It is a fact that the knowledge a dealer has is one of his primary sources of power in this business. Another part comes from the secrets we keep. So far so good.
Any gallery will, if successful, have a number of people working in it. The big question becomes, who can you trust? We have all seen the movies about the mole in MI6, or business espionage, etc…
Well, recently a gallerist I know was confronted with a situation that just floored me. Apparently she watched her employee steal a complete copy of her inventory database which included the names of artists, titles, and some other information. This put my friend in a very difficult situation. She of course fired that employee immediately. In the country where her gallery is this is the first and most important step. After that she started to do damage control.
Fortunately the information taken is only usable if prepared properly, so there is no real danger. There is the issue of what other dealers would do with this information. That is where the real problem comes to play.
I, as a dealer, am always interested in what my competition has, and what they paid for it. This becomes an invaluable bargaining tool. I myself had to deal with the impact of just such an information recently. Fortunately it was with a friend, so we solved it and now own the wonderful piece together. But the likelihood that my colleagues assailant will share the information with a someone who is out for my colleagues best interest is highly unlikely.
Can we, in the art business, call upon our colleagues to stand to a higher moral order? I mean, where is line between helping ourselves and hurting others? This is difficult and I am not sure how I would deal with this were I offered such a store of information. I would like to believe that my moral fibre would empower me to stand for the inherently correct form of action, that being turning the information away and informing the person from whom it originated if I could find out who that was. Let me hope I am never confronted with that situation.
The fact that my friends assailant will probably never be able to work in this business again is obvious, but sort of a shame. There is a lot of time that goes into working your way into the art world, and throwing that away so haphazardly is both sad and stupid. But as we say in Germany:
“You can’t look inside a persons skull.”
