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Art gallery

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Image:MET NYC.jpg Image:Le Louvre - Aile Richelieu.jpg

The front of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

An art gallery or art museum is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art, and usually primarily paintings. Sculpture, illustrations, and objects from the applied arts may also be shown. The term is used both for both public galleries, which are museums for the display of a permanent collection of art, and private galleries, which are commercial enterprises for the sale of art. However both types of gallery may host temporary exhibitions including art borrowed from elsewhere.

Although the art collections of monarchs and aristocrats were often available for public viewing for part of the time, at least by the middle and upper classes, the art museum is considered a fairly modern invention, the first publicly owned and easily accessible one being the Louvre in Paris, which was established in 1793, soon after the French Revolution when the royal collections became state property. Here we see the beginnings of removing art collections from the private domain of aristocracy and the wealthy into the public sphere, where they were seen as sites for educating the masses in taste and cultural refinement. Early museums in America were often a part of or affiliated with Lyceums, Atheneaums, or Libraries with a broader cultural mission, and were not necessarily devoted exclusively to art. Many museums are associated with universities or colleges.

The word gallery derives from the Latin and Italian word for a type of large room. Generally, the term art gallery is used to mean buildings or locations dedicated to displaying and/or selling art, though the large rooms in museums where art is displayed for the public are often referred to as galleries as well, with a room dedicated to Ancient Egyptian art often being called the Egyptian Gallery, for example.

The term contemporary art gallery refers to a usually a privately-owned for-profit commericial gallery. These galleries are often found clustered together in urban centers such as the Chelsea district of New York, widely considered to be the center of the contemporary art world. Most large urban areas have several private art galleries, and most towns will be home to at least one. However, they may also be found in small communities, and remote areas where artists congregate, i.e. the Taos art colony and St Ives, Cornwall. Contemporary art galleries are usually open to the general public without charge, however some are semi-private. They usually profit by taking a cut of the art's sales; from 25 to 50% is usual. There are also many not-for-profit and art-collective galleries. Some galleries in cities like Tokyo charge the artists a flat rate per day, though this is considered distasteful in some international art markets. Galleries often hang solo shows. Curators often create group shows that say something about a certain theme, trend in art, or group of associated artists. Galleries often choose to represent artists exclusively, giving them the opportunity to show regularly. One idiosyncrasy of contemporary art galleries is their aversion to signing business contracts, although this seems to be changing.

Although primarily concerned with providing a space to show works of visual art, art galleries are sometimes used to host other artistic activities, such as music concerts or poetry readings. Conversely, some works of visual art are not shown in a gallery. In particular, works on paper, such as drawings and old master prints are considered by curators as unable to be permanently displayed for conservation reasons. Instead any collection is held in a print room in the museum. Murals generally remain where they have been painted, although many have been removed to galleries. Various forms of 20th century art, such as land art and performance art, also usually exist outside a gallery. Photographic records of these kinds of art are often shown in galleries, however. Most large museum art galleries own more works than they have room to display. The rest are held in reserve collections, on or off-site.

Similar to an art gallery is the sculpture garden (or sculpture park), which presents sculpture in an outdoor space. Sculpture installation has grown in popularity, whereby temporary sculptures are installed in open spaces during events like festivals.

Contents

[edit] Architecture

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain.

The architectural form of the art gallery was established by Sir John Soane with his design for the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1817. This established the gallery as a series of interconnected rooms with largely uninterrupted wall spaces for hanging pictures and indirect lighting from skylights or roof lanterns.

The late 19th century saw a boom in the building of public art galleries in Europe an America, being an essential cultural feature of larger cities. More art galleries rose up alongside museums and public libraries as part of the municipal drive for literacy and public education.

In the late 20th century the dry old fashioned view of art galleries has increasingly been replaced with architecturally bold modern art galleries, often seen as international destination for tourists in their own right. The first example of the architectural landmark art gallery would be the Guggenheim Museum in New York City by Frank Lloyd Wright. More recent outstanding examples include Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Mario Botta redesign of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Some critics argue that these galleries are self defeating, in that their dramatic interior spaces distract the eye from the paintings they are supposed to exhibit.

[edit] Notable art museums and galleries

Image:Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.jpg

High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA.

Paintings inside the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.
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[edit] List of notable contemporary galleries

[edit] Online galleries

[edit] Sponsored by museums and libraries

Most art Museums and Galleries have only limited online collections, but a few Museums have developed substantial online catalogues. Museums and libraries with substantial online collections of prints, photographs, and other works on paper include:

Museums with substantial online collections with more focus on paintings and sculpture include:

[edit] Independent online galleries and commercial galleries selling works by contemporary artists

There are also a number of online art catalogues and galleries that have been developed independently of the support of any individual Museum. Many of these are attempts to develop galleries of artwork that are encyclopedic or historical in focus, while others are commercial efforts to sell the work of contemporary artists.

In addition, numerous commercial galleries have online sites displaying works by artists whom they carry, and the large auction houses, such as Sotheby's and Christie's have large online databases of art which they have auctioned or are auctioning, and the site Artprice.com(pay for full access) with a database of over 21 million auction transactions, collects images and descriptions of artwork which have been auctioned or sold which are coming up for auction or sale through either the large houses or many of the smaller auction houses, and so has one of the more largest online databases of art.

[edit] Large databases of historical collections

Among the sites with significant focus on a broad collection of prominent and established artwork are the following:

  • The Mona Lisa Database of French Museums - Joconde (from the French Ministry of Culture) in French [9]
  • CGFA Large collection of images of paintings (ordered by artist's name, nationality or time frame)
  • Web Gallery of Art 12th to 18th century European paintings and sculptures.
  • Bodkin Prints Links specifically to online images of prints (engravings, etchings, woodcuts etc). Mostly on museum sites. Links to well over 10,000 prints,mostly pre-1830.
  • Olga's online art gallery Commercial, but online collection of approximately 10,000 paintings focusing on medieval through modern European art. Includes biographical information about the artists.
  • Artilysis- Online Gallery For Offbeat & Experimental Artworks A Huge collection of 10,000+ Original artworks from all over the world.

[edit] Folksonomy

There are also online galleries that have been developed by a collaboration of museums and galleries that are more interested with the categorization of art. They are interested in the potential use of folksonomy within museums and the requirements for post-processing of terms that have been gathered, both to test their utility and to deploy them in useful ways.

The steve.museum is one example of a site that is experimenting with this collaborative philosophy. The participating institutions include the Guggenheim Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

[edit] Vanity galleries

A vanity gallery is an art gallery that charges fees from artists in order to show their work, much like a vanity press does for authors. The shows are not legitimately curated and will include as many artists as possible. Most art professionals are able to identify them on an artist's resume. See:

[edit] See also

de:Galerie (Kunst) ko:미술관 mk:Музеј на уметност ja:美術館 sv:Konstmuseum

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