Is Gallery Traffic Down? Or Are Smaller Galleries Having Trouble Getting Traffic?: On the occasion of the worthy Chelsea Art Walk, Artnet’s news service offers some interesting numbers to claim the decline in gallery attendance is “well-documented.” Unfortunately, what follows is a mish-mosh of anecdotes from gallerists—not to be ignored but hardly solid evidence—and a recitation of seemingly unrelated statistics. For example, amid record numbers for museum attendance at major institutions in the US, Artnet offers an 8% decline in the portion of the US population that visited an art museum. Then we’re given a chart from Artnet’s report for TEFAF in 2017 that purports to measure the expectation of dealers. But we’re not told which ones, the big dealers who are claiming traffic is up? or the small dealers who claim traffic is way down?  Remember that the art market unevenly distributes sales with the bulk of value selling through a small number of large dealerships. (Also, Artnet is citing its own internet report to tell us that physical gallery sales are low on the list.) Finally, we get a quote from an earlier Zwirner Gallery profile that reveals the dealer sells 30% (is that value or individual sales) to clients who only see images and have not come to the gallery to inspect the work in person. Could it be that those are some of the gallery’s best clients? Ones who have developed trust with their representative and know that a work delivered that turns out not to be like the image can be returned?

• “Although commercial galleries don’t keep official visitor records, arts attendance on the whole has been on a long, well-documented decline. The number of Americans who visited art museums dropped from 40.8 percent in 1993 to 32.5 percent in 2012, according to a 2015 report from the National Endowment for the Arts. Today, dealers say they no longer view physical galleries as the primary site of sales and networking. Instead, they name art fairs as the number one venue for meeting new clients, followed by the internet, according to TEFAF’s 2017 art market report. Nearly a third of dealers expect to do even fewer sales at galleries in the future, the report says—and they expect greater drops in this area than in any other, including private sales, auctions, online sales, and fairs.Thirty percent of David Zwirner‘s sales today are made to buyers who see only emailed images, the dealer recently told the Wall Street Journal.” …

The Gardner Theft Becomes a Podcast: The most famous art museum heist in history is now a 10-part podcast coming on September 17th:

• “WBUR, and The Boston Globe, announced today they have joined forces to launch Last Seen, a weekly podcast that will debut on September 17. Hosted by WBUR’s award-winning producers and reporters Kelly Horan and Jack Rodolico, and with exclusive contributions from Boston Globe’s Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Stephen Kurkjian, author of “Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist,” Last Seen examines the most valuable and confounding art heist in history: the theft of 13 artworks, including Rembrandt’s only seascape, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.” …

A Peek at the New, Expanded Glenstone: The Washington Post takes a turn around Glenstone in advance of the Oct. 4 opening of the new building. As Sebastian Smee explains, the Rales’s collection began with a heavy emphasis on post-war American masters like de Kooning, Rothko, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly.  “One of the things we’ve done in the past 12 years,” said Emily Rales told Smee, “is to broaden our scope, looking at different continents and focusing on avant-garde movements from Japan and Brazil and Europe. We’ve branched off to look at artists who we feel are very important to the story of 20th-century art but may not have great representation in other collections — even museum collections.”

• “Among the highlights are three hanging sculptures by Ruth Asawa; paintings by Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko; an early “combine” by Robert Rauschenberg; a rare early painting by Sol LeWitt; sculptures by Eva Hesse, Lynda Benglis, Martin Puryear, Dieter Roth and Richard Serra; and paintings by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. […] The work displayed in the Pavilions ranges from classic minimalism to examples of postwar German art by the likes of Martin Kippenberger and Sigmar Polke; from pieces associated with Japan’s Gutai and Italy’s Arte Povera groups to key works by Brazilian modernists.”