What Happened to the Glasgow Art Market?

For little more than a fortnight every two years, Glasgow International (GI) turns Scotland's biggest city into a focal point for the international contemporary art world.

The eleventh edition of the festival, which is directed by Helen Nisbet, occupied the city as a dispersed exhibition space for 17 days in June with a programme spanning more than 60 projects presented across 32 venues, including museums, galleries, artist-run organisations, temporary sites and public spaces. 

As in recent editions, the festival eschewed a singular theme, bringing together an assemblage of newly commissioned works, major exhibitions, community-led collaborations and independently-organised projects that, taken together, reflected the breadth of Glasgow's creative landscape.

Yet the festival materialised against a landscape of mounting structural exhaustion, turning it into a vantage point from which to reflect on the fraying conditions of the city's cultural life once the biennial banners are taken down. A question that keeps surfacing is – what exactly is the Glasgow art market, and how does it sustain itself? 

When I ask the city’s artists and art workers this question, the response is often one of skepticism. Glasgow has long operated as an ideological counter-model to more commercially-driven art hubs. Its reputation ignores the traditional framework of collectors and commercial galleries and relies on a decentralised ecosystem of self-organised, artist-led infrastructure and publicly-funded cultural institutions. This alternative model of cultural production grows out of a deep-seated culture of mutual aid and collective solidarity, reflecting the city’s longer histories of industrial labour and working-class politics.

This distinctive landscape has shaped the city for decades. Despite the absence of a robust local commercial market, Glasgow has long served as an incubator for artists who would go on to command international attention. Established in 2005, Glasgow International emerged from this system, acting as a lightning rod for a local scene whose influence has often exceeded the scale of its material infrastructure. Historically, this reputation was anchored by the Glasgow School of Art, a network of grassroots spaces, the relative security of welfare programmes and the physical legacy of the city's manufacturing past – a steady supply of affordable, vacant post-industrial real estate. 

This Archive Breathes (2026), Corten Steel. Sohaila Baluch

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, these conditions provided a runway, allowing artists to work with a degree of autonomy, and without the pressure of having to immediately secure commercial success. Yet this way of life has become increasingly untenable as long-standing forms of DIY resilience now sit at a crossroads. Previous survival mechanisms are now in freefall and cheap resources have largely vanished. In the absence of this status quo, the question that follows is whether the very ecosystem that enabled Glasgow’s international standing can continue to hold.

Since 2024, Glasgow's visual arts sector has faced a rapid succession of crises, accelerated by the wider instabilities in Creative Scotland’s funding structures. Furthermore, the pioneering Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) entered liquidation earlier this year, while City Property (Glasgow City Council’s commercial property arm) issued revised lease terms to the seven cultural tenants of Trongate 103, causing their near erasure. 

Long-standing charities participating in this year’s festival, including Glasgow Print Studio, Street Level Photoworks and Project Ability, were hit with demands for a 400 percent increase in rent and service charges, prompting Glasgow’s arts community to protest. Although the Scottish Government has committed an additional £100 million for culture by 2028–29, the immediate reality remains one of neoliberal marketisation, where rising rents and overheads continue to hollow out the very organisations that form the bedrock of the city’s art infrastructure. 

Working within this landscape, Nisbet situates GI firmly within the city’s year-round artistic ecology, noting that it exists because of its community. While the festival seeks to support local practitioners through commissioning, direct investment and its open programme, she is clear about the limits of its reach. "A festival can bring visibility, resources and international attention, but it cannot replace the everyday infrastructure that sustains artistic practice," she says. For Nisbet, the pressures facing the sector are fundamentally structural. "They require long-term investment and political commitment,” she says. “The festival can contribute to the ecology, but it cannot be expected to carry it alone,” she adds.

Parallel to this institutional squeeze, younger experimental spaces such as Listen Gallery, 16 Collective and now Rumpus Room are forced to cycle in and out of temporary sites. These spaces are more than mere venues; they provide exhibition opportunities, production facilities, professional networks and essential pathways between education and professional survival. This constant shuffling exposes the reality of the structural austerity facing Glasgow’s next generation of artists, as the community spaces needed to gather and incubate ideas are systematically priced out. 

Lisette May Monroe, Neighbours, Collage, (2022), courtesy Glasgow International

Emerging artist Gianni Esporas participated in the three-person festival event, Disrupting Space: Sharing Practice, supported by Outer Spaces, a charity that repurposes vacant commercial property into temporary, rent-free studios. The project explored the idea of ‘meanwhile’ spaces as a way of occupying the city's abandoned buildings. 

For Esporas, working in these temporary sites is valuable, but also comes with clear compromises. “It was nice to have a bigger space to expand on my practice,” she says. Yet she also acknowledges a baked-in precarity. "Although it is free, you are sometimes paying in other ways,” she says. This includes short-notice displacement. “This way of having a studio might not work for some,” she says. But having the opportunity to participate in the festival also widened her connections with international visitors that might otherwise have proved difficult to access.

In the northeast neighbourhood of Easterhouse, artist Keira McLean co-designed Fire Stories with local residents – a multimedia project centred on the campfire as a space to share histories and break bread. Presented as a two-day community performance, McLean notes that the project’s inclusion in the festival produced "a visibility that we would not have had otherwise”, opening doors to an artworld audience "that might have previously dismissed the work as other, or less than”. 

Yet, she frames this exposure as only a beginning, arguing that what community-centered practices actually require is "long-term access to the resources and privileges of art institutions while they are still available.” 

“Cuts to funding, resources and support that in the past have affected communities and those facing social inequality first,” she says. “They are now starting to affect the artworld and associated communities”.

Concurrent to the festival, the Glasgow School of Art degree shows offer a counterpoint to the main programme. Moving between the festival venues, one naturally winds up in the student studios where the next wave of practitioners exhibit while the city is under the international spotlight. This graduating cohort becomes a reminder of the institutional foundation that has long upheld Glasgow’s reputation. Yet, against the backdrop of the current cultural dilemma, it is impossible not to wonder what actually happens to these young artists once they hit the graduate cliff-edge and leave art school?

For recent graduate Jessica Crowe, maintaining an independent practice means facing an “unforgiving reality” of living costs, disproportionately scarce commercial opportunities “for a city with an internationally-recognised contemporary art scene”, and the "looming spectre of AI’s impact on graduate employment”. While longer-term proposals such as a basic income for art workers offer a glimmer of transformation, immediate needs remain focused on "more of the basics": mentorships, internships, studio assistant posts and sustainable spaces to make and show work. 

For Crowe, retaining Glasgow’s international talent will require a bold structural rethink. The city's DIY and self-organising networks define its appeal, but "they cannot be expected to perform the cultural heavy lifting exclusively.” 

“That legacy has been systematically let down by the absence of the necessary and proportionate publicly funded support,” she says.