Cultural Sustainability of Contemporary Art Galleries in the Global Art Market

In the international contemporary art market, art galleries strategically compete at the leading fair Art Basel, crucially affecting their decision-making on which art and artists to showcase. We focus on galleries’ cultural sustainability, which we disentangle through six dimensions. The dimensions are: art differentiation, art magnitude, gallery innovation, emerging vs recognized talents, supply internationalization, and national representativeness of supply and we use their corresponding measurable indicators. We assess art galleries’ cultural sustainability using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) on an original dataset. Findings show that about one-fifth of galleries are culturally sustainable according to any or all dimensions. This is mainly contributed by galleries’ artistic innovation, besides their support of domestic artists. This article contributes to the development of the concept of cultural sustainability, its empirical index, as well as managerial implications.