You may have read the news the other day that Apple TV+ has just landed a new series called The Dealer, about the relationship between an art dealer (played by Jessica Chastain) and, in the words of Deadline “her most gifted and unnerving artist” (played by Adam Driver). You may have also heard that filming has just wrapped on The Gallerist, a feature film starring Natalie Portman and Jenna Ortega with a plot that Deadline encapsulates as being about “a desperate gallerist who conspires to sell a dead guy at Art Basel Miami.” (If you can sell a banana, you can sell a corpse.) What, you may wonder, is the difference between a dealer and a gallerist?
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A simple answer might be, a dealer works on the secondary market (artworks that have been bought and sold in the past) as well as possibly on the primary market (artworks fresh from the studio), while a gallerist works only with the primary market, and hence closely with artists and their “unnerving” personalities. (Hence the emphasis on the gallery, the space in which the unnerving artist sets up the presumably challengingly avant-garde work.)
Two New Yorker profiles, 20 years apart, provide a bit more nuance. In the late critic Peter Schjeldahl’s 2004 profile of Marian Goodman, who opened her eponymous New York gallery in 1977, one of Goodman’s artists, Thomas Struth, as well as Schjeldahl himself refer to Goodman as a “gallerist” before Schjeldahl gets around, at the very end of the article, to explaining the word. “‘Gallerist’ is the word she prefers for herself,” he writes. “She dislikes ‘dealer.’ What’s the difference? She couldn’t exactly say. Perhaps she, too, is spooked by the shadiness that clings to her profession. … [T]he French-sounding ‘gallerist’ signals something else, as well: an old-fashioned cosmopolitan ethos, for which the Atlantic Ocean is a lake shared by aspirants to transnational culture.” (Perhaps ironically, the article is called “Dealership.”)
Two years ago came a late riposte to Schjeldahl’s piece in Patrick Radden Keeffe’s profile of Larry Gagosian. “He is dubious of art dealers who refer to themselves as ‘gallerists,’” Keeffe tells us, “which he regards as a pretentious euphemism that obscures the mercantile essence of the occupation. He has always favored a certain macho bluntness, and calls himself a dealer without apology.”
And there you have it. Think of them as cocktails served at a hipster speakeasy: The Gallerist, an old-fashioned cosmopolitan; The Dealer, a mercantile essence.