By Jeff Huebner
How much?
Schwartz, the owner of Wicker Park’s Beret International Gallery, split the cost of a $10,000 booth at the art fair with Joel Leib, owner of Ten in One Gallery in Wicker Park, and Richard Kelley, who runs Tough Gallery on the near west side. For the last five years they’ve been aligned as Uncomfortable Spaces, sharing the costs of mailings and art fairs while trying to build an audience for their product–recent art with a conceptual bent.
When the guy with the ponytail reappears, Schwartz is surprised but cool. They sit down at the table again and this time they close the deal. The man arranges to have Surface Lure delivered to Northbrook the following week. They shake hands.
The typical Beret statement is playfully provocative, experimental yet mining many of the same humorous and satirical veins tapped by Dada and Fluxus antiart. Last fall, Marc Alan Jacobs staged his piece How to Spot a Jew by taking a bar mitzvah cake decoration of a boy reading from the Torah, placing it on the roof of a hot dog stand across Milwaukee Avenue, and inviting viewers to look at the figurine through a telescope positioned in a gallery window. In the same exhibit, Lance Warren documented his efforts to land either a job or an art exhibit at eight of the country’s most prestigious museums. He mailed boxed sets of dinner plates and napkins that had resumes and cover letters printed on them. Warren displayed the returned boxes, some still unopened, and the form rejection letters.
“I think these guys are the most important galleries in town because they’re showing younger, fresher artists,” says Michael Bulka, a freelance critic who contributes to the New Art Examiner and World Art. “Art’s about a conversation, and there are only so many times you can repeat the same line of dialogue. There have to be some places where you can go see things that don’t get shown because it doesn’t fit the program. But if you’re going to show some different stuff, you’ve got to take some kind of risks and not be afraid to lose money. And Beret does that more than most people do.”
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It’s not that Schwartz, a sometime conceptual artist himself, wouldn’t like to run a profitable business. But Beret’s brand of art stresses exposure over lucre. Since he runs the gallery largely out of his own pocket, he can afford to take risks. Certainly he’s not the first art dealer to subsidize a gallery, but he’s not wealthy and he’s trading in a kind of art that offers little prospect of future financial gain. Most Beret artists couldn’t hope to show in a River North gallery, though many wouldn’t want to anyway. Commercial galleries are forced to play it safe in a depressed market, sticking with only tested sellers and keeping an eye on the bottom line so they don’t lose their leases.
