Contemporary performance

Michael Gibson: The art of business when art is the business

Photo: Michael Gibson (photos Rob Nelson)

MICHAEL GIBSON, OWNER of the award-winning contemporary Canadian art gallery Michael Gibson Gallery on Carling Street, is nursing a ruptured Achilles ­tendon. A tennis injury, he says. So, he laughs a bit when I ask what he meant when he described himself a few years back as a “jock.”

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“Yeah,” he says, “I’m feeling a little less like a jock these days.”

The story of Gibson, a four-decade veteran of London’s downtown business and art scene, often revolves around something like this. He was a university football player, a prolific and ­talented skier and a guy who went to business school — not the free-spirited bohemian you might expect to find in the contemporary art world.

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Admittedly, it’s a rich vein to mine: How does a guy with an all-American résumé end up running a high-end, nationally recognized gallery focused on contemporary Canadian art in the relatively small art market of London, Ontario?

For Gibson, the die was cast early on. “Before I got into this in ‘84, I really decided that I would like to work for myself. I think that’s a huge decision for anybody to make. You either work for someone else or you work for yourself,” he says. “I decided I’d probably be better suited to be self-employed. And you know, in hindsight of course, that was true.”

In his mid-20s, Gibson found himself working for Asher Roth of Roth Art on Talbot Street, a business he eventually purchased when Roth retired. For a while after that, he was in the retail art business, with a shop on King Street that had a framing operation, employing three or four people. In 1997, he picked the whole operation up — minus the framing operation, which he jettisoned — and moved it to a gallery at 157 Carling Street, where it still resides today.

At this point, Gibson recalls looking up at the paintings on the wall and asking himself a question: “How the heck can I pay the rent selling art?”

As it turned out, there was no black magic to it, and his business brain thinks of it in relatively straightforward ­fashion. “It’s a unique asset, and you have to find those people that are interested in what I’m doing,” he explains. “There’s a lot of assets that have value, and that people might want to buy, for just that reason.”

Finding those people, however, took some doing: flying back and forth across the country; pounding the pavement at art fair after art fair; learning how best to operate in the often-opaque world of art dealing.

But that alone doesn’t (maybe can’t) explain everything. It’s art, and art is subjective. “I do think I was born with a good eye for value and quality; there’s some instinct there,” Gibson admits. But he’s not too insistent on it. To run a good art business, you first have to run a good business. Art, ­perhaps like football, is all about fundamentals. “One motto we have around here is whenever we make a decision, it’s artist first,” Gibson says. “If it’s good for the artist, it’s good for the business.”

So, where to from here? After 40 years in the art business, is Gibson at all ready to slow down, hang up the cleats (so to speak)? Not by the looks of it.

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“I think what I’ll be doing is just working with the clients that I work with now, and I’ll probably meet a few more I’m sure, and just keep aiming higher and higher because intellectually, for me, it’s really the stimulation I’m looking for,” Gibson says. “I’m going to try to continue to pursue strong younger artists. We’ve taken on some new ones lately that are really very good, so it’s fun working with them.”

It’s hard to see any of that changing. Gibson has scaled the mountain, built a business that survived then thrived, and wants to bask in that for as long as he can. “The day-to-day stress of trying to pay the rent or meet payroll, I mean those days have left me a long time ago,” he reflects. But as long as there’s art to be sold, and buyers with appetites to be satisfied, the work continues. “The phone rings and things happen. That’s the business. You can never ignore it.” Kieran Delamont