I walk in a commercial area with a catering company, brick company, events space, diamond wholesaler, etc. There on a street with a name that is usually recognized in science or business — Sigma Road — is an art gallery. Although in an inauspicious location, it proclaims its creativity with an abundance of metal ribbonlike sculptures outside. I have been to the Met and the Guggenheim in New York, along with the Dallas Museum of Art and the Meadows Museum in Dallas. But I can’t say I have ever really frequented small, independent art galleries. Maybe I should. I do so admire artists’ abilities to take inanimate objects like a canvas frame and tiny blobs of color to create a living portrait, a bird in flight or simply a random combination that is pleasing to the eye. And sculptors who take cold materials like metal or stone and make them come alive are magicians to me.
History
According to Wikipedia, In Western cultures from the mid-15th Century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The long gallery in Elizabethan and Jacobean houses served many purposes including the display of art.
Art is displayed not only for aesthetic enjoyment, but also as evidence of status and wealth and for religious art as objects of ritual or the depiction of narratives. The first galleries were in the palaces of the aristocracy or in churches. As art collections grew, buildings became dedicated to art, then becoming the first art museums.
Exhibitions of art operating similar to current galleries for marketing art first appeared in the early modern period, approximately 1500 to 1800 CE. In the Middle Ages that preceded, painters and sculptors were members of guilds, seeking commissions to produce artworks for aristocratic patrons or churches. The establishment of academies of art in the 16th century represented efforts by painters and sculptors to raise their status from mere artisans who worked with their hands to that of the classical arts such as poetry and music, which are purely intellectual pursuits. However, the public exhibition of art had to overcome the bias against commercial activity, which was deemed beneath the dignity of artists in many European societies.
Art galleries were well-established by the Victorian era, made possible by the increasing number of people seeking to own objects of cultural and aesthetic value. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century there were also the first indications of modern values regarding art; art as an investment versus pure aesthetics, and the increased attention to living artists as an opportunity for such investment.
Commercial galleries
Commercial galleries owned or operated by an art dealer or "gallerist" occupy the middle tier of the art market, accounting for the majority of transactions although not the highest monetary values. Once limited to major urban art worlds such as New York, Paris and London, art galleries have become global. Another trend in globalization is that while maintaining their urban establishments, galleries also participate in art fairs such as Art Basel and Freize Art Fair.
Art galleries are the primary connection between artists and collectors. At the high end of the market, a handful of elite auction houses and dealers sell the work of celebrity artists; at the low end artists sell their work from their studio, or in informal venues such as restaurants. Point-of-sale galleries connect artists with buyers by hosting exhibitions and openings. The artworks are on consignment, with the artist and the gallery splitting the proceeds from each sale. Depending upon the expertise of the gallery owner and staff, and the particular market, the artwork shown may be more innovative or more traditional in style and media.
Contemporary galleries
An enduring model for contemporary galleries was set by Leo Castelli. Rather than simply being the broker for sales, he became actively involved in the discovery and development of new artists, while expecting to remain an exclusive agent for their work. However, he also focused exclusively on new works, not participating in the resale of older work by the same artists.
Nonprofit galleries
Some nonprofit organizations or local governments host art galleries for cultural enrichment and to support local artists. Nonprofit organizations may start as exhibit spaces for artist collectives and expand into full-fledged arts programs. Other nonprofits include the arts as part of other missions, such as providing services to low-income neighborhoods.
· Artists Space was founded in 1972 in SoHo, New York City.
· Westbeth Gallery is operated by the Westbeth Artists Residents Council
Arts districts
Historically, art world activities have benefited from clustering together either in cities or in remote areas offering natural beauty.
The proximity of art galleries facilitated an informal tradition of art show openings on the same night, which have become officially coordinated as "first Friday events" in many locations.
Galleries selling the work of recognized artists may occupy space in established commercial areas of a city. New styles in art have historically been attracted to the low rent of marginal neighborhoods.
An artist colony existed in Greenwich Village as early as 1850, and the tenements built around Washington Square Park to house immigrants after the Civil War also attracted young artists and avant garde art galleries. The resulting gentrification prompted the arts to move to the neighborhood "south of Houston" or SoHo which became gentrified in turn.
Attempting to recreate this natural process, arts districts have been created intentionally by local governments in partnership with private developers as a strategy for revitalizing neighborhoods. Such developments often include spaces for artists to live and work as well as galleries.
According to Adrian Searle’s March 25, 2020 article “Private view: Our art critic’s favourite online galleries” in The Guardian, if you never got to see the National Gallery’s Titian exhibition — or even if you did — there are three Facebook Live conversations about the show are also available on the National Gallery’s YouTube channel, along with many other videos about other works in the collection and key ideas.
If you need an Andy fix, why not visit the website of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which has the largest holdings of the artist’s work in the world?
“There is no need for you to leave the house,” wrote Franz Kafka. “Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.”
Even if it isn’t quite the physical thing, there is always art. Armchair tours of the world’s museums, now that we can’t go anywhere, will have to do. The experience is in some ways far from second best. Have you ever tried muscling your way through the crowds gathered in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch in Amsterdam’s Rijkmuseum? Mostly, they are letting their smart phones do the watching.
You can home right in or back away, without bumping into anyone. If you want to get closer still, the Night Watch is being restored, and you can watch https://nightwatchexperience.com/en/; there is even an accompanying children’s tour.
The Rijkmuseum, along with more than a thousand other museums worldwide, is now partnering with Google Arts & Culture https://artsandculture.google.com/, where you can get inside everywhere from MoMA in New York to the Munch Museum in Oslo, from the British Museum to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to the Today Art Museum in Beijing. Not only that, the website also allows you to zoom in far closer on individual works than you ever could in real life. Like a dragonfly, you can alight on Monet’s pond, lose yourself in the sky beyond the branches in a Cézanne landscape, or get personal with the ruffs and jerkins, the bulbous noses and elephant eyes of the Night Watch.
Fancy a trip to the Prado and its 936 Goyas, https://www.museodelprado.es/en
some of which come with extensive commentaries and videos with English subtitles. The same approach is applied to Velázquez, Bosch, Rogier van der Weyden and the other artists, and you can spend days on the Prado website, just as you can in the museum, and fall down the rabbit hole of its interactive timeline:
At the Louvre you can take a virtual tour of the empty galleries, zooming in on artworks as you go at https://www.louvre.fr/en.
The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has announced has a number of online exhibitions on view — including Michelangelo, and another on the history and development of the Bauhaus, as well as its extensive collection and art historical resources: https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/explore-getty-art-resources-closed-coronavirus/
Who knows where even an idle journey might take you.
Congolese choreographer and dancer Faustin Linyekula was meant to perform at this year’s BMW Tate Live Exhibition, alongside other performances by Okwui Okpokwasili and Tanya Lukin Linklater. Linyekula and his collaborators worked with Tate to stage a one-off, site-specific work, performed to camera in the empty Tanks.
For enlivening conversations with artists, go to the Louisiana Channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY2mhw-XNZSxrUynsI5K8Zw
Based at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Humlebaek, Denmark, its website is full of good — sometimes alarming — things. As well as poets, novelists, architects and thinkers, artists discussing single works, artists talking about outer space and the Arctic, artists who use water in their work, writers on facing the blank page and a section devoted to advice to the young. Whether you want to watch David Hockney talking about space, Marina Abramović discussing Giacometti, painters winding each other up or just terrific conversations, this is a very good place to find yourself.
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