FINANCE “WE’RE EXPERTS AT COMMERCIALISING CULTURE” Gregg Sedgwick, Founder of Gallery One, talks about the rise of cultural retail in the UAE By Meryl D’souza There isn’t much I remember about my father. Not a lot of good anyway. However, I do remember him claiming to be a hustler. A highschool dropout, one of his favourite stories to tell was when he took up a job as a bellboy in a hotel. The pay obviously wasn’t great but he found a way to con tourists and make a quick buck. At the time, postcards were the rage. He would convince guests not to buy postcards from the hotel because they were overpriced. Instead, he would sell them postcards from his “personal collection”. His victims didn’t know that as the bellboy, one of his duties was to give the hotel’s guests a complimentary postcard before their departure. He knew tourists wouldn’t mind paying a fee if it meant they could take a bit of their vacation destination’s culture with them. He didn’t know it, but he was already a cultural retailer. Thankfully, not everyone out there is out to deceive people. “For me, it all started from a small unit in Souq Madinat Jumeirah about 10 years ago,” says Gallery One Founder Gregg Sedgwick. “I was not a retailer. I was a designer who had previously worked in branding and had sold his media company in London to WPP. Gallery One was simply a passion project that, very naturally, became what it is today.” For those wondering, today, Gallery One is the region’s leading cultural retailer that brings art to the masses in the hopes of creating a non-elitist environment around the subject. “Very often, there’s this misconception that people need to have a deep understanding of art in order to appreciate it,” he says. “Art can be appreciated in a purely aesthetic level. I say that as a creative person who studied art and as someone who is trained as a designer. And despite being so informed on the subject, I get nervous about the pretentiousness that surrounds art. Art doesn’t need to be complicated, it shouldn’t be complicated and over intellectualised.” Basically, art isn’t just for the fedora- and monoclewearing snobs who spend hours debating the deeper meaning behind an abstract painting. “When people like Andy Warhol were working in the Sixties, they weren’t over thinking about their art pieces. He, for instance, just went about producing highly visual works that appealed to him. It’s the snobs today that tend to read too much into it.” When Sedgwick started Gallery One about a decade ago, he saw an opportunity: cultural retail. Cultural retail is essentially the art of taking culture expressed through a painting, sculpture, pattern or calligraphy and commercialising it into a product. “Think about it for a minute,” Sedgwick says with a twinkle in his eyes. “If you go to any of the great museums or galleries in the world, like the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan or the Tate Modern in London, the busiest spot is not the exhibition hall but the shop. I was at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice recently. It was such a beautiful gallery. She’s got original Mark Rothko and Alberto Giacometti pieces in there, which are amazing and busy, but then you go to the shop which is a tiny little room and it’s packed. Those shops in those galleries and museum spaces, they epitomise cultural retail.” Sedgwick reckons that the first idea of cultural retail started with the production of postcards about 200 years ago. People visiting tourist hotspots would spend thousands on postcards to remind themselves of their experiences. Sedgwick noted that despite being steeped in culture, no one in Dubai thought to commercialise it. Sedgwick took regional artists and photographers and started creating products like boxes, coasters and other memorabilia. “Taking a local artist and creating a painting or taking a calligrapher and using his talents to craft a commercial product is the easy bit,” he says. “The hard part is making a sustainable business model out of it.” In any other part of the world, it would have been 14 EQUITY
FINANCE Taking a local artist and creating a painting or taking a calligrapher and using his talents to craft a commercial product is the easy bit. The hard part is making a sustainable business model out of it 15 EQUITY
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