Transcript for Episode 148 – Gallerist, Anna Schwartz, Anna Schwartz Gallery (Melbourne, Australia)

Gallerist, Anna Schwartz, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, Her uncompromising position, Changes in the Art scene in Australia over the past 30 years, Artists should be protagonists, Her role of making artist she represents marketable, Art Fairs, it is all about relationships, the importance of family, Art academia, Gallery exchanges, Art as a Cultural representative, Artist are not show ponies, the importance of trust and confidence between gallery and their artist, if you have to resort to a contract it is a relationship not worth having, gallery relationships should be reciprocal, John Nixon, Georges Mora, Joseph Kosuth, Antony Gormley, Anselm Kiefer

 

Recorded February 2, 2021
Published on February 18, 2021

Recording here: https://wisefoolpod.com/gallerist-anna-schwartz-anna-schwartz-gallery-melbourne-australia/

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 

Matthew Dols 0:12
Could you please pronounce your name correctly? For me?

Anna Schwartz 0:14
I’m Anna Schwartz.

Matthew Dols 0:16
And you have been running the Anna Schwartz gallery in Melbourne, Australia for quite some time now. So one of the first things I always wonder about is how do people even get into the creative industry? So your childhood? Were your parents creative? How did you even come to the arts industry itself?

Anna Schwartz 0:36
That’s a very complex securus route. My parents were, politically, the word they used to use was progressive. They were utopian post World War Two Communist Party members. My father came to Australia in 1938, from Poland with his very prescient father, and mother and sister, just before the Holocaust, and the rest of the family were all murdered. And he, he was the first non English speaking person who against university policy, was admitted to Melbourne University and came top of engineering and he became an aeronautical engineer and my mother came from an established Melbourne Jewish family, the father was Russian, actually, they met at Melbourne University, and like many young people, young, idealistic people of their time, joined the Communist Party. And eventually, my father was involved with the Australian Labor Party. So the influences in my childhood were more political than they were artistic. My first venture into an art gallery was in 1982, when I joined a group of people who a group of artists who wanted to run run their own gallery because of the the constraints that were then imposed on artists within the existing gallery system, in that artists were expected to produce saleable exhibitions. So this was an This was essentially an artist run space that I was involved with. And I ended up kind of holding the baby in, so to speak, because of the the unsuitability really about us to have to run a business. And I hadn’t come from a business background at all. And in fact, I’ve been involved in another field in at university in linguistics. But through circumstances, my first husband, having been an artist who died very young, and I joined this group, or was invited by this group, to represent his work in this new gallery. And I was, I was enthralled and became very involved and ended up with another person, another initial member, running a gallery, and that eventually evolved into my own gallery, I learned that I was somebody in the field not prepared to compromise. And that’s something that has been a major position of mine never compromising.

Matthew Dols 3:43
I’ve read a couple articles with about you sort of interviews with you. And those kinds of words like uncompromising come up very often. Don’t get me wrong, I admire you for that so much, you have no idea. But I always wonder how can you pull that off, because that’s a really difficult position to take, especially when it talks about, you know, being able to pay rent, being able to pay your employees being able to pay your artists to be uncompromising, and not concerned with sales, but with the strength of the quality of the work, like that’s a difficult line to ride.

Anna Schwartz 4:23
For me, they go together, I’m not interested in and I’ve never been interested in working with artists who would dream of compromising, and I consider it to be my responsibility, to represent their work, to show the work but to and without compromise and to mediate that work, to bring an audience to it to create an audience and, and to turn that audience into a market. And it’s been, I think, probably different in Australia to how it might have been or has been in Europe or in America, where there’s greater cultural depth and a greater history. of engagement with the contemporaneous art. But the culture here has changed enormously over those 38 years, and there is a much larger and hungrier and much more engaged audience than there than there was in those early days.

Matthew Dols 5:21
Well, give me a little context on that, because as I’ve said, I haven’t visited Australia. So what, give me a little from your experiences, because you’ve been part of the scene for so long, like What has changed? What was it like when you started and what has grown or changed or gotten better, or potentially gotten worse?

Anna Schwartz 5:41
Well, Australian art history, the great art history is indigenous art, which has been an art form for for 60,000 years. That is the great prevailing enduring and underpinning of this continent. And since the arrival of Europeans, the art that was considered to be straightened out was a colonial art. And over time, the artists came to perceive the landscape, what they the country, in terms of what it was, rather than through the prism of a European or English landscape. So early paintings were very much through that prism of European painting, and, and, and couldn’t actually see Australian light Australian conditions, and the variation of what was actually before them from the art that had underlined their visual culture. So there was a history of the new landscape painting. But then in the 20th century, there was a strong antipathy and movement and modernist movement, and a new voice in Australian art that evolved into a contemporary art scene that is in dialogue, and has been in dialogue with the ideas and the language, which is an international one. And I guess, that’s when I, I entered the art scene, I guess, in 1982, when that was well established, or was beginning to be established, let’s say, there were not many. In fact, there were very few. And I was one of the first galleries, who began to represent the thinking of the time. I was very fortunate to meet it was a much smaller art scene than it is today. And I was very fortunate to meet some very salient figures, one of whom very recently passed away, john Nixon, who was very influential in the country, and in my development, in an in my conceptions of what a gallery could be, and how it could be. intellectually, and, and even physically. My first gallery, my first engagement was with, as I said, this group of artists and the first gallery was called United Artists. And that was in a small space that had been inherited from a well known gallerist, George Mora, who had been a French partisan had come to Australia. And he represented Australian artists, but also American and European. He represented Chuck Close in Australia, he showed Barnard showed was a very wide spectrum of artists, but and he was a wonderful person. And when he left this space, which was part of a restaurant, which he’d also run, we took it over. But then eventually, I found a large, enormous warehouse space in the CBD in the centre of Melbourne, and opened against the advice of anybody who asserted their opinion. And there were many of them, stripped it and turn it into the largest gallery that anybody had ever imagined in this country, and started to do large scale exhibitions. And that, of course, attracted a lot of artists and I’ve always been the beneficiary of relationships between artists. And my gallery has always been a kind of collaboration with artists rather than any kind of hierarchical structure.

Matthew Dols 9:56
Looking at your roster of artists that you currently represent And like, it’s quite astounding, like I there are a number of artists that I have been in a great admirers of that you have. So one of the things that I always wonder about galleries and yours, obviously at this point is sort of how do you find artists and but more to the point is like, what is the characteristics that somehow elevates them to the point that you’re like, yes, this is somebody I want to work with, like that they have what, what’s that thing?

Anna Schwartz 10:29
They have to be the protagonists in a field, they have to be not working in the School of or following anybody. I mean, given that is a trajectory. And there is a kind of lineage of ideas, of course, and a cultural lineage. But within the kind of resistance of this culture, it’s only worth doing, if it’s really worth doing, you know, it’s only worth doing if the artist is doing something that’s culturally innovative. And that is new language. As I said before, I’m the beneficiary of relationships between artists and have good advice. And artists have come to me, I remember when Joseph kossuth came to me, he asked me, would I represent his work in Australia? And he said, before you answer, I advise you to say yes, because it’ll be good for your artists. And the reason that he that he said that, as he later told me, and I’ve worked with him for many years, decades, he admired the fact that I worked with the most interesting artists of this culture and the most, you know, what, to some people might seem seemingly, not commercial artists, but but I’ve made it my measure, to make the work saleable to create a market for those artists. I’ve worked with some wonderful people, some of whom you will know, and some of whom you might never have heard of, but should have, and, and hopefully will. So, you know, in the forum of the art fair, I would often show artists like Joseph and Anthony Gormley, and English on a bar and artists very well known alongside their counterparts, equivalents and contemporaries, from Australia, because people in the marketplace, which, which art fairs are, need cue cues. And so, you know, from a place, it’s considered to be peripheral, it seemed to be useful sometimes to, to present artists in that kind of horizontal way. Although I must say that I’m a great advocate of, if one has to attend an art fair of presenting a solo exhibition of an artist and always allowing that artists voice to be to be coherent and complete. Well,

Matthew Dols 13:16
you brought up two points that were things that I was going to ask you about, which was art fairs. Do you like them? Do you hate them? What’s your opinion on them? What’s your opinion on the future of the art fair, at this point, with the way the world’s going?

Anna Schwartz 13:30
Well, what’s the future of travel? It’s very difficult to predict at the moment from Australia, and I’m in Melbourne, and I’ve been to Sydney once since the virus broke out. And that’s a trip I used to do once a week. You know, it’s an hour long flight. And I would do that every week. But I haven’t. I’m having an opening in the gallery. This at the end of this week by an early exhibition by Shaun Gladwell. And people are coming from all over Australia, which is a huge commitment, and a very moving commitment, as far as I’m concerned that people are prepared to take that risk. And many of them have said to me, we haven’t traveled for a year, but we’re going to come to this exhibition. So it just reinforces for me the importance of art to people’s lives. fairs. There, you know, I think there’s no galleries Who would ever admit to liking an art fair. There’s something very, as a gallery is very passive about, you know, you can’t really have agency and you can’t express and present the work of artists in its entirety and, you know, in its articulation the way one can in the gallery an artist doesn’t play to an art fair the way an artist plays to a gallery I’ve done many of them participated in many without us because it has been a way of internationalizing artists and meeting people and engaging. And I’m not saying I’d never do it, again, if the world reconfigured itself. But I think that large scale exhibitions and in museums and being alleys and so on, and even exchanges with, with galleries and other parts of the world are probably something that I’m more interested in a booth in an art fair.

Matthew Dols 15:34
Fair enough, totally get it. You talked about how, when you represent artists, that you some of them may already have sort of followings, and they’re already, you know, rising stars in their career. And some of them you try to build them and create their, their position in the genre. So when you’re working with them to do this kind of stuff, are you focusing on the idea of a collector’s buying or trying to get sort of works in exhibitions and institutions, and or sort of institutional collections.

Anna Schwartz 16:10
I’ve never made a plan. I just do what comes up and what seems to be the best thing at the time. And it’s everything, you know, it’s it’s selling the work, it’s placing the work in the right museums, it’s, it’s basically about relationships, it’s about relationships with collectors, it’s its relationships with the culture. One of the benefits of not being so young, is that, you know, a lot of people have been involved in this culture, through its development. And I and I do know a lot of people and there are not many areas of the culture that I haven’t been involved in. And so I’m able to facilitate relationships, and disseminating the work of artists, and creating careers or assisting with their careers is a function of relationships, whether they are with individuals who are buying art, collecting art, or whether it’s with curators, for various generations, directors of museums, writers, people in theater, all kinds of people who commissioned artworks, we do a lot of work in the public sphere, public Commission’s, it’s all a function of engagement with people and relationships. And so that’s how I see, the role of my gallery is the role of facilitator and mediator. And one of never, as we said, compromising but giving, creating access to ideas and to the work of artists, which might seem to be inaccessible to people. But if you break down the defensiveness and give a point of access and prepared to, not over explain, but provide a language, I find that people are very responsive. And we’ve been able to somehow maintain our existence for all those years, almost 40 years and provide a living for a lot of really great artists.

Matthew Dols 18:23
Within that, like you seem to be focusing primarily on Australia and Australia. Now I’ve seen you do represent artists from other places, but you know, the most majority of your roster seems to be Australian, not to you know, knock it, but like, why did you choose to stay in Australia? I mean, you seem to be incredibly skilled, you literally could take your skills and doing this and being as I read a tastemaker sort of anywhere in the world, but you’ve chosen to stay there and sort of build it there. What about it keeps you there?

Anna Schwartz 18:57
That’s a very good question. And the answer to the question is for me, you know, I couldn’t leave my family. I couldn’t leave my, my daughter, I could have taken out with me at a young age, but my husband had aged parents who since died, is very committed to his parents as I was to mine. And I couldn’t cut myself off, extricate myself really, from family. And now I have grandchildren. Not I mean, you know, there was certainly a time when I could have struck out in New York. But there’s a sense in which I did have I felt a great commitment to the artists of this country. There was no compromise in staying in Australia for me, because of the quality of the artists and the importance of the ideas in their work. And, and I don’t even want to say equivalence because it’s not a comparison with the rest of The world with pick what people were doing in other places. But there was no reason really to uproot myself, and remove myself from my context and my family and the artists whose work I really know, appreciate, and can represent and disseminate to go to another place, why would I, because there’s thriving cultures there. And I felt that it was useful and important to contribute to the culture here in this place, and to elevate it, to allow it to be elevated through the voices of the artists here, who needed that, who needed that support needed the platform. And it’s one that I found myself able to provide.

Matthew Dols 20:43
Alright, to revisit something. You, when you were talking about, like artists you choose, you talked about protagonists, and I know that you’re often referred to as like, highly conceptual, and your were your artists that you represent stuff. Like, what I guess the question is sort of like, if there was an artist out there, let’s say that wanted to be represented by you. What kind of things could they What do you like sort of what are, I guess the good thing is like, conceptual, that’s a very vague terminology, like some sort of concrete thing of like, something that actually engages you right now. I mean, of course, I know, this has changed, I’m sure over the years,

Anna Schwartz 21:27
I look, it’s like falling in love. It’s very hard to actually define, you know, but you know, when it strikes you, you know, when it’s totally authentic, and original, and intelligent and important. But one of the things that I really advocate, I’m often asked to speak to art students in art schools and young artists, and I really advocate that they should open a gallery, they need to be galleries. For a new generation of artists, you know, there are artists do keep applying to our gallery, but there’s a limit to what, what one can actually responsibly do, you know, and to represent an artist fully is a is a very major commitment. It’s something that, you know, I wonder, really, with art schools, that there are so many people, so many graduates who imagine or who are, who are led to imagine that they can have, that they can have a viable career as an artist. And that can only lead to the disappointment of many people, because they’re not going to achieve that it’s just impossible for them to achieve the expectations that they’re led to believe by the system that they should be able to attain. But running a gallery and creating platforms and creating the, you know, the space for discussion and for ideas, whether it’s expressed visually, or however it is expressed is a very important thing to be able to contribute to the culture. And so that’s something that I I really do advocate.

Matthew Dols 23:15
What do you think, given that you’ve just brought up academiae? What do you think about the contemporary art academic structure? Just to be clear, I’m in it, and I’m not a huge fan of it.

Anna Schwartz 23:28
Look, I think that it’s really important that it exists. And I think it’s really important that ideas are pursued, and that they’re not subject to the criticism that they’re elitist. You know, I think that’s really important that human culture evolves. And and it’s not, as I said, not subject to the constraints of an anti intellectual push, I think that culture is pluralistic. And that there should be space for parallel trajectories. And I think that there are, there are parallel streams of making our parallel art histories. And I don’t believe really in a hierarchy, I’ve chosen to place myself in the domain that I find most interesting that I find myself into an important but it’s not to the contradiction, really, of the viability of others.

Matthew Dols 24:21
Yet, some of my favorite artists are sort of what we would call like outsider artists or untrained artists, like they’re, you know, people that just have that incredible passion and that innate ability to be expressive through the visual mediums are can be as possibly even better than some of the people that go through the the academic rigor and all that kind of stuff, because to a certain extent, academics can remove a lot of those natural skills and abilities and ideas by sort of pressuring them into following some style.

Anna Schwartz 24:54
Yeah, I don’t think it’s a question of validity or style. I do think that there protagonists in art thinking today there are major artists who by whom the culture is defined and will be defined and will have been defined. But that’s not to undermine the pleasure of making up for other people, you know, and other artists, you know, there are long traditions in landscape painting. And there are various positions, obviously, that one can take in relation to that. But do you look at in some cases, a landscape photo, there are so many courses of thought that one can pursue that. I think that there’s to be pragmatic about it. There is scope for a lot of, certainly in this country, and I know in other countries scope for a spectrum of practices and galleries to represent those practices. I think that what we’re doing is the most important, but that’s, that’s in my eyes.

Matthew Dols 26:01
Okay, well, along that line. So like you had talked about going to schools and giving advice and things like this, and you already mentioned one bit of advice. What’s the thing that you feel like is the best piece of advice not just to our young artists, but young gallerists that you could give? And what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received in the arts world?

Anna Schwartz 26:21
Well, the best piece of advice I ever received, was from George Mora, whose gallery space I inherited in that first gallery, United Artists. And George slightly aggrieved said to me, and I hear you’re going to open a gallery. He was a great restaurant. And I said, Yes, George, we are. And he said, let me give you a piece of advice. And I said, Yes, he said, feed them. He used to have famous lunches every day. And people would come it was kind of silver service. And, and at those lunches, one would find an extraordinary Milan’s a mixture of people. And so that was a great piece of advice. And I’ve always enjoyed cooking. And I do that I have lunches and dinners, and I love to create situations in which people can engage. So that was probably the best piece of advice I’ve ever received. Because I’ve, I’ve never been a grateful receptor of advice about what I should do. And the best piece of advice that I would give to a young gallerist is think very carefully about your position because it is a cultural position. And don’t compromise and play the long game, play the long game, take long view, be prepared to be perceived to fail, but know that you’re not failing.

Matthew Dols 27:56
Alright, you also mentioned earlier about the ideas moving forward, because of course, a lot of the questions are, will museums continue to exist? Will galleries continue to exist? all this kind of stuff? And you talked about the idea of doing exchanges with other galleries in the future? Is this something like I grew up with, I worked in galleries when I was younger, and we had what we called sister galleries in other cities and countries that we did exchanges with. So is this something that you have not done that you’re looking forward to doing?

Anna Schwartz 28:27
There are some galleries that I’ve had very good relationships with, in terms of mutuality of artists? It’s something I don’t know how the world is going to reconfigure itself. It’s something I’m certainly interested in investigating. I’m hoping that we can travel again, it’s going to be interesting to see where this is, played this interview, and when, and what what will be the vantage point of the listener? Because we’re speaking in 2021. It’s the beginning of the year. In Australia, in my city, we were in lockdown for seven months. I didn’t leave my house for seven months. In one sense, I thought it was the long service leave, I’d never had the sabbatical I’d never heard. But it was a difficult time. It was a difficult time for economic survival. And it was a very difficult time for artists in many ways, although a very productive time. Artists practices flourished, you know, artists in their studios did extraordinary things during this time. I think it’s been a historical time and I hope it’s one that doesn’t continue. We don’t we can’t say at this moment. I can’t predict or predicate from this moment. We’ve had two waves of the Coronavirus here in Melbourne, Australia. And we’ve had 27 days of no new cases, no community cases. So We’re waiting to see, holding our breaths, hoping that there, that it’s that it’s eradicated and that it will not no longer exists. But as people come back to the country or enter the country, there are new cases in quarantine. So, you know, the future is a little bit unknown. We just don’t know what’s going to happen. I look at the world, I look at New York, I look at London, I look at Europe, all the places that, you know, I feel now I didn’t really fully take advantage of being in. And I wonder, you know, I certainly wouldn’t go into any of those places now, given the contamination and the contagion. And I wonder, you know, this year, I’ll be 70. And, you know, I don’t know what the future will be, I just don’t know. But having said all of that, there’s still the transport of objects. And so maybe the access to culture and international culture will be through gallery exchanges. You know, maybe that’s how we travel, we we represent ourselves through the art of our countries. We have cultural exchange, through the exchange of galleries, exchange of artists, that maybe it’s, maybe it’s again, the artists who are the protagonists of culture, you know, when when Australia wanted to make a kind of political foray into Asia, they sent art first. And maybe that’s going to be the post viral communication in the world. Maybe art will be the ambassador, maybe art will be the traveler.

Matthew Dols 31:50
I love that. I think it’s, yeah, it would be magnificent. I mean, they used to do it. You know, centuries ago, when when diplomats and stuff visited other countries, they would take ARDS that represent their culture and stuff. So I mean, this is a long standing tradition.

Anna Schwartz 32:06
I think we might have to reinvent that tradition that will be representative, you know, and that’s how we will speak to each other through. We can’t, we can’t go personally, it will be the that we produce that will engage.

Matthew Dols 32:23
Okay, well, along that lines, actually. Because, of course, the limitations of the past year and the potential for Well, not as much travel in the future. What about any sort of technologies that you are implementing in the gallery? Are you doing any like virtual tours, virtual exhibitions, like, what what kind of technologies are you trying to instigate to, or sorry, implement in order to still continue to engage people in the gallery and your artists?

Anna Schwartz 32:52
During the lockdown one of my projects was to renovate the, I’ve got two levels in our gallery, and renovate the upstairs space, which had been very much a remnant of the original warehouse building with windows down one side. And so we actually filled in that wall with the windows and built it up. So that it became a remarkably unknown new space with doing very little, it became totally different. And a very viable, in fact, even perhaps more desirable, and a very well known large space on the ground floor. So we changed with my new two year standing co-director tended to rocklers just reconfigured our program, so that in the main gallery, downstairs, we’re just having three or four major exhibitions a year three month exhibitions, during which time the artists can reimagine or reconfigure their exhibition if they so choose. And the upstairs space is more flexible and responsive to to the situation around us. So shorter exhibitions, lectures, various kinds of performances. So there are these kind of to juxtapose programs going on. But in response to your question, we have redesigned and re reconfigured our website, which I think is really very good. It was always considered to be the best gallery website now. It’s the best new gallery website, I’m told. And we did a lot of work on Instagram in a new way. We decided not to do virtual exhibitions because we just wanted to remain authentic to the artists practice. And the artist practice didn’t involve Fly throughs. So we’ve always had a very kind of representative website. And people responded to that we’ve had a lot of diet, we, you know, throughout the lockdown, we had a lot of dialogue and a lot of majoring engagement with museums and the development of public projects. So you know, it was no holiday, it was no vacation.

Matthew Dols 35:24
Never thought it was no, I probably been working harder in mice, both my studio as well as my jobs now in lockdown than I was before.

Anna Schwartz 35:35
I basically, for artists, I don’t think that there was so much disruption, because as an artist, you might have an exhibition every two years. So, you know, a year of, of no action is not such an unusual thing. And for the gallery, we we work doubly hard, and, and continue to do so. So you know, we’re really in a position to all we have to respond to the circumstances always have and always will, when I first opened a gallery, it was in 1982. I didn’t even know what a recession was. But apparently, that was a recession. So for me, that was, you know, ground zero, and everything else has been a bonus.

Matthew Dols 36:22
Here, the only disruption I’ve had was getting supplies, a lot of the sort of infrastructure of like art stores, getting their supplies, and then being able to even have access to the art stores. Because the even some of the art stores here in this region were closed for many months. So the access to the supplies was a little difficult. At a certain point, it’s gotten better now. Because even they need to stay open, because how are we going to make our work if we can’t get supplies? How are they going to feed their families? Indeed. So you mentioned something that sort of struck me is how important you said in the virtue of the idea of doing virtual stuff that you didn’t want to sort of do little fly throughs and do all this kind of stuff. How important is the like the character of the artist, so the is the artist, the I don’t know, cheer cheerleader, or sort of the outgoing the person that sort of the, you know, encourages interest in their works? Or are you primarily sort of stay focused on the work and the artists personality is secondary.

Anna Schwartz 37:29
Now, artists shouldn’t be compelled to present themselves theatrically or in the public realm at all. No, their work is that their medium is that work. And and I don’t believe that they should be, you know, requested, or they can be requested. But I don’t think that they should feel compelled to acquiesce or agreed to appearing in the public in any form other than in their work through their work.

Matthew Dols 37:57
I love you for that. That’s great, because I feel like sometimes we’re sort of show ponies sort of brought out to sell things.

Anna Schwartz 38:05
Not that’s our role. That’s the galleries role, gallery galleries role is to represent the artist, the artist, is free to make art to only make their work and, and it’s the role of the gallery, I don’t believe in the kind of, you know, mistake of the artist personality or the exotic infant kind of persona that artists are expected to fulfill. Not at all.

Matthew Dols 38:33
I’ve heard stories from different galleries, some galleries to have the sort of standard when they sell art work. It’s a split between the gallery and the artist, whereas I’ve heard other stories about some galleries where they will sort of give a stipend or an honorarium or whatever, and basically support the artists, whether they’re actively selling in that given month or not. Like do you follow either of these models are some other sort of model to sort of keep your artists being able to work and live?

Anna Schwartz 39:01
Well, my position is that I have a series of individual relationships and partnerships with artists. And there’s no one rule that applies to everybody that it’s idiosyncratic. It’s what that person needs and what what we can come to together that is satisfactory for both parties. So there’s nothing there’s nothing that you can imagine that hasn’t been done. Right. Okay. I understand what because it’s building a relationship. So every relationship is unique. Yes, it is. It’s a unique and it’s a confidential, and it’s a trusting relationship. And that’s salient. That’s the salient thing, the trust and the ongoing confidence in each other. And there are artists that I’ve worked with very closely for all those years for, you know, 37 years, 3537 years on the basis of trust. I’ve never had a contract with anybody. I’ve never needed why You know, if you have to resort to a contract, it’s a relationship not worth having.

Matthew Dols 40:06
That’s an interesting point. Okay? Because I come from America and in America, like even marriages have contracts.

Anna Schwartz 40:14
I’ve never needed one. And I don’t I don’t want a relationship where you need one.

Matthew Dols 40:18
It’s a it’s very admirable. I am, you know, I wish more galleries were the only way to live. Do you have a contract with your children? Not yet.

Anna Schwartz 40:28
No, no contract? No, no.

Matthew Dols 40:34
You mentioned that a lot of your artists you’ve worked with for decades, have you had any situations where something’s didn’t work out for whatever reason, because it seems like you pride yourself on sort of having these long term relationships?

Anna Schwartz 40:48
Well, the ones that I still have, many of them have been very long term. And there are, there are some that perhaps haven’t lasted for the varying reasons. When the relationships are long lasting, they’re they’re great relationships, they’re lifelong developmental interactions that facilitate the growth of both parties that facilitate, I think the growth of the artists and certainly have facilitated my intellectual growth. And they’re fundamental, to my life and to, to what I do. And I think that being fundamental to certain artists in facilitating their, their practice, and its dissemination in the world, and so that’s a great thing. But, you know, as with the whole enterprise, it is very individualized. Some relationships flourish in the long term, and some are short lived, and serial, you know, it’s like, any other relationship, you know, some relationships are serial, and some are lifelong. And the great thing about running a gallery is you can have it all. You have a long term marriage, and you can also have affairs.

Matthew Dols 42:12
You’re a serial monogamist. I got it.

Anna Schwartz 42:14
Well, no, it’s not a serial monogamist. It’s all at the same time. What’s, what’s the word for that,

Matthew Dols 42:20
polyamorous?

Anna Schwartz 42:22
Well, maybe, but there’s many types of relationships with artists, as there are artists.

Matthew Dols 42:32
Alright, last question, then. Instagram, you mentioned that you use it, I have a love hate relationship with Instagram warehouse, What’s your feeling? Have you had like, has it shown you any sort of return on the bad disabled, like return on investment? So like, the time and the energy you put into Instagram, has it shown you any results,

Anna Schwartz 42:55
I’m in a position now where I have younger people working with me in the gallery. And they’re the ones who are engaged in Instagram, and they have had their commitment to it, and its response and the responses from it. And that’s their domain. And one of the pleasures in my life now is allowing it or enjoying that my divestment from every aspect of the gallery. So that’s not I enjoy it. I think the images are great. And the way that they’ve compiled them is extraordinary. The development of the expression of each artist and a series of exhibitions and what they’re able to configure on that new form, new for me is really impressive. And it’s a language and that and they’re engaged in that language with people all over the world and really respected for it and, and things do come out of it. There’s a whole range of you are in that question. Inherent is the presupposition of sales. And there’s so much more than that, inherent in the gallery. Although I do have to say that my everything that you see in my gallery, the building the staff, Everything about it is the product of sales. So that’s crucial. It’s a real business. It’s nobody’s tax loss. Fortunately, or unfortunately, prep fortunately for the artists, unfortunately for me, so it’s it’s real, it’s all real. And that Instagram engagement, as I said, in my advice to young gallerists, take the long view, take the wide cultural view and do everything that has apparent meaning and potential fruition for you because you can’t actually predict what the outcomes going to be aware where it will be but as long as it’s something that you think is worth doing and is enjoyable and is authentically a representation of the artists work, then it’s really worth doing. So I’d say that about Instagram at the moment.

Matthew Dols 45:14
Marvelous. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me. It’s been a great pleasure.