Doug
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I am sorry to say, I don't know. I dropped out of anything to do with pursuing galleries and shows by the end of the Seventies. So, to know these sorts of things, you really do have to be on the ground--know the local scene.
OTHO, I could guess. Art around here contracted into very small, somewhat fly by night galleries with virtually no possibly of making a museum show, even the local group shows by the early Eighties. No money period. LA stayed pretty much unaffected for a fairly long time after that--maybe mid to late Eighties. Smells of economics doesn't it? But even down south dried up.
So, it sounds like NYC experienced pretty much the same contraction. In general there must have been some kind of tax deduction, business expense or some other little legal dodge that in-directly made fiddling around in the art gallery business worth somebody's time and effort at one point, and then that disappeared.
I used to work for an art crating company in LA and we used to deliver and install art. The typical customer was obviously filthy rich, but usually very pleasant about it--gracious. One guy catered a lunch for us. Many of the owners showed us their collections. They knew we were most likely art students and would enjoy them, and we did. But all that was in the 'way back when' Sixties.
But that class changed, changed what it wanted to do with its money. It could have been as simple as realizing that buying art was actually a good investment, if you picked the right work. But the right work for investment is not or rather was not the current work. To buy art for investment is not the same as supporting art by any means. The investment trick is to pick work that is intrinsically very good, but for various stylistic reasons is out of vogue--analogous to more general investment 'strategies'. For example, the art history community tried to re-awaken interest in American Regional painters of the 19C and several well known historians managed to get articles in Artforum in the early Eighties--just about the lowest point imaginable for very old and completely forgotten regional painters. So, if you invested in those sort of works by the mid-Eighties you would have quite a solid investment now and you could have turned that over in the early to mid-Nineties--especially minority works. So art became more closely aligned to the antique or antiquarian market.
Also the most advanced art by the Eighties had taken on a distinctly self-conscious and anti-bourgeoise posture. It was ugly, awkward, annoying, confrontational, intentionally stupid and badly made--denying its own status as an 'art object' of 'value' on purpose. This posture was a given in advance of any other consideration. So, who but the specialist collector would buy that kind of work? This wasn't just a question of sloppy looking painting. Work started to depend more and more on the installation space, or could be assembled from cheap materials and then discarded after the show--photographs and slides became documentary evidence that such and such a piece was actually made and such a collection of photographs and notes became the objects on display. What is to buy or support in that kind of work?
In the other direction, scale or presentation out grew the dimension of the class who once supported the work. You can't buy an earthwork for example or have a performance piece running in the downstairs foyer. So, the art conspired to disappear itself at the same time that any hope of earning money to live disappeared. In other words it seemed as if everybody agreed this trip just wasn't happening anymore.
You can also point to the obvious---an avant-guard that can no longer dazzle and amaze is hardly avant of anything (sounds like a Sixty Minutes phrase from a review done by Morely Shafer). The whole idea of a tradition against itself, finally collapsed its own romantic illusions. You can only revolt against the past and present and once that is worn thin there is nothing left. It was this revolt that made art bourgeois in the sense that the bourgeois conceived themselves as a continually renewing and advancing class--revolutionary in the sense of a continual evolving dynamic, much like its own capitalist ideology of continual expansion, growth and change. But the arts by then had taken the darkest turn, a revolt of the future, a future against itself. This had already occurred in the Seventies, but was by no means wide spread, or simply a foundational assumption. A decade later such a foundational assumption was just as much part of making art as it was part of writing and thinking about art.
I could go on and on about the death of the future, mostly based on Octavio Paz, in _Children of the Mire_ ('72), but I am still not really satisfied with that sort of conceptual answer. There had to be questions of money at the bottom of it all, just because there always are.
Chuck Grimes