You might think of New York’s Kasmin Gallery as an art gallery, but it’s actually a moving company, and they’re moving art. Thousands of works of art. Pieces are trucked and shipped (or flown) to and from clients’ homes, museums, conservators, artists and between eight and a dozen art galleries around the world. “Every day, we ship things,” said Eric Gleason, Kasmin’s head of sales, noting that the gallery has five registrars who “work around the clock” to arrange the transportation of the artworks (which must be packed, crated, shipped and insured) using the gallery’s truck drivers for the trip. local and foreign companies on long trips.
Art fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach—currently, next to Art Miami, Untitled Art Miami Beach and NADA—and the associated travel costs make up a large portion of many galleries, ranking neck and neck with rent and behind salaries. for workers, who often spend most of their time preparing artworks for delivery or transporting pieces. Unsurprisingly, gallery staff contacted by the Observer were reluctant to provide actual percentages or dollar amounts for artwork shipments. Still, San Francisco gallery owner Todd Hosfelt said, “We’re a transportation company,” suggesting the numbers are high.
The gallery has no choice but to keep the top trucking companies busy because they need to reach people where they are. “Art fairs drive our economy,” said Sique Spence, director of New York’s Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which participates in four art fairs every year, sending between thirty and forty works of art to each show. He mentioned that few sales come from people who just walk by the gallery these days, adding that “we depend on exhibitions to focus on selling places, and expanding our customers. Buyers love art fairs, and they believe that fairs bring their best works to the fair.”
It might reduce costs if galleries just sent the same artwork, or many of the same, to different shows, but that’s a no-no because people who attend these shows “make a cycle,” Spence explains, “and you don’t do that. I want them to see the same pieces over and over again.”
Also keeping costs high is the fact that many works of art are fragile or made up of several parts that require careful packing, sturdy crates and soft moving vans. “Everything is expensive,” said James Hendy, managing director of Crozier Fine Arts, a company that stores, installs and transports works of art for artists, collectors, dealers, galleries and museums. “The artwork itself is expensive, the engineering of the crates is expensive, the training of the art workers to do everything correctly, the insurance is expensive, the cost of transporting things by land, sea and air is expensive, it is increasing. it’s expensive.”
He noted that there is no average price for moving works of art because each item is different, and some are more fragile or unmanageable than others. “Some only need two handlers to pick up and move the crate, while others need five handlers and maybe a crane.”
There are even cases where the costs (and risks) of transporting works of art are too great. Hosfelt told the Observer that he is reluctant to ship artwork that contains electronics because bumps in the road or bumping of crates during the move “could cause the wires attached to the cables to come loose. You don’t want to make a piece at an art show and find out it doesn’t work.”
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Art created from non-traditional materials can pose additional expensive challenges to accommodate sellers who want to transport them from one location to another. Manhattan gallery owner Cstin Tierney told the Observer that “works of art can be made of wax or chocolate or tissue paper. We represent one artist who makes sculptures out of balsa sticks, the kind that architects use to make scale models, and those works can be very fragile.” Almost everything produced by the artists represented in his gallery requires special treatment, and special treatment means expensive treatment. Another challenge his gallery faced recently was to send—from London to New York—a 2020 work by two British artists John Wood and Paul Harrison entitled. Seat/Amber which consisted of an elementary school chair and desk combination with the space under the chair filled with thousands of pieces of chewed and mixed gum. “It turns out that the resin is incredibly heavy,” he said, and keeping the resin in place is necessary to fix the crate.
Maintenance is another factor that can make the moving process more expensive. A spokesperson for Chapman Freeborn, an air freight company used by many art galleries, collectors and museums to ship works of art to art exhibitions and other venues, told us that “risks in shipping depend on the nature of the good and its surroundings. For example, exhibitions in areas with extreme weather, challenging infrastructure or high humidity levels may require additional safety measures.Our team works closely with customers to reduce those risks—either through solutions for custom packaging, climate-controlled charts or by sending couriers to hand-deliver and oversee shipments.”
The insurance industry reports that most damage to artwork occurs during transit, but galleries we contacted said that artworks rarely experience damage during shipping and that they have made few insurance claims over the years. Significantly, both statements can be true. Gleason confirmed that the most important risks in art work are found not in going to art exhibitions but in the events themselves. “There could be 35,000 people on a given day filling the booths, and people bumping into things,” he said. (Remember the tragic death of Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog (Blue) in the 2023 Art Wynwood program.)
Still, galleries do their best to keep costs down. New York gallery owner Andrew Schoelkopf told the Observer that he sometimes uses art movers—trucks that transport the artworks of several galleries from one location to another—rather than hiring a truck that is willing to carry only his gallery’s items. Hosfelt Gallery occasionally ships individual works using FedEx and DHL, according to gallery registrar Brooke Corley, who noted that shipping a painting via FedEx from the gallery to a client in Los Angeles can cost as little as $100. The gallery participated in the recent ADAA’s The Art Show, submitting twenty small paintings measuring only 8” x 10” each, “fit in one box. That’s a writer’s dream.”
Everyone is thinking about the main issue. Hosfelt says the cost of shipping works of art to clients is usually passed on to those clients, and although collectors often debate when it comes to artwork prices, as well as shipping costs, “I’m a firm believer in that.” Some galleries try to do as much of the packing and crating as possible rather than paying a fine art trucking company, which helps keep shipping costs down. And in some cases, galleries take a DIY approach. If the trip is local and the shipping is small, Tierney said, he’ll “ride an Uber” himself to get it where it needs to go.
