pruning will help Pace. But if this is what a (supposedly) reformed mega-gallery looks like, then the general “model” or “thing” that Pace and its closest competitors have been following for 15-plus years—namely, the ambition to be big, global, and market-leading—is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon. The quicker the rest of us recognize as much, the quicker we’ll be able to look past the spin and the schadenfreude at the enduring reality of the gallery sector’s peak.
*I made a correction to this post after the newsletter went out: I originally misstated Pace’s all-in costs for its Manhattan headquarters at “an estimated $300m”; the actual estimated costs are more than $200m. (See the financial breakout in the footnote for more details.)
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Pace was founded by Arne and his wife, Milly Glimcher, in Boston in 1960.
Zwirner sold Platform to Basic Space, the design and fashion e-tailer, in 2025.
The math on the estimated costs: the gallery pays around $9m per year for rent, plus it “shared” around $100m in renovation and construction expenses with the developer, per the Times. So if the shared costs were an even split, Pace’s all-in expenses for the project over the life of the lease would be around $230m.
Superblue was formerly known as PaceX (yes, the name was partly a SpaceX homage). Its main location, in Miami, didn’t open until 2021 because of Covid, and a second location in London closed after one show in 2022. Spokespeople and executives from Pace and Superblue also insisted for years that the two businesses were in fact separate entities despite sharing top brass, board members, and even some staff. Notably, the stories about Pace’s downsizing have included zero corrections to, or qualifications around, the idea that Superblue was for all intents and purposes a subsidiary of the gallery.
I would retroactively make this same argument about Blum gallery, the high-end dealership that stirred up a media cyclone by blaming “the system” and “the model” for its closure last year.
Pace’s website had 104 names on its Artists page as of newsletter time, but a gallery spokesperson confirmed that this is only because Pace is “fulfilling [its] commitments to current and ongoing projects with a number of artists” before releasing them. Once this process is complete, the revised roster will be around 80 artists, at least for the time being.