Welcome to the great gallery getaway

It’s a sunny Saturday in Somerset. We’re sitting on the front lawn outside Hauser & Wirth eating strawberry ice cream from the gallery’s farm shop while our sticky toddler darts between Niki de Saint Phalle’s voluptuous dancing women. No disapproving looks. No anxious gallery assistants hovering. All around us are young families, well-dressed couples with dogs, a few locals perhaps – though mostly it feels like people up from the city, visiting relatives or their weekend homes. We live in Somerset now, so technically we count as locals, though probably fall more cleanly into that latter bracket.

It’s a different crowd from Mayfair, but not a radically different one. The biggest difference is that people aren’t rushing through the exhibition, snapping a few pictures and moving on. They’re hanging out. Are they paying closer attention to the art? Who knows. But they’re certainly spending more time in and around it.

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is now a firmly established destination and, for many, the only reason they’ve heard of Bruton. It’s been over a decade since Iwan and Manuela Wirth transformed the then-derelict Durslade Farm into, in their words, an ‘art centre’, complete with a restaurant, shop, guesthouse and gardens designed by Piet Oudolf. There’s a vineyard, beehives, an orchard. By all counts, it’s idyllic.

But this is not a museum. It’s not a public institution. It’s a commercial gallery and as such, it’s part of the luxury market. The art is for sale (if you know how to ask and meet the criteria); the food and goods are artisanal, locally sourced, beautiful and expensive. In a similar way to high-end hotels, these are spaces that create the feeling of escape from the capitalist machine while quietly reinforcing its logic. It’s no coincidence Hauser & Wirth also has an outpost in the exclusive skiing resort Gstaad and owns The Fife Arms, a five-star hotel in the Scottish Highlands.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism – I fall neatly within the demographic these places attract. But it’s worth asking: who are these spaces for? They’re free to enter, they offer public programmes and community events, live music and mini festivals which are actually fun. There are children running around, people resting or talking to one another, and in that sense they feel more welcoming than many traditional gallery spaces. But they also remain part of an elite economy: one that caters to those with the means, or the proximity, to participate.

Hauser & Wirth’s Menorca outpost, which opened in 2021, extends this model. Like Bruton, it’s set in a historic building (this time, part of a decommissioned naval hospital on a private island) and includes a restaurant and a shop – everything about it is designed for beauty and relaxation. And again, it’s likely reaching a similar audience: white, middle-class holidaymakers who consider themselves culturally inclined. Whether they’re buying art or not, they’re participating in the experience – and that experience, increasingly, is the point. It helps, of course, that the space is extremely photogenic, one of the most popular shots on Instagram being a pose beneath the white picture-frame entranceway with the gallery’s name written across the top, sunlight slicing across the ochre plaster walls behind. This summer’s exhibitions by Mika Rottenberg and Cindy Sherman have also been widely photographed and shared on social media, especially Rottenberg’s installation of fluorescent mushroom lights. For those familiar with both artists, the irony of posting work that critiques image-obsessed, aspirational culture is perhaps the point while for others it’s simpler: it looks good on their feed.

In Menorca, there’s also an ‘education lab’ – note, again, the careful choice of language to imply experimentation and benevolence– which exists in Somerset too: a space where community groups, schools and universities are invited to engage more deeply with the exhibitions through hands-on activities. At the moment, Bruton’s space features a rather excellent collaborative painting made by primary school students who, in the spirit of Saint Phalle and Tinguely, incorporated personal objects onto the canvas. But the space itself feels like an add-on. As with so many destination galleries, the word community does a lot of work, often gesturing towards inclusion without clearly defining who is being invited in or on what terms.

That said, the Menorcan gallery does seem to be making a genuine effort both in terms of conservation and education, which, as a commercial space, it certainly isn’t obliged to do. Since opening in July 2021, it has hosted every school on the island and continues to work closely with the Fundació de l’Hospital de l’Illa del Rei, the non-profit organisation also based on the island. “We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response from our local community and work hard to develop cultural partnerships and collaborations, always keeping a long-term view on the positive impact we can make together,” says senior director Mar Rescalvo Pons. “As a Menorcan, I am of course part of the community here and experience this first hand, alongside most of the gallery team.”

Destination art galleries have been on the rise over the past few years. Last summer, London gallery Gathering opened a space in a former paper mill on the quieter, north side of Ibiza. It includes a restaurant – named after co-founder Alex Flick’s daughter – and a bar designed by Gathering artist Tai Shani. Flick, who’s been coming to the island for years, noticed a gap: “Some of the world’s best restaurants, nightclubs and beaches are here, but there wasn’t a big, proper city gallery – and people were kind of crying out for it.” By ‘people,’ he surely means affluent tourists and island residents, including Isabel Marant, who’s apparently a regular.

But his goal, he says, isn’t just to sell more work – and in fact, sales on the island so far have been slower than back home, despite the celebrity neighbours. “I want to engage more people,” Flick insists. That might sound vague, but he’s noticed a difference in how people view art here compared to a conventional, fast-paced urban setting. “This is a really beautiful place,” he says. “People are more relaxed and I think that makes them more open.”

For a gallery like Gathering, which supports artists with “less commercially viable”  practices, that openness matters. In the sun, after a day on the beach and a glass of wine, people may be more inquisitive about work that, in a different setting, could be dismissed as not to their taste or too challenging. A 2020 research article by psychologist Claus-Christian Carbon, published in Frontiers in Psychology, found “overwhelming evidence that the context and way of presenting artworks make a difference, especially regarding the richness of experience, the memory traces that are made, and the pleasure that is gained.”

For artists, showing in a former farmhouse or industrial building brings constraints, but also potential. It can shift the way their work is perceived or even what kind of work they’re making, but there is also a risk of reduction, of their art being folded into the ambient mood of the environment, becoming one more detail in an aestheticised lifestyle.

Doing something “fun and interesting” is, according to Timo Kappeller, the driving force behind The Campus: a collaborative project launched last year that sees six New York galleries – Bortolami, James Cohan, Kaufmann Repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps and Kurimanzutto – take over an old school in Hudson for a large-scale summer exhibition. Kappeller, who is its curator and artistic director, points out that showing art in unconventional spaces isn’t new. “Going back to the Renaissance, art was always shown in places that weren’t entirely neutral. I think there’s a push back towards that.”

He notes the contrast between the rapid turnover of exhibitions in city galleries, which helps drive sales, and the slowness of summer spaces like theirs, in terms of both the preparation process and the way in which people move through the space. This year’s edition includes artists such as Richard Tuttle, Kiki Smith and Rita Ackermann, showing across 35 rooms, including classrooms and the sports hall of the former Ockawamick School, which has been left largely untouched. “The art really communicates to the audience,” says Andrew Kreps. “It’s engaging. When you go to galleries, you kind of just roll through them, but I think [this] also has to do with making a pilgrimage. It just feels very alive.”

The language on the press release is familiar: “The Campus seeks to build community and foster dialogue in upstate New York, and many of the included artists have ties to the region.’ But again: who does ‘community’ refer to – the art world ‘making a pilgrimage’ or actual locals? Both Kappeller and Kreps insist that the audience is very mixed, with people wandering in out of interest, including former students of the school. There is definitely something to be said for the fact that The Campus by no means appears to be a ‘luxury’ space. I haven’t visited, but from the pictures, there’s a DIY vibe about the place which is appealing and distinct from most commercial set-ups. The joining together of six galleries, and the inclusion of artists beyond their rosters also suggests a different kind of ambition, one that perhaps operates a little outside the typical competitive sales model. But, the underlying question remains: who hears about these projects, and who feels welcome to step inside?

Hudson has a deep artistic lineage (it was where many prominent artists of the Hudson River School lived and worked), but in recent years it’s become a site of accelerating gentrification, spurred in part by the broader post-COVID trend of people relocating from cities. If The Campus hasn’t instigated that, it’s certainly aligned with it. Still, like Gathering’s space in Ibiza and Hauser & Wirth’s rural outposts, there’s a genuine impulse here to be braver, both in what gets shown and how.

It’s also worth noting that commercial galleries didn’t come up with the idea of bringing art into rural locations. Yorkshire Sculpture Park opened in 1997; Tate St Ives in 1993; and Jupiter Artland in 2009; with East Quay in Watchet, which opened in 2021, being among the most recent public-funded arts venues to set up shop outside of the art world’s central orbit in a tiny coastal town in west Somerset. These spaces all have different looks and visions, but they share not just in their aim of providing access to art to a wider demographic but also in the kind of space in which they operate. Like Hauser & Wirth Menorca and Somerset, and Gathering Ibiza, they’re not just galleries, they have cafes, shops, programmes of activities that seek to keep both locals and tourists happy. But where for commercial galleries these kinds of outposts fit a wider brand logic, by building prestige, visibility and aligning the gallery with a certain type of lifestyle, public institutions, at least in theory, serve the community first before the brand. That is to say they may look similar on the surface, but the power dynamics and obligations are very different.

And this is where the key difference lies. For mega-galleries, these spaces are about expanding empires, building legacies, attaching their brand not just to artists but to landscapes, architecture, experiences. In a culture where brand is everything, this has, in a way, become essential to survival at this scale. A gallery can no longer just be a white cube in a city, it has to become part of a lifestyle that includes holidaying in Ibiza, artistic retreats in Hudson, foraging in Somerset.

In the process, these spaces do make art more accessible in the sense that they draw in new audiences, they bring new life to extraordinary sites which might otherwise not be available to the public and they present artists with the opportunity to show different kinds of work, in different contexts. But they also reproduce many of the same exclusions in subtler forms: through location, lifestyle, cost and cultural fluency. The setting may be more interesting, but in many ways, the same rules still apply.