All the latest news from the art world, as well as what's happening here at Gallereo. If you've built a gallery at Gallereo, let us know about your experience and you and your site could feature in our blog in the coming weeks.
Anselm Kiefer was an incredibly interesting artistic character, as I'm sure anyone interested in his work can attest. We were pleased to hear that BALTIC have announced that they will be bringing a major exhibition of his work to the North-East of England. (Gallereo day out!)
This marks the continuation of a great string of exhibitions at the BALTIC over the past few years that have brought some really amazing names, and some fantastic artworks to the region. At the moment there is an exhibition of John Cage's prints, drawings and watercolours; perhaps lesser known mediums for the American composer, writer and artist but nonetheless something different and well worth the visit.
In recent years we have seen the likes of Sarah Sze, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Martin Parr, Yoko Ono, Yoshitomo Nara, Bharti Kher and Steve McQueen at BALTIC to name just a few.
This latest announcement will see one of the greatest European post-war painters going on display. The exhibition that is to be displayed over 2 floors of the BALTIC gallery space with cover a diverse range of work spanning four decades and including everything from paintings through to his monumental installations.
Kiefer created a large body of work dealing with myth, history, theology, philosophy and literature, with much of his work being used a vehicles for him to come to terms with the history his home country, Germany.
We look forward to visiting BALTIC to see Kiefers work, hopefully you can visit too!
Image: Anselm Kiefer, Sonnenblumen, 1995. Oil on Canvas
You might just be starting out in photography, be an avid fan of the art of taking a great photograph, or working your way to the professional big time. No matter where you sit on your career or hobby path you just never know when your works are going to be the next big thing.
It's interesting to take a look at the top ten photography auction results. While the prices are obviously no where near that of the painting or sculpture market, they are still starting to fetch huge amounts of money at the top end of the market. It's great to see photography gathering such attention and you never know, one day it could be your name on this list!
Gilbert & George, To Her Majesty (1973). Sold at Christie's London in 2008 for $3,292,410
Richard Prince, Cowboy (2001-2002). Sold at Sotheby's New York in 2007 for $3,000,000
Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent II (2001). Sold at Sotheby's London in 2007 for $2,946,450
Edward Steichen, The Pond, Moonlight (1904). Sold at Sotheby's New York for $2,600,000
Andreas Gursky, Los Angeles (1998). Sold at Sotheby's London in 2008 for $2,561,520
Richard Prince, Cowboy (2001). Sold at Christie's New York in 2007 for $2,500,000
Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent II, (2001). Sold at Phillips de Pury & Co. New York for $2,200,000
Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent (1999). Sold at Sotheby's New York for $2,000,000
Cindy Sherman, Untitled No. 92 (1981). Sold at Christie's New York for $1,850,000
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Black Sea, Ozuluce... (1991-92). Sold at Christie's New York for $1,650,000
Information courtesy of Art Price, a leading provider of art market intelligence. All figures given are the hammer price and do not include the buyers premium.
The Guggenheim New York and YouTube have joined forces to create YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video, where a jury of informed individuals will seek to discover and showcase some of the best artist talent to be found in the realm of online video.
This project has already drawn major world wide attention with more than 6,600 videos having been submitted since YouTube Play was announced on 14th June. The YouTube Play channel has already attracted more than 2.6 million viewers as the submissions continue to arrive before the deadline of 31st July.
The panel of judges for the biennial is impressive in itself, featuring, to name just a few, artists Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter and Takashi Murakami, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, artist and filmmakers Shirin Neshat and Apichatpong Weerasethakul as well as graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. The jury is chaired by Guggenheim Chief Curator and Deputy Directory Nancy Spector.
To find out more and perhaps make a submission, visit YouTube Play.
To come back to looking at keywords and the on-site optimisation of your artist or photographer website, let's have a look at some of the search engine options available with Gallereo and why they are important, not matter what sort of creative website you have.
For the pages across your site there is an SEO Settings tab, which allows you to edit your on-site keywords so that each individual page can be best optimised to draw traffic from the search engines. On these tabs there are a number of key fields, which are:
Browser Title
This is the information that is shown in the web browser that lets you know the title for the page that you are on. This is also the name that will appear if you open a new browser tab or bookmark the page. You should make sure that your best keywords are incorporated here, and try and make each page title a little bit different. These title keywords are one of the first things that search engines look at when they are trying to decide whether your site is relevant to bring up in any given search.
Page URL Keywords
These are the keywords that sit after your domain name: www.domain.com/these-are-the-keywords. It is really helpful to optimise your site with the keywords in your URLs as this is something else that search engines really pay attention to. Aside from the search engines, this also lets visitors know a little more about the page that they are visiting.
Image Hidden Keywords (Alt Tags)
Search engines cannot read images, they can only read text. So no matter how great your pictures are, they don't really mean anything to the search engines....unless you make use of Alt Tags, which are hidden keywords attached to the images on a page. You should add in keywords to describe the pictures on the page, making sure to include your chosen keywords. The keywords can be comma separated, they do not need to be in full sentences.
Meta Keywords
For the meta keywords field, this is where you list your keywords for that page. The browser title, page URL keywords and Alt Tags should be kept fairly short, but here you can have up to 15 keywords. Our recommended limit is 15, the reason being that search engines do not like to see 'keyword stuffing' or the overuse of your keywords. These meta keywords will not appear at the front end of your website, but they will be read by search engine bots come to find out what your site is about.
Meta Description
The meta description is again read by the search engines and will not appear at the front end of your own site, but this description might appear in places such as the short description that follows the website title in Google search listings. For this reason, you want to make sure you use your keywords here, but also make sure you write in full sentences that humans can read!
These are the main fields that you should fill with your keywords in order to optimise your website for the search engines and hopefully draw lots of interested traffic who will become interested in your work. Aside from these fields you should also make sure that you use your keywords in the written content on your site. Search engines love lots of content, and you have a perfect opportunity to really let people know what you're about by creating it.
The Art Newspaper recently published an interesting article about the current state of funding in the arts, and the battle which organisations like the Arts Council UK face in coming years to rationalise long-term funding schemes for the arts.
It is said that this is the first true instance in which the Government has been challenged to take the arts seriously since the start of the Second World War when Britain's museums and galleries were empty as works were hidden away from the frequent bombings. The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (today the Arts Council) was born in order to fulfill the Governments promise to fight for civilisation.
We are definitely not in the same situation as we were in 1940 however the arts do face a significant battle to render themselves 'useful' and worthy of funding in the eyes of the Treasury. The Department for Culture, Media and Sports has to make a cut of £88 million in this years spending, giving the Arts Council quite an uphill battle to rationalise spending in the arts.
It has long been argued that the arts provide a sense of community and belonging throughout society and aid social and urban regeneration. It has been noted that Glasgow's year as European Capital of Culture in 1990 and Liverpool's in 2008 are perfect examples of this. The New Labour Government, without a good economic argument for the arts, were more than happy with a social rationale to work with.
Given the current economic climate, it would seem that social measures don't make a strong enough statement for the current UK Government. If the sums don't add up in their eyes then there is little reason at all for them to consider boosting or even maintaining current levels of available funding.
We started off last week talking about SEO and how it can really push your website forward by helping you to draw as much traffic as possible. The first thing you should think about when it comes to SEO is your keywords and key phrases. These should be words that represent what you do and what you offer, and they should be as focused and unique as they can be.
The idea is that you will use these keywords and phrases to target your audience, and your audience is people out there who are using the internet to search for the sort of things that you offer.
An example could be that you are a landscape photographer who has a website where you display images of your local landscape, which happens to be the Lake District in Cumbria, UK. A very picturesque area!
The sort of keywords you would be looking to use for your site would be things like:
Landscape photography Cumbria
Photographs of the Lake District
Lake District photographers UK
Cumbrian photographs
Photographs of the Cumbrian landscape
You get the idea. These are basically keywords and phrases targeting the same audience, but slightly varied to cover the varied way in which people may search for the subject matter.
The overall aim here is to use these keywords throughout your website, both in your text and in your on-site SEO settings. This is so that search engines understand, and can see, that your website would be useful to anyone looking for that subject.
A key thing to remember when trying to come up with your keywords is that there are likely to be a lot of other people targeting the same audience. Your job is to find keywords with a lot of traffic but not a lot of competition from other artist or photographer websites.
Google Adwords is primarily a tool for advertising on Google, but you can sign up for free and use their keyword tool to find out things like how many people have searched for a particular keyword and how high the competition level is. This can really help you to narrow down effective keywords.
Our next SEO post will look at how to implement your keywords on your Gallereo website with the SEO tabs that we have created for you and in your site content. In the meantime, happy keyword hunting.
Most artists, whether they enjoy art as a hobby and want to share their work with as many people as possible, or whether they are cruising to be the next Turner Prize winner, understand the need to have a website to show their work.
A website is the front line of attack for an artist. It gives space to display and sell work, to advertise exhibitions and events and to offer a direct line of constant contact to fans and collectors.
So step 1 - get a website. Then what? What else can you do to make that website a really effective tool?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website more appealing to search engines like Google so that you are listed as high as possible in their rankings, and therefore are likely to get more visitors to your site.
SEO isn't rocket science, but it is time consuming, so to help you out, we're going to be listing basic things that you can do to optimise your website. Keep an eye on the SEO label in the labels box to the right for each of our updates.
Firstly, you may have noticed in your Gallereo admin pages, a tab called SEO Settings. We have made it really easy for you to set up SEO onsite by giving you all of the fields that you need to complete on these tabs. We'll start to take a look at these over the next week, as well as the importance of keywords.
If you're interested in finding out more right away, or want a comprehensive overview of SEO I can highly recommend Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. It certainly helped me to get to grips with everything!
Want some extra advice or information about how to get the most out of selling art online and generally getting by as an artist? Here are a few books we've found that could help:
Some good practical advice for artists. It has been noted that most of the spcific references to law, grants etc are American based, but that the general advice is fit for all.
Anabella Ruston has written a couple of quality books about the best ways to go about marketing and selling art. The book covers all from looking at pricing your work, terms and conditions of sale, as well as specifically covering website and internet sales.
This book looks at the experiences of dozens of practicing artists, alongside expert advice, to provide a guide to surviving day to dat life as a professional artist.
That's right, over the coming weeks, artists and photographers from universities around the UK will be holding their end of year degree shows. These are a great place to go and see what the next generation might bring to the art scene and maybe even pick up some work from the next Damien Hirst or Tracy Emin.
Our first visit is going to be to the Northumbria University Degree show which started last weekend and runs until 25th June.
If anyone has any good recommendations for where to go next, drop us an email or comment below for all to read!
Being constantly on the look out for cool exhibitions, upcoming artists or new and interesting places to visit, we came across an article on the artdaily.org website (a great place for art information from around the world if you're interested!) announcing that Europe is to host Sam Francis' biggest show since 1995!
European fans of the this American painter and printmaker have every right to be excited. The show, titled Sam Francis: Retrospective in Blue, will be on show at the Danubiana Meulensteen Museum in Slovakia from 20th June until 29th August and will bring together 100 works from this world famous artist.
To find out more about Sam Francis (and where else you can see his work if Slovenia is a bit of a trek) visit the Sam Francis Foundation website, dedicated to the artists life and work: www.samfrancisfoundation.com