How galleries let third-party platforms become the room, the register, and sometimes the client, and why it is time to take the relationship back
By Alejandro E. Trimper
A friend recently asked what I meant when I said galleries had sold their souls to third-party platforms.
Fair question. “Sold our souls” is the sort of phrase that sounds excellent over dinner and slightly unhinged the next morning. It conjures candles, contracts written in blood, and perhaps a junior associate from a private equity firm waiting in the hall.
What I meant was much less theatrical and much more expensive.
We, the gallery world as a collective, did not merely give away the client relationship. We paid for the privilege of having it taken from us.
It didn’t happen all at once. We surrendered it one useful convenience at a time: inventory, images, descriptions, prices, inquiries, negotiations, payments, and every last bit of buyer data. Eventually, galleries were paying monthly fees and commissions to supply the art, the expertise, our reputations, the customer service, and all of the risk while someone else controlled how collectors met us.
I’m not pretending I watched this from a mountaintop clutching a handwritten ledger. In early 2013, at my mother’s gallery, Isabella Garrucho Fine Art, I consulted on the launch of the fine-art category at 1stDibs, and later with Artsy, ArtCloud, and others. Years later, Trimper Gallery was selling through eight third-party platforms. I believed in the promise because much of the promise was real.
These platforms brought art to people who might never enter a gallery. They gave small businesses like mine international reach and, for a time, something resembling an even playing field with the largest galleries in the world. They normalized online buying and offered search, payment, logistics, fraud protection, and exposure no independent gallery could build alone. We still use them because they serve a purpose and, for the moment, some are too large to ignore.
This isn’t a breakup letter to the internet. Trimper Gallery is fully online, our new website is central to what comes next, and we are building unconventional sales channels precisely because foot traffic isn’t coming back just because the art world lights a candle and wishes very hard.
The problem is not technology. The problem is confusing access with ownership.
The internet can be the front door. It should not own the house.
At first, they brought ladders
The early pitch was wonderfully collaborative: let us help you get online, reach the world, and introduce collectors to your gallery. That offer wasn’t fake, at least not at first. It solved a genuine problem for thousands of galleries worldwide.
Artsy began in 2009 around the language of access and discovery. Today it promotes access to more than three million collectors and art lovers each month, while offering galleries tools for visibility, inquiries, e-commerce, analytics, and marketing. Its gallery plans now include monthly subscriptions and commissions on e-commerce transactions, according to Artsy’s own partner materials.
The tension was visible almost immediately. Hiscox’s first Online Art Trade Report, published in 2013, found that galleries were attracting new clients online while many still resisted click-and-buy because close personal relationships mattered. In that first survey, 40% of galleries said 30% or more of their sales already happened with little or no interaction with the buyer. The relationship was changing before anyone had decided what should replace it.
1stDibs began as a listings site, launched e-commerce in 2013, and became a full marketplace by 2016. In 2017, Architectural Digest reported that dealer names had disappeared from listings and explained the commercial reason plainly: too many inquiries were beginning on 1stDibs and concluding elsewhere. The platform needed the transaction to remain inside its walls because transactions outside them do not monetize themselves.
That shift is not a conspiracy theory. It is the ordinary economics of a marketplace.
In its public stock-offering filing, 1stDibs described a “flywheel”: more supply attracts more buyers; more buyers encourage sellers to list more inventory and devote more attention to the platform; the resulting network becomes a barrier to competitors. That is not a leaked villain memo. It is a business model written in proper securities-law English.
At first, the platforms arrived carrying ladders to help galleries climb onto the internet. Once most of the industry was upstairs, they began charging rent on the staircase, a service fee for standing on it, and an introduction fee for anyone you met on the way.
The incentives changed because the businesses matured. Growth had to become monetization. Exposure had to convert into captured transactions. Investor patience had limits. A platform that began by asking, “How can we help galleries and dealers reach collectors?” eventually had to ask, “How much of the activity between them can we own?”
I can’t prove that any company planned a bait-and-switch, and I’m not suggesting one. I don’t need a conspiracy to make the point. Once galleries became dependent on these networks, the platforms had both the incentive and the leverage to control more of the relationship.
Then came the tolls
Third-party reach isn’t free, nor should it be. These platforms provide exposure, technology, payment processing, and buyer protection, and they deserve to be paid for that. The question is whether what they charge remains proportionate to what they provide, especially when galleries still supply the art, fund the inventory, document it, market it, ship it, and stand behind the sale.
At Trimper Gallery, Artsy means a very high monthly cost and, for a gallery of our size, the rare privilege of VIP status. Apparently even importance has a subscription tier. Our 1stDibs arrangement has included a significant commission plus a roughly 3% payment-processing charge, before any client or trade discount. Those are our terms, not a claim that every seller has the same plan. 1stDibs says its subscription and commission rates vary by plan, business, item, and price.
Now follow the money from the headline price. Many clients expect a discount. Designers and other industry professionals purchasing through designated “trade accounts” expect one too. The platform takes its fee, and the artist receives the agreed share. What remains must cover staff, insurance, storage, photography, framing, freight, crating, fairs, travel, rent, if there is still a physical space, and the glamorous modern pleasure of paying for more than a dozen software subscriptions to learn that somebody clicked “favorite.”
The headline sale price and the money left for the gallery don’t even live in the same ZIP code, maybe not on the same continent.
This matters because galleries are not operating in a forgiving market. The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026 found that dealer sales rose a modest 2% in 2025, while operating costs rose 5% on average. Logistics costs increased 10% and fair costs 9%. Lower profitability was reported by 38% of dealers, and the average number of buyers per dealer fell to 57, the lowest since 2021.
Then the report hands us the number that should make every gallery owner put down the canapé. Sales through third-party online platforms accounted for 2% of dealer sales by value in 2025, the lowest share in six years. Over the same period, direct gallery sales, whether in person or through the gallery’s own digital channels, rose from 48% in 2019 to 60% in 2025.
Those are industry averages, not every gallery’s books. Still, galleries are spending more to remain visible on channels accounting for a shrinking share of dealer sales value. This is not a reason to disappear from platforms. It is a reason to stop confusing presence with dependence.
There have been painful, highly visible closures and contractions. Here is the quick-fire version, because at this point the industry’s obituary column needs its own booth at Art Basel:
- Marlborough Gallery wound down in 2024 after 78 years.
- In 2025, Blum phased out its traditional gallery model; Venus Over Manhattan closed after 13 years; Clearing shut New York and Los Angeles; Kasmin closed after 35 years as its leadership launched Olney Gleason; Sperone Westwater closed after 50 years; and LA Louver ended its public exhibition program after 50 years and shifted to private dealing, consulting, and projects.
- In 2026, Stephen Friedman Gallery went into administration after 30 years, closing London and New York, and Tiwani Contemporary ceased operations after 15 years, shutting London while Lagos paused in its current format pending restructuring.
- The mega-galleries are not immune. Pace did not close, but it moved to cut as many as 50 of its 135 artists and reduce staff from about 250 to 200. Gagosian closed Burlington Arcade and is leaving Basel. Apparently even the mega-gallery model has learned the phrase “right-sizing.”
These aren’t identical events. Some were full closures, some involved succession or governance, and some were deliberate shifts to smaller or private models. Platforms didn’t cause every one. Anyone claiming that has confused a contributing pressure with an entire economy. But when names this established are closing, contracting, dropping artists, or abandoning public space across New York, Los Angeles, London, Lagos, Basel, and beyond, we’re not looking at one incompetent dealer and a bad lease. We’re looking at a system-wide correction.
Interest rates, rent, shipping, fairs, payroll, tariffs, changing tastes, succession, overexpansion, weak artist demand, and plain bad management all matter. The same Art Basel report’s New York survey counted 36 openings against 20 closures in 2025 and emphasized that the reasons for closing varied. The story isn’t “every gallery is dying.” The story is that many are restructuring because the old model has become brutally thin, especially in the middle.
Platform expenses belong in that calculation. So does the loss of repeat business when the buyer remembers the marketplace more clearly than the gallery that supplied the work.
A million thumbnails are not a point of view
The larger distortion is not merely financial. It is visual and cultural.
Artsy, 1stDibs, Artnet, and a growing collection of smaller marketplaces often carry overlapping inventory from overlapping sellers. Many galleries list on several at once because each promises a slightly different audience and none can safely be ignored. The result is the digital equivalent of walking into a warehouse where every wall is covered, every label is shouting, and the helpful person at the entrance hands you another filter.
Photography suffers especially. The same image can appear through several galleries, across several platforms, in several sizes or editions. A collector sees dozens of versions of what looks like the same thing, sometimes with different presentation, availability, or pricing. The work has not acquired four markets. It has acquired four URLs.
Platforms may vet sellers and merchandise selected listings, but their commercial strength is breadth. A gallery’s strength should be the opposite. A serious gallery program is selective. Its roster is an argument: these artists belong together; this work deserves attention; this example is stronger than the other one; this price makes sense in relation to the artist’s practice and market.
A million thumbnails are inventory. They are not a point of view.
Content overload also changes buyer behavior. When every work is one swipe away from another, deliberation feels like inefficiency. The collector is trained to compare color, dimensions, price, and popularity while the questions that actually matter are buried beneath the interface: Why this artist? Why this work? Why this edition? Why this price? What is the condition? Who has owned it? What does the seller know, and what will the seller put in writing?
Search is useful. Search is not connoisseurship with better lighting.
“Make Offer” is a discount button wearing a tuxedo
I support visible pricing when it creates clarity without eliminating the opportunity to explain value. The art world spent decades treating a price as classified intelligence, available only after a ritual of eye contact and social vetting. That performance did not create trust. It created anxiety, suspicion, and the occasional bit of comedy.
But a visible price is not the same as a transparent value proposition, and it is certainly not evidence that the work will hold its value, or that the buyer should reasonably expect it to. That is a separate discussion, one I addressed in Price Is Not Proof of Value.
Hiscox’s 2023 buyer survey makes the distinction beautifully. Clear pricing and access to past and current prices were critical for 91% of online buyers. Yet 39% of hesitant buyers still cited a lack of transparency and objective guidance. Their question was simple: how do I know I am paying the right price? A visible number tells you what the seller is asking. It does not tell you whether that number makes sense.
The familiar “Buy Now” and “Make Offer” buttons reduce the decision to whether the buyer will pay the displayed price or negotiate it down. A serious retail price should not arrive with a built-in assumption that it is negotiable. Negotiation itself is not the problem. Making it the default is.
Artists and galleries spend years building demand, maintaining price consistency, and establishing what a work should cost, only for the platform to place a public invitation to discount it beside the image. Luxury brands understand price discipline. A new Rolex is not marketed as the beginning of a negotiation.
Galleries understand this too. But once every platform displays “Make Offer,” refusing to participate can feel like volunteering to lose the sale. So everyone participates because everyone else participates. The asking price becomes an opening bid, and then the art world wonders why collectors stop believing the number.
A proper gallery conversation sounds different. How does this work compare with others from the series? Is this the strongest available example? Is the work primary-market inventory or a resale? What does the edition mean? Has the work been exhibited or published? What documentation accompanies it? Is there another artist in the gallery’s program who may be a better fit for the collector’s eye, wall, budget, or intention?
The most valuable sentence a good gallerist can say is, “I do not think this is the right work for you.”
No conversion funnel has a button for that. It should.
What buyers are actually saying
I went looking for buyer complaints about Artsy and 1stDibs because it is easy for sellers to assume our irritation is universal. It is not.
As checked on August 10, 2026, Artsy holds a 4.2 rating on Trustpilot, and 1stDibs holds a 4.1. Many buyers praise the selection, convenience, packaging, specialist help, and smooth transactions. Those positive experiences are real. Reviews are self-selected, mix different customer types, and are not scientific market research, but dismissing the good ones would be dishonest.
What fascinated me was how often the praise attached to a human being. A responsive gallery. A patient specialist. A careful seller. Someone who followed up, packed the work properly, or helped a first-time collector feel comfortable.
Apparently the killer feature was a person.
That is not just Trustpilot talking. Hiscox found that 79% of new art buyers would feel more confident buying online if they could speak with an adviser, up from 66% in 2020. We spent a decade trying to remove the person from the sale, then commissioned surveys to discover that buyers still wanted one.
The negative reviews and formal complaint records also reveal recurring fault lines. Buyers describe works arriving damaged or not as expected, delays, confusion about shipping or customs, disagreements over descriptions or authenticity, cancelled transactions, and the feeling of being passed among the platform, seller, shipper, or support team.
None of that proves systematic misconduct. International art purchases are complicated, and many disputes are resolved well. It does expose the structural tension: the buyer sees one polished interface, but underneath it may be dealing with a platform, an independent seller, a carrier, a payment processor, customs, and an insurer.
One checkout button, five parties, and apparently everyone is “looking into it.”
Buyer protection is valuable. 1stDibs requires damage or description issues to be reported within seven days, with supporting photographs and packaging. Its authenticity guarantee can require written opinions from two independent recognized experts. These are real protections with real procedures, not magic shields.
The platform also monitors messages and calls and restricts the exchange of contact information, explaining that on-platform transactions support fraud prevention and its money-back guarantee. That rationale is legitimate. So is the consequence: the platform controls the conditions under which buyer and seller can know one another.
A platform can protect a transaction. It cannot, by policy alone, explain the object, judge whether the price is sensible, or become the collector’s trusted adviser for the next twenty years.
Galleries helped create this mess
Before any gallerist becomes too pleased with this argument, we should discuss our contribution to the situation. We’re not blameless here.
The traditional art world often behaved as though opacity were sophistication. Prices were hidden. Basic questions were treated like character flaws. Collectors were expected to trust the gallerist’s word because the gallerist had a nice address, good shoes, and a tone suggesting the matter had already been settled among adults.
That worked better before the internet made comparison possible. It didn’t necessarily work well.
Some galleries sold weak work at ambitious prices, offered little documentation, paid artists late, pressured buyers, and vanished when a resale question arrived. Some demanded loyalty they had done nothing to earn. Platforms grew partly because the old gallery system left enormous openings for convenience, access, visible inventory, transparency, accountability, and buyer protection.
If galleries behave like tollbooths, collectors and artists will go around them. They should.
We are not going back to the bad old mystery. The gallery relationship now has to be more transparent than the platform transaction.
A good gallery should explain what it knows and what it does not. It should provide accurate descriptions, condition information, edition details, provenance where relevant, clear title, invoices, and the basis for any authenticity statement. The Art Dealers Association of America’s ethics code sets out many of those responsibilities for its members. New York law also gives real weight to written statements from art merchants by treating material facts in certificates or similar documents as express warranties.
The gallery label is not a halo. Trust must be demonstrated in the paperwork, the pricing, the advice, the artist payments, and the phone call after the package arrives.
The relationship is the product nobody puts on the invoice
One clarification, because the art world can turn any sentence into a loophole: by “direct” I mean a direct relationship with the gallery, not cutting the gallery out. The Art Basel report found that the artist-direct share of high-net-worth collector spending doubled from 10% in 2021 to 20% in 2025, while dealers still accounted for 43%. The report is blunt about why dealers remain difficult to replace: they signal value, legitimize early work, build and sustain careers, and provide practical, financial, and personal support. A gallery should not be a velvet-rope tollbooth. It is also not a middleman whose only contribution is the invoice.
Collectors need good galleries because access is not the same as guidance. The work of a gallerist is not merely to know what is available. It is to compare, edit, contextualize, document, and remain accountable.
Artists need good galleries because a career requires more than uploads. It requires coherent pricing, exhibitions, scholarship, archives, careful placement, limits on supply, introductions, follow-up, logistics, and somebody willing to protect the long term from the exciting stupidity of the short term.
The gallery needs direct relationships because that is how we learn. A client’s questions tell us what our website failed to explain. A collector’s home, history, and interests help us recommend better work. A resale problem five years later teaches us more about market responsibility than a dashboard of favorites ever will.
The Art Basel report puts an economic value on the point. Online sales are good at introductions: 40% went to new buyers in 2025. But weighted by value, new buyers accounted for 26% of dealer sales, while clients of more than five years accounted for 45%. Discovery opens the door. Relationships keep the lights on.
This is why an inquiry matters.
An inquiry is not a failed checkout. It is a person raising a hand and saying, “Tell me more.” That is the beginning of trust, education, and often a collection. The rush to eliminate friction has sometimes eliminated the exact moment in which a gallery proves it deserves to exist.
The concentration question
The issue is becoming more urgent as ownership consolidates.
In April 2026, Artsy and Artnet announced that they had joined forces under shared leadership after Beowolff Capital acquired majority control of Artsy and took Artnet private. The combined group now occupies major positions in online discovery, gallery commerce, auctions, pricing data, and art-market journalism. Dozens of employees were laid off immediately afterward, according to Hyperallergic.
No one can say the direction came as a surprise. In Hiscox’s 2018 report, 41% of online platforms thought the market would consolidate into only a few global players. By 2023, that figure was 65%, and 71% anticipated more mergers and acquisitions. The calendar was optimistic. The direction was not.
Those facts are not proof of wrongdoing. They are a reason to ask grown-up questions about concentration. Who controls the data used to discover art, sell it, price it, and report on the market? What happens when the same ownership group serves galleries, collectors, auction participants, data subscribers, and readers? Which interests win when they conflict?
Private equity is not a supernatural force. It is capital with a return target. Pretending otherwise is how one ends up surprised when a mission statement acquires a monetization plan.
1stDibs offers another useful lesson in restraint. Its most recent quarter, ended June 30, showed meaningful improvement: revenue and gross merchandise value rose, its GAAP net loss narrowed to about $1 million, and adjusted EBITDA turned positive. At the same time, active buyers fell 10% and orders fell 4%. The company is not “hemorrhaging today.” It is a marketplace with a long history of accumulated losses that is now approaching operating breakeven through a leaner cost structure.
That is enough financial detail. The important point is not to gloat at a balance sheet. It is to understand the pressure. A marketplace required to prove profitability will keep looking for more conversion, more retention, more monetization, and less leakage. Galleries should not act shocked when the platform behaves like a platform.
Take back control without pretending it is 1997
The answer isn’t to delete every listing, smash the laptop, and wait nobly beside an empty gallery door. We should use the platforms where they create reach, respect the terms of transactions they introduce, and refuse to let them become the entire business.
For Trimper Gallery, taking back control means putting our website, publishing, artist records, and direct relationships at the center. Third-party marketplaces, social media, pop-ups, hospitality, design partnerships, corporate placements, and other unconventional outlets sit around that center as paths of discovery.
Our artist pages should be the canonical record for each work. Our email audience should be permission-based, because followers aren’t automatically clients. We should publish the interviews, research, installation stories, market explanations, and opinions a marketplace listing cannot hold, make prices clear where clarity helps, and make it embarrassingly easy to reach a human being.
The measurements need to change too. Views and favorites are pleasant. Qualified inquiries, response time, referrals, repeat purchases, collector retention, and timely artist payments are a business.
Here is the test: if a platform disappeared tomorrow, could a gallery still identify its collectors, reach its audience, locate its documents, explain its program, and continue serving the people who bought from it?
If the answer is no, the gallery is not merely using the platform. The platform has become the gallery’s landlord, filing cabinet, telephone, and memory.
That is too much power to rent.
What I want back
No one knows what is coming next. The art market humiliates anyone who predicts the future too confidently, usually just after they have sent the press release.
I hope our blog reaches more readers. I hope the new website creates visibility. I hope the unconventional outlets we are building bring the work into rooms where galleries have not traditionally gone. And yes, I hope all of that produces sales. I own a gallery, not a monastery.
But the first spike I want to see is in inquiries.
I want collectors to ask why we chose an artist, why one work costs more than another, what the documentation shows, whether a photograph is available elsewhere, how an edition works, what we believe, and where our confidence ends. I want to answer directly, put the material facts in writing, and still be there when the collector calls years later.
The platforms can keep the checkout button. I want the conversation.
Use the technology. Pay fairly for distribution. Welcome online buyers. Put art in new places. Make discovery easier. Do not violate the rules of a channel simply because you dislike its economics.
But the story, records, service, and responsibility belong with the gallery. Above all, so does the relationship.
That is the soul galleries gave away, and it is the only part worth taking back.
Sources and further reading
- Art Basel and UBS, The Art Market Report 2026: Dealers, especially pages 76-77, 93, 95, 107, 120-124, and 128-129
- Art Basel and UBS, The Art Market Report 2026: Global overview
- Hiscox, Online Art Trade Report archive, 2013-2023
- Hiscox, Online Art Trade Report 2013
- Hiscox, Online Art Trade Report 2018
- Hiscox, Online Art Trade Report 2023
- Artsy, Gallery Growth Tools and partnership pricing
- Artsy, About
- 1stDibs, 2021 Form S-1
- 1stDibs, fiscal year 2025 Form 10-K, commission and processing fee disclosure
- 1stDibs, Ask the Seller communication policy
- 1stDibs, seller subscription structure
- 1stDibs, seller commission structure
- 1stDibs, item damage and issue policy
- 1stDibs, authenticity guarantee
- 1stDibs, second-quarter 2026 financial results
- Architectural Digest, “What’s Happening to Dealer Names on 1stDibs?,” 2017
- Artsy and Artnet, official 2026 combination announcement
- Hyperallergic, layoffs following the Artsy-Artnet combination
- The Art Newspaper, analysis of the Artsy-Artnet combination
- Trustpilot, Artsy reviews
- Trustpilot, 1stDibs reviews
- Better Business Bureau, 1stDibs complaint records
- The Art Newspaper, Clearing’s 2025 closure
- Marlborough Gallery, official 2024 wind-down announcement
- The Art Newspaper, Blum’s 2025 shift away from the traditional gallery model
- The Art Newspaper, Venus Over Manhattan’s 2025 closure
- The Art Newspaper, Kasmin’s 2025 closure and transition
- The Art Newspaper, Sperone Westwater’s 2025 closure
- The Art Newspaper, L.A. Louver’s 2025 transition to a private model
- The Art Newspaper, Stephen Friedman Gallery enters administration in 2026
- The Art Newspaper, Tiwani Contemporary ceases operations in 2026
- The Art Newspaper, Pace’s 2026 artist and staff reductions
- The Art Newspaper, Gagosian’s 2026 London and Basel exits
- The Art Newspaper, 2026 review of gallery and auction-house finances
- Art Dealers Association of America, Code of Ethics and Professional Practices
- New York Arts and Cultural Affairs Law Section 13.01
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