In 1950, more than 4 million Turkish citizens voted to unseat Atatürk’s longstanding Republican Peoples’ Party, putting an opposition party at the nation’s helm for the first time in the history of the young republic. The landslide elections were seen as a symbol of Turkey’s definitive abandonment of its authoritarian past and a sign of “true” democracy in action, and stimulated widespread efforts to think through new forms of democratic participation in Turkey—particularly ones which would serve as alternatives to the Fascist and Communist models that dominated the post-war period. This paper looks at the specific ways in which future prime minister Bülent Ecevit devoted himself to the problem of democratic participation through his engagement with the art world. Ecevit opened Turkey’s second modern art gallery in 1952, and used the gallery as a site to test out the idea that capitalism could help cultural production escape from state control. As the new administration pushed for the privatization of the national economy, Ecevit deployed “sales talk” and the example of his own art gallery to argue that the capitalist free market was a locus for the newly enfranchised masses to exert their independent purchasing power.