The Art of Debate

Even for the most fanatic outdoor types, the increasing infusion of arts and culture into western resort towns such as Park City, Sun Valley, Aspen and Santa Fe is hard to ignore, especially in the summer. Every weekend offers up a veritable smorgasbord of delicious cultural fare, often in inspiring outdoor venues.

The visual arts are no exception. Galleries have become a mainstay of resort towns, with hundreds of people showing up for gallery strolls and art exhibitions, drinking wine and mingling with artists. Sales are strong, prices are up, and both the featured art and the clientele are increasingly sophisticated and urbane. Many galleries are reporting shipping 50 to 70 percent of purchases to national and international addresses, or even having pieces loaded onto private jets headed for New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and Seattle.

With all of this increasing cultural sophistication in resort towns, we couldn’t help wondering if the art world is decentralizing just a bit. Is the power center shifting ever so slightly from the East and West Coasts’ firm holds to mountain towns nestled in the West and Southwest?

“No. Never. Never. Never,” says Pam Crowe-Weisberg, executive director of Park City’s Kimball Art Center. Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, director and chief curator of the Aspen Art Museum, says graciously and definitively, “The power base is not shifting.” “New York is going to stay New York,” says Sun Valley gallery owner Andria Friesen. “The answer is no,” says Aspen gallery owner David Florian, followed by a long pause that suggests there is no need for any follow-up questions.

Of course, we asked the follow-up questions anyway and discovered that while no one suggests any kind of shift, those deeply entrenched in resort town art scenes — gallery owners and directors of museums and art centers — note that art ventures in these resort towns are enhancing the national and international art market in a meaningful way.

\Jacobson insightfully points out that art hubs like New York City and Los Angeles are always going to be where artists live and work. “It is highly unlikely that there would ever be enough people to create a nexus in a resort town,” she says, “because they’re too expensive.” Sky-rocketing real estate is a two-way street: while it prices all but a few artists out of the market, it also attracts a more sophisticated and moneyed clientele with plenty of discretionary income to spend, as it turns out, on art. Second homeowners often have spacious mountain homes with plenty of wall space that, unlike their urban dwellings, can accommodate large works. And many tourists are forsaking T-shirts and knickknacks as memorabilia and taking home a painting or sculpture instead.

In the past, that painting would likely have been a traditional landscape scene of the area. Today, it might just as well be an abstract painting. “What I have seen in Santa Fe in the past seven years is a shift from traditional Southwestern, landscape and “cowboy” style art to a contemporary esthetic,” says Cyndi Conn, the visual arts director for Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts. With more than 250 art galleries, several art centers and museums and a vibrant artist community, Santa Fe is generally considered to be the third most important art market in the country.

The top two U.S. art markets — New York and Los Angeles — remain the hotbeds and incubators for artists; however, resort galleries provide attractive venues for those same artists to show their work. “Resort towns are doing a really good job of highlighting artists, some of whom show at very prestigious galleries in major cities,” says Robin Reiners of Sun Valley’s Gallery DeNovo. Gallery owners are finding that artists are eager to be represented and enthusiastic about taking a break from urban living, breathing some mountain air, and attending their openings. Many patrons plan their visits to resort towns to coincide with monthly gallery walks so that they can meet a particular artist. “This accessibility is not necessarily something that the larger, and to some extent more impersonal, galleries in big cities can offer,” says Carey Molter of Sun Valley’s Kneeland Gallery.

The resort gallery scene seems determined to provide an antidote to the sometimes unwelcoming and off-putting elitism of the commercial art world. “Is there anywhere you could possibly feel smaller?” Phil Collins, a video artist and a nominee for this year’s prestigious Turner Prize, recently told The New Yorker. Referring to the sometimes aloof aspect of big city art openings, he said, “It’s the only place where you can give away free booze and no one turns up.”

In resort towns, people turn up, in large part, because gallery owners go out of their way to make their spaces welcoming, friendly and accessible, even to those who have come solely to enjoy the art. The relaxed atmosphere makes people, especially those who are just beginning to collect art, feel more comfortable building a relationship with the gallery owner and purchasing. “One can find artists in many different locations via the Internet,” says Reiner. “It’s the relationship of the gallery and the client and the process of the sale that makes the difference in where they choose to buy.”

Melanie Gray and Mark Wawro, attorneys from Houston with a second home in Park City’s Deer Valley area, consider themselves amateur modern art collectors. When they arrive in Park City, one of their first stops is the Julie Nester Gallery. They love the art, and they appreciate Nester’s warm style, especially compared to the hard sell of a venerable gallery in Houston, where they once bought a piece of art just to end the sales pitch.

Some resort galleries represent high profile artists, but most focus on emerging or mid-career artists, providing important venues for these artists’ works that otherwise might not exist. For collectors like Gray and Wawro, that’s an added bonus: Because the art is less commercialized, they enjoy a sense of discovery. Wawro will never forget her disappointment after buying a piece by a well-known artist and then walking through the Houston airport and seeing the artist’s work displayed throughout.

Some critics complain that resort art offerings tend to be too “safe” and “lovely,” reflecting their patron’s upbeat vacation mood. While it’s true that most venues steer clear of über controversial or shocking exhibits, Andria Friesen, who owns galleries in downtown Seattle and Sun Valley, argues that people on vacation are actually in a better place to appreciate more difficult pieces. “In Seattle, it is so hard to get people to even walk through the doors. If they do, they’ve just been in a traffic jam or stuck on a bridge,” says Friesen, whose Friesen Gallery Seattle is on the plaza level of one of the city’s most prestigious office buildings. “The air and the scenery play a huge role in peeling back layers so that the mind is more open,” she says. Weisberg agrees.

“The landscape gets people in the mood for art.”

Visual arts are just one aspect of a broader movement to market resort towns as year-round arts and culture destinations. Community art centers, museums, gallery associations, chambers of commerce, and state tourism offices are all working together to transcend the ski town reputation. In Park City this year, the local Chamber/ Bureau for the first time funded a media trip where key players in the Park City art community spent a week in New York City visiting with national magazine and newspaper editors in an effort to promote the town’s “cultural tourism” opportunities.

Aspen gallery owner David Florian believes that people still go to Aspen primarily to go skiing, fly-fishing, or hiking, not to buy art. But he says that when given the choice between going to Aspen, Vail or Breckenridge, they choose Aspen because of the cultural programming. While major city dwellers can find even better cultural programming right out their backdoors, it’s the combination of culture, outdoors, and the leisurely pace of being on vacation that people find appealing.

Aspen gallery owner David Florian points out that the world’s most serious collectors are not going to head to a resort town to fill a hole in their collections. Nevertheless, art venues in these towns are providing a different, and welcome, experience of viewing, appreciating, and buying art. Visitors often have their guards down, their schedules clear, their cell phones turned off, and their partners with them. And generally speaking, they are surprised and delighted by what they find.

Amy Albo is a frequent contributor to Park City Magazine.