As the price of photography has continued to rise over the decades between when photography was not considered and medium worthy of being called art and now, the focus has moved more and more towards the stable or inflationary fiscal value of a photograph.  We dealers are busy cornering, developing and monetizing our artists bodies of work. The clients are busy viewing, understanding (at best) and buying the works we offer.  This all is appropriate and a regular part of any business. Buy low, sell high.  Its a simple and meaningful principle for any business to live by.

I regularly find myself in conversations with friends, artists, clients, collectors and most anybody, about the value of the artwork that is bought or sold. Particularly by younger collector I am often asked, how stable the value of the artwork is that I am recommending they purchase?  I have never been able to answer the question without changing the focus of the questioner.

There is something personally valuable about every object we hold dear to us.  The meaning of these things we collect are bound to our experience.  They help us both define as well as express who we are at any given stage in our lives. That is a meaning I think is incredibly potent.  If we free ourselves from having to have that meaning justified by someone else’s  approval then we take a step closer to standing without holding on to anyone or anything.  It’s kind of like what happens when a child goes from crawling to standing, to walking to running.  These developmental stages are all confined by their own restrictions and challenges.  We need to develop our senses, challenge our ideals and test our truths to see if they still hold up. They are all part of our becoming complete people.

The arts are a perfect and omnipresent tool to help us in this process.  All of us started defining our world using our creativity.  Every parent has received a drawing (resembling chicken scratch) from their child who stand beaming and says, “look a house!” (or whatever)  We see a bunch of scratchy marks, but the child sees the house.  Most of us forget this childhood understanding of abstraction.  We unlearn it because our world of productivity declares that the most efficient is always the best.  Maybe it is in many ways, but certainly not all ways.  We inherently can understand the arts.  We may just need to relearn or awaken it in ourselves.

So how do I answer the question of stable value?  If you consider that a work of art that you purchase becomes a part of your life. It becomes a part of you. It serves a purpose in it being with you.  That purpose can be fulfilled in a very short or a very long time, or maybe never.   If, at the time the purpose is fulfilled, you decide to part with it then ask yourself if it was worth it to have solved whatever it was that the artwork helped you solve?  If the answer is yes, then any amount of money you may receive for that work is icing on the cake.  And if that happens to be more than you paid for it, then thats all the better for you.

I know this is a lofty and dreamy view on all of this, but it is how I live with the arts.  I have grown up with art in the house, and in the museums where I regularly went (The National Gallery in Washington DC rules!!).  Now this will not always work, but as Benjamin Zander said in a his TED Talk from 2008, “…it is a possibility to live into..”

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So one of the questions I am very often asked is:

“What does Feroz mean and why is your gallery named Feroz?”

This is a bit of a long story, so I will write it here for the record books.

When I started my career as an art dealer a few years back it was based on a discussion I had with my parents Gerd and Christine about how to manage the rather large collection of vintage photography that my father had amassed during his 30+ years of working as a gallerist, curator and dealer. Almost as a joke I said

“Why don’t I open a gallery?”

Said, done.  So the new idea needed a name.  My father then said that I could not/ should not use the name Sander Gallery as it was his gallery name and it was also to close to August Sander and would lead people to think that I only have works by August Sander, which is certainly not the case.  So I went searching…

I am a big fan of the Ferus Gallery in LA which was run by Irving Blum and Walter Hopps.  Walter Hopps (who would be here in 20 minutes) was a close friend of William Christenberry who, in turn, was an artist my father represented in Washington DC and New York City before he moved to Germany.  My father helped to connect Bill with Peter MacGill and Peter agreed to represent Bill.

I started to look for words that had no specific meaning in the art world and found the persian word Feroz, which means successful.  I thought this was a wonderful omen, and as the name sounded similar to Ferus I decided to go with it.

I later discovered that the word means wild, beas tlike and uncontrollable in Spanish.  At this point it was too late, and I rather liked the combination of meanings.

So there is the story of the name.

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I was discussing the impact of exhibitions that have have excellent content, even to the point of challenging some pre-conceived ideas, that are not really visited by anyone.  This discussion was with the director of a German museum who, through an exhibition I had at my gallery this year, came to see the show and invited me to visit him thereafter.

The general gist of the conversation was that there are populist exhibitions which will draw crowds, possibly generate sales and generally will be seen as immediately successful.  There are also exhibitions which are not this way because they represent an aspect of an artist or topic which has not yet moved into the general understanding and as such require time before they develop their impact.  That is where the term “Time Bomb” came into play.

I think about this often.  Indeed I have had many conversation before, and even more after this meeting about this topic.  My father Gerd, who ran the Sander Gallery in Wqashington DC and New York City before he founded the August Sander Archive often said to me that a gallery is not a place to sell pictures, rather it is a place to formulate a point of view.  I would love to agree with this whole heartedly, but there is an aspect of reality that requires that I actually sell pictures.  No sales, no money. No money, no food, etc…  But aside from this existential reality, I really do agree with my dad.  When I think back on exhibitions that have moved me I cannot think of one that was based on selling pictures.  They were always based on the work, the artist and the meaning interpreted by the curator (yes, this is another topic for another day).

The shows that were also successful showed work that was close enough to the popular stream of consciousness that the buyers could embrace it without having to step too far away from their own safety area.

Back to the Sander Gallery, and the work it showed. A friend of my father and mine, and a fellow gallerist from New York City named Howard said that my father was always 10-20 years ahead of his time.  Good if your buying, difficult if your showing or selling.  A mixed blessing if you are growing up with it.

So here I am with the aforementioned mixed blessing.  And a series of time bombs.  I guess I do believe that a gallery is a place to define a point of view.  There is no other place where I can freely show examples of how I see the arts, and how I envision them being combined.  The views I present are, by nature, very personal.  They must be.  If they were not then I would be showing a consensus which is certainly very far from being a singular viewpoint. And while I do this I gain fans and collectors who respect my view and are willing to enter a discussion with me about the work shown.  Some prove me right, some prove me wrong, but we all are the richer and more blessed for it.

So, I guess it isn’t a mixed blessing after all. Just a series of time bombs.

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I was asked to write a journal about my experiences in the art world by a friend some time back.  After a few years and enough experiences to make me remember this request I will now follow up with the idea and write about my experiences in the art world.

-Julian Sander on December 28.2013

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