Unfixable is a confession.

A note before we start. This Edit is the written companion to last Tuesday’s live, but it is not a transcript. On the live I worked the argument out loud. In the chat and the comments, some of you pushed back, and a few of you were flat-out right where I was wrong. The art world does not need another take. It needs people willing to revise one on the record. So this piece does both jobs: the autopsy of what happened at Pace, and the corrections the room handed me. The thesis is at the bottom. The arguing is everything in between.

What actually happened, with the receipts.

Wednesday night, the New York Times breaks it. By Thursday, every art outlet has it. Pace, sixty-six years old, seven locations, the kind of gallery artists name when you ask them what the dream looks like, is cutting roughly fifty artists from a roster of about 135, down to about 85, and laying off around fifty staff. Some of the staff reportedly learned the scale of the cuts from the news. The town hall came at nine the next morning. Sit with that for a second: a gallery whose entire brand is intimacy and care, and its own people found out in the press.

The CEO, Marc Glimcher, said the mega gallery model of constant expansion and rising prices is no longer sustainable, that it no longer serves us or our artists. And then the line that took everyone’s breath: the model is not just broken, it is unfixable. One of the cut artists, Glenn Kaino, said he was not even surprised. His words: the model was optimized for an art world that never materialized. Hold that line. We are coming back to it.

The numbers under the story are not mysterious. Pace’s New York flagship reportedly runs around nine million dollars a year in rent before a single painting sells. Add global staff, fair booths on every continent, shipping, insurance, and a roster of 135 names, in a year when global sales dropped about twelve percent. Glimcher himself called it a self-reinforcing cycle of rising costs and rising prices. When your overhead is that high, you have to push prices up just to stand still, and pushing prices up in a cooling market does not save you. It damages the artists, their markets, and eventually the gallery itself.

Where they are retreating to matters as much as what they cut: fewer artists, fewer shows, leaning on the estates they manage, and going deeper into private sales with two secondary-market dealers. And look at who went. Pace did not publish a list; this is reporters comparing rosters. But the pattern is legible. Photographers, in a market where photography is among the hardest things to sell. Asian artists, as Pace pulls back from Asia. The tech and NFT bets, after that wave collapsed. When an institution returns to its core, the people furthest from the core go first. Write that down somewhere you will see it again.

What I argued on the live.

My read, short version. This was never one market. It is at least three: a scarcity market at the top that runs on exclusivity, an access market at the emerging end that runs on people getting in, and a middle that has to play both games at once and is getting squeezed hardest. Pace saying the world got too commercial confused people, because in public language commercial means famous and reachable. Inside the business it means something quieter: the money swallowed the mission. And the apparent contradiction, curing commercialism with private sales, the single most transactional thing a gallery can do, resolves if you read it as a funding structure. The quick money from quiet deals pays for the slow, expensive work of actually caring for a smaller roster. One play pays for the other.

And the part I said that I will not soften: everyone talking about the art world becoming smaller, more intimate, more personal, as if it is warming up. Intimate is the gentle word for exclusive. Pace tried the accessible version, and the people who write the big checks did not like it. Their core collectors like the gate. You have not seen gatekeeping yet. The doors are about to get more private, not less.

Being chosen was never safety. It can be taken back in one news cycle.

Correction one: I called galleries cash cows. The room caught it.

On the live, reaching for a word, I called most galleries cash cows. A reader pushed back, and the pushback was correct. A cash cow is the thing that throws off more money than it eats. That is not the gallery. At Pace, the cash cows are the top of the roster and the estates, the handful of names whose sales carry everything else. The gallery itself, the buildings, the booths, the staff of generalists stretched across 135 artists, was the opposite of a cash cow. It was the mouth.

The same reader gave me a better diagnosis than the one I walked in with, and I want to use it with credit: corporate anorexia. It is a real term from the management literature, and it names a specific failure: a business that cuts and starves its own functioning to fund growth, until the organism can no longer do its job. That is a sharper description of Pace than anything in the press release. They were not fat. They were starved and overextended at the same time, cutting into muscle while building wings. Seven locations. Every fair. An NFT venture. A roster stockpiled at wholesale, 135 names deep, in a business where representation is supposed to mean attention. An artist on a roster that size getting one show every few years is not represented. They are inventoried.

You can call that growth addiction or you can call it greed. I go back and forth, and honestly the word matters less than the math. What I will say plainly: the disease was never that art got too commercial. The disease was that the gallery kept eating to grow and starved the thing the growth was supposedly for.

Correction two: unfixable is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Here is where I have landed after a week of circling it. Glimcher does not get to indict the whole industry. The art world is diverse in its levels, and most of those levels were never running Pace’s model. Smaller galleries grew about seventeen percent last year. The middle is squeezed, and that worries me more than anything happening at the top, but squeezed is not unfixable either. What died last week is one specific thing: Pace’s version of the gallery, the wholesale merchant that signs at volume, expands at volume, and sells the idea of care it cannot physically deliver at that scale.

And the proof that the model was fixable is the fix he announced in the same breath. Fewer artists. Fewer shows. Deeper attention. A reconstruction toward specialization: a primary program, an estates business, a private-sales operation, each run on purpose instead of one overworked organism pretending to be all three. If I were rebuilding that staff, I would rebuild it the way one of you said in the comments: specialists and managers focused on a category of service, not generalists stretched across everything. That is not an unfixable model. That is a fixed one, announced as a eulogy.

Unfixable is what it sounds like when the architect does not want to say: I built it wrong.

The honest sentence was never the model is unfixable. The honest sentence is we can no longer do what we were doing, and we knew before we kept doing it. Because that is the part I keep side-eyeing: years ago this same CEO told galleries to slow down, do fewer fairs, that the pace was unsustainable. Then his gallery sped up. He helped build the exact machine he is now calling unfixable, and he knew while he was building it. The word unfixable protects the builder. The word confession is closer to the truth, and weirdly, I respect the confession. It is more honesty than this market usually allows out loud.

The reader building her own gallery.

One of you wrote something I have been chewing on since: this is why I am building my own gallery and my own website and controlling my own destiny, because I cannot rely on a gallery whose mindset is money and not substance. I understand that decision completely, and half of me applauds it. Independence is leverage. Nobody can cut you from a roster you own.

But I owe you the hole in it too, because this Edit is about poking holes. A one-person gallery can catch the exact disease that took Pace down, just at a different scale. When you are the program, the registrar, the shipper, the marketer, the bookkeeper, and the artist, you are one bad season away from your own corporate anorexia: starving the practice to feed the operation. And the money mindset you are running from is not optional. Substance without a business underneath it closes too, and it closes quietly, without a Times story. The galleries that fail at the emerging end mostly do not fail from greed. They fail from undercapitalization and exhaustion, which are just greed’s broke cousins.

So build it. I mean that. But the lesson from Pace is not no gallery. It is no dependence. Build your room like a specialist, not a wholesale merchant: one category of service done deeply, a roster, even if the roster is just you, that you can actually care for, and a financial floor that does not require growth to survive. The mindset you want is not money instead of substance or substance instead of money. It is substance, capitalized.

Does art scale? Another one of you said no.

A perspective came through that deserves its own section: galleries should not be scaling on Instagram, because art does not have scalability. I have been turning that over all week, and here is where I come out. It is mostly right, importantly wrong, and the place it splits is the most useful idea in this whole story.

The work itself does not scale. That is not a flaw, it is the entire premise. A painting is one object. A studio visit is one afternoon. A real collector relationship is built in years, one dinner and one honest conversation at a time. Care does not scale, and notice what that means: Pace did not collapse because art got too commercial. Pace collapsed because it tried to scale the unscalable part. They scaled care, or pretended to, across 135 artists and seven buildings, and the pretense came due. The scarcity market at the top does not just tolerate art’s refusal to scale. It monetizes it. A Pace painting holds value partly because you cannot have one. At that level, inaccessibility literally is the product.

Here is the importantly wrong part. Attention scales. Distribution scales. The story around the work scales infinitely, and that is what a gallery like Unit London actually built on Instagram: not scaled art, scaled audience. The feed never sold the painting. It built the room of people who might one day buy one. So the rule I would write on the studio wall is this: scale the reach, never the relationship. Scale the story, never the supply. Instagram is a distribution tool for the access market and an audience-building tool for everyone, and it becomes poison only when a gallery or an artist confuses scaled attention for scaled care and starts making promises that only the unscalable thing can keep.

That is also the triangle from the live, one more time, because it is the operating system under all of this: supply, demand, access. The top plays less supply, less access, more demand. The access market plays more supply, more access, and has to work to keep demand level. The mistake that kills careers and galleries is running one market’s triangle while standing in the other market.

Where I land, after the room pushed back.

So, revised on the record. One: it was never one market, and nothing about last week changes that. Know which one you are in before you take anyone’s rules, including Pace’s, including mine. Two: the mega model did not die of commerce. It died of corporate anorexia, starved functions funding unsustainable growth, and greed is as good a name for the appetite as any. Three: unfixable was a confession, not a diagnosis. The fix was announced in the same press release, and we will learn which version is real by watching what they do, not what they say. What a gallery says is the story. What it does over the next few years is the truth. Four: the gate is coming back, because the people writing the biggest checks like the gate, and intimate will keep being the gentle word for exclusive.

And five, the only part that was never up for debate. The fifty artists who lost the machine in one news cycle had one thing in common: the machine was all they had. The sales team, the collector list, the museum introductions, the validation, all of it lived in someone else’s building. Being chosen was never safety. The thing nobody can take back is a direct relationship with the people who love your work. Not rented followers on a platform that can change the rules overnight. Owned connection. Emails. Names. Conversations. Ten thousand followers is not ten collectors, and the difference between those two numbers is your actual career.

Build your leverage in the access market. Behave with scarcity discipline while you do it. And when it is time, convert, on your terms, holding your own list, so that if any institution ever corrects around you, there is something underneath you when it does.

That is the whole reason the Glory Collective exists, and I will keep saying it plainly: it is the room where we build that direct relationship together, week after week, Office Hours on Mondays and GloryLab on Thursdays. If this Edit is the work you know you need to start, that is where I would point you.

And y’all know what it is always: you cannot have the glory without the story. Pace is living its story in public right now. Stay close to yours. I’ll see y’all Tuesday.