Artwrld How Tech Could Transform the Art Industry with Marc Glimcher CEO of Pace Gallery
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.