You may think of New York’s Kasmin Gallery as a place to look at art, but it is really a moving company, and what they are moving is art. Thousands of artworks. Pieces get trucked and shipped (or flown) to and from clients’ homes, storage facilities, conservators, artists and between eight to twelve art fairs around the world. “Every day, we’re shipping objects,” said Eric Gleason, Kasmin’s head of sales, noting that the gallery has five registrars “who are working all day long” on arranging the transportation of artworks (which must be packed, crated, shipped and insured) using the gallery’s own truckers for local moves and outside companies for longer trips.
Art fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach—on now, alongside Art Miami, Untitled Art Miami Beach and NADA—and the associated moving costs make up a significant part of most galleries’ overhead, ranking neck-and-neck with rent and just behind salaries for staff, who are often spending much of their time preparing artworks for shipment or even transporting pieces. Unsurprisingly, gallery staff contacted by Observer were reluctant to provide actual percentages or dollar amounts for shipping artworks. Still, San Francisco gallery owner Todd Hosfelt said, “We’re a logistics company,” which suggests that the figures are high.
Galleries don’t have any alternative but to keep the fine art 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 annually, sending between thirty and forty artworks to each fair. She noted that fewer sales result from people just walking by the gallery these days, adding that “we depend on fairs to be focused selling venues, as well as to expand our clientele. Clients like the art fairs, and they believe that galleries bring their best works to fairs.”
It might cut down on the costs if galleries just shipped the same, or mostly the same, artworks to different fairs, but that is a no-no because people attending these fairs “do the circuit,” Spence explained, “and you don’t want them to see the same pieces again and again.”
Also keeping costs high is the fact that many artworks are fragile or composed of several parts that require careful packing, sturdy crates and the gentlest of moving vans. “Everything is expensive,” said James Hendy, managing director of Crozier Fine Arts, a company that stores, installs and transports artworks for artists, collectors, dealers, galleries and museums. “The artwork itself is expensive, the engineering of the crates is expensive, the training of art handlers to do everything properly is expensive, the insurance is expensive, the cost of shipping objects by land, sea and air is expensive, and it’s getting more expensive.”
He noted that there is no average price for transporting artworks because each object is unique, and some are more fragile or unwieldy than others. “Some need just two art handlers to pick up and move a crate, while others require five handlers and perhaps a crane.”
There are even cases in which the costs (and risks) of transporting artworks are just too great. Hosfelt told Observer he is reluctant to ship artworks that contain electronic elements because bumps in the road or the knocking together of crates during the move can “cause connections in the wiring to become loose. You don’t want to set up a piece at an art fair and find that it doesn’t work.”
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Art created from non-traditional materials may pose additional expensive-to-accommodate challenges for dealers seeking to transport them from one place to another. Manhattan gallery owner Cristin Tierney told Observer that “artworks might be made out 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 pretty fragile.” Almost everything produced by the artists represented by her gallery requires special handling, and special handling means expensive handling. One challenge her gallery faced recently was shipping—from London to New York—a 2020 work by the British artist duo John Wood and Paul Harrison titled Chair/Gum that consisted of a primary school chair and desk combo with the space under the chair filled with thousands of pieces of chewed and wadded gum. “Gum, it turns out, is incredibly heavy,” she said, and keeping the gum in mint condition required modifying the crate.
Modifications are another thing that can make the shipping process much more expensive. A spokesperson for Chapman Freeborn, an air cargo chartering company used by numerous art galleries, collectors and museums to ship artworks to art fairs and elsewhere, told us that “the risks in shipments depend on the nature of the fair and the logistics surrounding it. For example, fairs in locations with extreme climates, challenging infrastructure or high humidity levels might require additional precautions. Our team works closely with clients to mitigate those risks—whether through custom packing solutions, climate-controlled charters or even deploying couriers to hand-deliver and oversee the shipment.”
The insurance industry reports that most damage to artwork occurs in transit, but the galleries we contacted said that artworks rarely experience damage during shipping and that they have made few insurance claims over the years. Notably, both assertions may be true. Gleason confirmed that the most significant risks to artworks are not found en route to art fairs but at the events themselves. “There can be 35,000 people on a given day crowding the booths, and people bump into things,” he said. (Recall the sad demise of Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog (Blue) at the 2023 edition of Art Wynwood.)
Still, galleries do what they can to keep costs down. New York gallery owner Andrew Schoelkopf told Observer he sometimes uses art shuttles—trucks that transport artworks for several galleries to a particular destination—rather than hiring a dedicated truck to carry objects from only his gallery. Hosfelt Gallery occasionally ships individual works using FedEx and DHL, according to the gallery’s registrar, Brooke Corley, who noted that shipping a painting by FedEx from the gallery to a client in Los Angeles might cost just $100. The gallery took part in the most recent ADAA’s The Art Show, sending twenty small paintings measuring just 8” x 10” each, “which all fit in one box. That’s a registrar’s dream.”
Everyone is thinking about the bottom line. Hosfelt says that the cost of shipping artworks to clients is typically passed on to those clients, and while collectors regularly negotiate when it comes to the price of the artwork, as well as the shipping costs, “I hold firm on that.” Other galleries try to do as much of the preparatory packing and crating as possible rather than paying a fine art trucking company, which helps keep logistics costs down. And in some cases, galleries take a DIY approach. If the trip is local and the shipment is small, Tierney said, she will “hop in an Uber” herself to bring it where it needs to go.