Conclusions

When I organ writing this book in eaty 2014, 1 was comined the ile loo
Castelli model might no longer be a viable choice for running a contemporary art gallery. I thought it might be broken. With the growing corporatization of the art market, an epic bloodbath among mega-galleries that was exciting cupidity down through the system, and new intermediaries oozing out of the Internet to chip away steadily at the gallery's preeminence, the genteel world of handshake agreements and thoughtful contemplations that Castelli's model had helped inspire seemed quaint, if not downright suicidal for any dealer who had survived the financial collapse of
2008. Or so I thought.
While I was researching and writing and rewriting, though, I was challenged by a friend to consider how the concept of "success" in the art world had somehow been hijacked. Much as it had come to be in nearly every other profession, "success" in the art world was increasingly measured by numbers, and in particular by numbers preceded by dollar signs. If such metrics were absurd in any context, it would certainly be the art world, no?
And yet, no.
So I began rethinking about (and rewriting) the book from dual perspectives: was the Castelli model still viable, and was the mega-gallery track truly the only path to success? In the opening of Part II, I outlined the central argument for the second perspective: that "success" is measured by whether you meet your goals, not whether you meet someone else's goals. And yet, again and again, the goals of a handful of ambitious dealers were seemingly dictating many other dealers' goals or at least their actions. So in addition to trying to answer whether the Castelli model still made sense, I also approached each topic wondering what role it played in reinforcing the misperception that there was only one definition of "success."