Eye Level Art closing in December
Owner Mike Elder cites economy
Posted by Erica Jackson Curran at the Charleston City Paper on Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM
When we heard that Spring Street gallery Eye Level Art was slashing prices on paintings, we called owner Mike Elder to find out why. He said that, due in large part to the economy, he’s closing the gallery at the end of the year and moving to New York.
“I’ve been thinking about it for awhile,” Elder says. “If things had changed and the market was better and I wasn’t working as hard for basically nothing… Everything’s telling me to get out.”
Elder started the gallery in a small Queen Street space in 2002, quickly establishing it as a destination for contemporary art lovers. After a brief stint in a warehouse on Heriot Street, Eye Level relocated to the warehouse at 103 Spring Street. The gallery branched out to include diverse concerts and events as well as art shows in an attempt to raise more funds.
“Art is why I got into it,” Elder says. “I was kind of getting away from the path I was going.”
He adds, “I’d have an art show five years ago and sell $5,000-10,000. Now I do an art show and I sell $2,000, and I have to give half of that to the artist. A thousand bucks does not fly, especially when you do an art show once a month.”
Elder also cites the neighborhood as a factor in the downturn.
“The area around Spring Street is cool, it’s up-and-coming, but it’s not exactly what I thought,” Elder says. “It’s not as progressive as I thought it was going to be.” He says the area is mainly populated by college students — not your typical art buyers — while many older folks are uncomfortable stopping by the gallery.
The gallery has a number of events planned through the end of the year, including the Brian Bustos show, which opens on Thurs. Nov. 10, as well as two more Holy City Artists and Fleas events, several concerts, and one final group art show on Fri. Dec. 16.
Elder hopes to sell everything in the gallery, including furniture, frames, and fixtures. All art has been reduced 50 percent; Elder says he’s giving the artists 90 percent and keeping 10 percent.
Although he’s not sure who will be taking over the space, Elder says the landlord plans to remodel it.
“I have no regrets,” Elder says. “I feel relief after making this decision because … after meeting the artists and having all these shows, I’ve been blessed to be able to do this and not have any majorly bad things happen.”
23 Oct
17 Oct
Art at it’s simplist form
This video shows the example of art in its simplest form. We learn so much from art in a way that simplicity is the building block. Art in all forms is this simplicity. The best learning tool is to keep people expressing themselves. Use art in every day life.
Mike Elder
Your morning alarm clock.
6 Oct
Two Man Gentlemen Band
6 Oct
To Dance Like This
14 Sep
Cool Video
28 May
ELA LOUNGE OPENED!
2 Aug
Interesting Wall Street Journel Article on easing the fear of buying art.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
AT LEISURE MAIN AUGUST 14, 2006, 12:09 P.M. ET
YOUNG AT ART
New Groups Ease the Way For Aspiring Collectors
By ANNELENA LOBB
Leyla Marrouk, a 29-year-old attorney at the New York office of the firm Clifford Chance, says she always has
enjoyed visiting museums and galleries, but her hectic work schedule rarely leaves her with enough energy to
just drop by. Last fall, Ms. Marrouk began looking for a way to deepen her connection to the arts. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Apollo Circle, for patrons age 21 to 39, appealed to her, but she was daunted by its
$1,000 fee. “As much art as there is in New York, there aren’t many ways to get involved in an unintimidating manner,” she
says. Through a college alumni connection, she heard about an organization called the Contemporaries, which brings
together young professionals with an interest in contemporary art for educational and social events. Ms.
Marrouk has been a member for about a year. She says she might join the Apollo Circle one day, but that the
Contemporaries has provided her with an engaging alternative. Young-collectors’ groups like the Contemporaries that target newcomers to the fine-art world are multiplying, fueled by growing wealth among under-40 professionals who are interested in buying art, but who might be put off by its perceived elitism. The new groups, often created by young professionals themselves, position themselves as demystifiers, offering novices how-to lectures about collecting and opportunities to socialize. They say their aim is to serve as starter organizations to grow the ranks of arts enthusiasts and feed museums’ patronage efforts. Some groups target individuals in law, finance and business, giving young professionals a
chance to rub elbows and get hooked on art as their salaries climb.
For museums, which depend heavily on philanthropy and for decades have cultivated emerging donors and
collectors through their in-house patrons’ circles, the growth of independent groups poses a challenge. On the
one hand, increased interest in the arts ultimately could enhance museums’ ability to attract new patrons. On the
other hand, young arts aficionados might never develop the institutional ties that lead individuals to become
significant contributors as their wealth grows. What’s more, the newer organizations have come on the scene as
arts institutions compete with public health, education and other causes for donations.
Museums for years have run their own arts-patronage groups to
court under-40 members. Besides art itself, the organizations often
emphasize fundraising and acquisitions, with the belief that some
of today’s young art enthusiasts will be tomorrow’s significant
donors. At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Junior
Associates run campaigns to raise capital for the museum. The
group raised around $1 million for the expansion of MoMA’s
building facilities in 2004. Some members of the Guggenheim
Museum’s Young Collectors’ Council sit on its acquisitions
committee and help select new pieces for the museum, says Abby
Lawler, who organizes events for the group.
In contrast, the independent organizations tend to concentrate
solely on education and collecting, and don’t have a fundraising component. They spend time with pieces new
collectors can purchase, rather than works that fit a major museum’s budget. “I saw a need for a group that
focused on collecting, rather than looking at pieces a 30-year-old could never buy,” says Rodney Reid, who
co-founded the three-year-old Contemporaries while at Harvard Business School. The New Collectors’ Circle,
which launches this fall and is affiliated with Ramsay Fairs, a company that runs several contemporary-art fairs,
combines events like Pulse, a contemporary-art fair held in New York and Miami, with gallery tours, lectures,
and curatorial walk-throughs.
In general, museum development officials say their in-house groups are better places for young arts enthusiasts
to get started. “Art fairs are a great place to go and look at collecting, but it’s a commercial perspective,” says
Bettina Korek, who chairs the prints and drawings council at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and who
helped launch Avant Garde, its patronage group for people under 40, three years ago. The Guggenheim’s group
offers new collectors an opportunity to cement strong relationships with curators, says the Guggenheim’s Ms.
Lawler, who help develop every event.
But museum officials also see the potential for outside groups to act as feeders for their own organizations. Both
the Guggenheim and New York’s MoMA arranged recent events for Summer Art Circle, another new group,
whose members are summer law-firm associates. Kianga Ellis, the group’s founder, says she aims to create a
pipeline for museum arts-patronage groups like the Junior Associates or the Whitney Contemporaries. She plans
to launch another group, the Young Patrons’ Collective, in October, for professionals under 40.
Young-collectors’ groups are emerging as the art market has soared: Last year, fine-art auctions brought in $4.2
billion world-wide, an increase of 15% over the year before, according to Artprice, an auctions tracking firm. The
Contemporaries’ Mr. Reid, a 28-year-old investment banker at UBS Warburg, says that some members have
begun to collect more seriously since joining.
“They don’t collect purely as investors, but you notice the
potential,” Mr. Reid says of the group’s members. He now owns
about 60 works of art, 10 to 15 of which he bought over the past
two years.
At a July gallery talk for Summer Art Circle, founder Ms. Ellis
started a debate among the lawyers in attendance about the risks in
buying pieces by very young artists, who might gain early fame
only to see the value of their work sputter by age 30. She
encourages participants to start collecting. “Once you make that
financial investment, it makes you serious,” she says.
Phil Selden, a summer associate at law firm Willkie, Farr and
Gallagher in New York, went to several Summer Art Circle events
Paul Brissman Photography
Members of Summer Art Circle attended a Phillips
de Pury & Co. auction preview in June.
The Contemporaries
The Contemporaries at a gallery reception in July.
Before taking part in the group, he hadn’t had much experience with the visual arts beyond museum
visits and a high-school studio-art class. He says the group gave him the know-how to find galleries in New York
with art he likes. “I’m much more comfortable with art now,” Mr. Selden says. “So much of this was about
access.”
Summer Art Circle’s Ms. Ellis and the Contemporaries’ Mr. Reid both expect that at least a few of their fledgling
collectors eventually will become prominent arts patrons. Mr. Reid says he is confident that some of the
members of the Contemporaries will land on museum boards in the next 10 to 15 years, in part because so many
of them have the kinds of lucrative career paths that would make such largesse possible.
“Some of us will be there,” Mr. Reid says. “I aspire to that role myself.”
Write to Annelena Lobb at annelena.lobb@wsj.com
