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.
In the continuation of our exploration of the lesser-known cities around the world that cater to artists, it's time to move things out of the North and get a break from the relentless winter that just won't seem to let up. Santa Fe, New Mexico is definitely on the lesser-known side of things even to those in North America, and so is probably virtually unknown throughout the rest of the world. Located in a stunning series of geological formations, it has a feel truly all it's own - that has created some truly beautiful pieces of work.
Not that it's all artistic glory, of course. Santa Fe has a huge reliance on tourists who come for the art community without necessarily being a part of the art community, which leads, as anyone who's visited the artistic and cultural centres of Europe can attest, to a preponderance of kitsch and spineless, shameful aping of true talent. But paradoxically, this welter of second-rate mass-produced artwork helps to highlight the truly amazing works, and some even argue that it has inspired the serious artists of the region to make even more creative distinctions and powerfully enabled their work.
Santa Fe boasts a number of famous galleries, including the Museum of New Mexico, which administers several galleries, is in fact older than the state itself, boasting a number of treasures from contemporary and historical American artists, and is currently featuring a beautiful exhibition of Goya's work in conjunction with the British Museum, exploring how the famed Spanish artist's work informed and inspired a good deal of art in the American Southwest.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is also located in Santa Fe, boasting the world's largest collection of works from the internationally-renowned artist, spanning the extend of her career from 1901 to 1984, when her career was sadly ended by failing eyes. It is a testament to American modernism, and is the only museum dedicated to a world-famous female artist.
The real contemporary treasures are likely to be found in the city's numerous small, independent galleries, which may very well outnumber the hotels in the city limits - over 240 individual galleries at last count. The Santa Fe Art Fair, about to enter it's fourteenth year of exhibition, is also an experience not to be missed, and is rapidly gaining renown around the world as more and more far-flung galleries sign on to contribute exhibits each successive year.
It's no secret that the art world is undergoing some major changes. As we discussed recently, the market for auctionable art has taken a turn for the better in recent years, driven by expanding wealth in Asia and the Middle East, as well as increasing consumer confidence throughout the West. However, in the market for artists still making a name for themselves, a number of other changes are taking place, most notably the transition away from the traditional model of the independent gallery towards online galleries managed by the artists themselves as well as the growing popularity of the 'art fair'.
This transition can be something of a double-edged sword, especially in locations that are historically and locally famous for their art gallery districts. London's own venerable Cork Street is - to some, surprisingly - just one of the latest to suffer the depredations of real estate developers hoping to maximise profits in desirable downtown locations. This Valentine's Day, the local planning council deadline for public response to a proposal to redevelop historic Cork Street, home to a great number of galleries, some of whom have had their current locations for nearly a century.
Westminster city council has tentatively approved the deal in principle, which hoped to build 42 flats over a shopping centre, pending the results of the request for public responses. A number of other developments are slated to go in, assuming that the first proposal is ratified. To date, a number of prominent public figures have spoken out against in favour of preserving the cultural and historical significance of Cork Street, including actor Bill Nighy, comic Graham Norton, illustrator Quentin Blake and retail leader Mary Portas, among many others and a great deal of support from the general public. A plan currently exists to place a portion of the neighbourhood under the purview of a 'special policy area', but gallery owners hope to dramatically expand the borders of the area to save as many galleries from relentless urban development as possible.
No matter how much of the area is saved, however, it's impossible to mistake it as a sign of the changing times of the art world. As any good artist will tell you, traditions are always being up-ended and turned inside out in art, and the way the public interacts with art isn't going to exempt from those changes. While there will surely always be a desire for physical galleries, they can no longer assume their own viability without changing and adapting.
While it may not be common knowledge in much of Europe, America's car manufacturing heartland is having some troubled times of late. After talks of bailouts of major car companies and successfully saving a few of them, we're finally starting to see some more complete fallout from the 2008 economic collapse that crippled much of American industry. One of the less-expected casualties from this turmoil, however, was the city of Detroit. Known unofficially as 'Motor City', Detroit was at the centre of American car manufacturing for a number of companies, and the city has been left bankrupt and desolate as jobs moved away and with them, the people. Abandoned houses are common, and the city is struggling to balance its debts.
Even fewer know that Detroit boasts a world-class art collection in the form of the Detroit Institute for Arts. As the gallery is owned and operated by the city, it has been presented by some officials as a means to help pull Detroit's economic futures out of the sinkhole they're currently mired in. The collection, is truly world class, with some of the highlights being van Gogh's 'Portrait of Postman Roulin', the famous sculptural masterwork by Rodin 'The Thinker', 'Fruit, Carafe and Glass' by Picasso as well as works by Bruegel the Elder, Cezanne, and Whistler, to name but a few.
Those who would hope to use the collection to help pay debts include insurance executives who view the works as non-essential to the mission of the city hope to gain as much as $2 billion dollars US from the sale of the best pieces, but museum officials say that initial consultations with Christie's auction house peg the collections value below that, and possibly even below $1 billion USD, as well as pointing out - rightly so - that sale of the collection wouldn't do much to solve Detroit's immediate financial problems and will eventually hinder the regrowth of the city into a vibrant metropolis.
As a compromise, city officials and the museum directors agreed to forestall the sale of the collection provided that the museum was able to fund itself and contribute money towards paying the city's pension obligations, which are a major source of debt. In January, museum officials said in a statement that they would push their fundraising capabilities to the outer limits and beyond, hoping to raise $100 million to join forces with the roughly $375 million already being contributed to the museum by a number of private institutions and fundraising groups in an effort to keep the museum doors open and the collection intact.
Ever since the global economic meltdown in 2008, the art market has been in some relatively dire straits. Many famous works that were put up for auction by famous auction houses remained unsold, or sold for amounts that were barely eye-catching at the time. Fortunately, the rise in consumer confidence that many nations around the world have begun to experience is also making its way into the global art market, which has once again begun to thrive.
Many speculate that the driving force behind the initial resurgence in the market is a sudden increase in demand from newly affluent buyers in the Asian market, especially China, which may account for the recent perception that the most expensive works being sold today are predominantly red, as the colour red is associated with luck and good fortune in many Asian cultures. Several major crimson-tinted pieces have gone up for auction recently, including a portrait of Chairman Mao by pop-art icon Andy Warhol, valued at up to 7 million pounds, and even more eye-poppingly, a beautiful abstract piece titled 'Wall' by Gerhard Richter, which is estimated to sell at a minimum of 15 million pounds. This is truly remarkable, as Sotheby's, the auction house responsible for the sale of 'Wall', speculates that the auction may exceed expectations and sell for over 23 million pounds, breaking the record for highest auction price commanded by a work from a living painter. Not something to sneeze at, surely.
The latest estimates from Sotheby's pegs the Chinese taste for art at nearly a quarter of the $58 billion USD global art market, but buyers from Latin America, Russia and the Middle East are also paying staggering sums of money at auction houses around the world, with the current favourites being Picasso, Matisse, as well as more contemporary artists. Both Sotheby's and Christie's are also looking to expand their operations in India, with several new sales upcoming and already passed in recent months.
While most of us won't be selling works valued anywhere near the staggering amounts listed above - at least, maybe not in our lifetimes - if you're looking for some inspiration about how to guide your next piece, creating something of the crimson persuasion might help give you an edge. If nothing else, warm colours might help you creatively offset the harsh winter that's gripping much of the northern hemisphere this year.
We've discussed a number of different ways you can structure your Gallereo page in order to boost your sales, from taking advantage of search engine optimisation to writing complete descriptions all the way to using social media to build a name for yourself and ideas for maintaining and building readership using your built-in Gallereo blog. There is an element to your Gallereo page that can make an even larger difference to your success - the visual style, of course! We've held back from commenting on this because it's fairly personal in terms of your own unique artistic vision, but there are still some basic design pointers that we can offer that will be especially beneficial to those of you who are new to the whole web design world.
First of all, it's important to keep in mind that the pre-made templates that Gallereo offers are excellent. If the idea of designing your own website or modifying the templates yourself is overwhelming, don't be afraid to make use of the pre-made options. They're going to do a great job of helping you sell your work, and they all look great. That being said, if you have the time and the skills - or at least the willingness to learn - nothing can do a better job of representing you than a customised site.
When you're customising templates or coding from scratch, though, there are some things you should keep in mind. Namely, unless you're making your entire site an art project in and of itself, you want to keep the design elements to a minimum. To give your artwork maximum impact and so gain maximum sales numbers, you want the artwork itself to take centre stage, not the website. This is why so many artist websites use neutral colours for backgrounds - white, grey, or black - because they really help the colours and elements of the artwork imagery 'pop' from the page.
With that in mind, though, it's a good idea to include a little bit of colour around your site, but make sure to use it sparingly. Choose one or two colours that work well together, and use them as accents around the site - for example, on your 'Buy' or 'Purchase' buttons and any other 'call to actions' you use on your site. A 'call to action' is basically what it says on the tin: a button or link that asks the user to perform an action, such as 'get more information' or 'purchase now', which makes highlighting them with colour very useful.
Plan your site carefully, because it can be one of the largest factors that impact your success at selling your artwork online. Remember - it can be a work in progress. If you finish your site and find that you're getting lots of visitors but not a lot of sales, try changing your site around to see if it will help boost sales.
GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF - those of you who are new to the world of digital images might feel a little overwhelmed by the acronyms alone, and they can seem a bit daunting to us old hands as well sometimes. When you're saving your perfectly edited image, whether it's a digital painting or a photograph of your latest sculpture, it can sometimes seem completely impossible to navigate the wide arrays of file formats and settings that you are presented with. The four listed above are really the only ones you're like to need to work with, and we'll take you through the merits of each one.
GIF, which is actually supposed to be pronounced 'jiff', is one you can discount almost immediately. It was quite popular in the early days of the web, but unless you're creating work that has a very limited colour palette, it's not your best option. It can be very useful for maintaining minimal file sizes, but the reason it excels at that is its limited colour palette. It's great for animated cats, but it's not worth using for your art images.
JPEG is by far the most popular image file format for web-based imagery. It has a great blend of low file size and a wide colour palette, and it can be read by virtually every browser on every device ever made. When saving your JPEGs, the most important choice to make involves the amount of compression you're going to use, typically presented as a range from 0-100 (although sometimes from 1-10 or 1-12). Unless you have truly exceptional visual acuity, you can save yourself some file size by starting out around 80 (relatively large file size, but near-perfect image representation). In many cases, you can reduce all the way down to 65 or even 60 without any noticeable impact on the image quality. This can be very helpful when creating large numbers of image thumbnails or if you want larger images to load more quickly.
PNG is a special case image format, that can have some very specific uses in web design, for example when designing or customizing your Gallereo page. The main thing that makes PNG stand out is that it is capable of including something called an 'alpha channel', which allow PNGs to contain transparent elements. Each digital image contains 3 channels, Red/Green/Blue, which are each greyscale versions of your image. White pixels on the red channel show up as red, etc. The alpha channel is a fourth channel that controls the transparency of each pixel. It also has a relatively good file size to quality ratio, but unless you're using transparency, JPEG is usually a better option. If you do opt to use PNG, be sure you're using PNG-24 not PNG-8.
TIFF is what you want to be using for saving your full-resolution images. It is what's known as an uncompressed file format, meaning that it won't compromise your image quality at all, and newer versions of the TIFF standard support ZIP compression and another form of lossless compression known as LZW. Either way, though, TIFF files wind up with extremely large file sizes - a JPEG that is 2 megabytes in size might be as much as 20 megabytes when saved in the TIFF format. Because of this, reserve TIFFs for sending to your printer, and don't use them for the web.
Last month, we took a look at some of the best cities in the world for art lovers, with the hope of inspiring some of you to shake the dust off and take an art-filled winter vacation. A couple of you wrote to us and said that you'd already been to the cities we mentioned - and to be fair, they were pretty popular options - but popular for good reason. With that in mind, we decided to prepare a short list of some lesser-known cities that have burgeoning art communities, both in terms of established galleries and flourishing smaller scenes. We'll look at a different city each time, and zoom in close to give you an idea of what you can expect if you manage to visit.
First on the list is Toronto, Canada. While Toronto has been making headlines lately thanks to its buffoon of a mayor, the art scene is still going strong. Toronto is probably most recognized for being home to the Art Gallery of Ontario, which boasts an impressive collection of Canadian painters, as well as the majority of the collected works of Henry Moore, a famous sculptor who donated his entire personal collection to the AGO. Recent exhibits at the AGO have also featured Ai Weiwei, the famous Chinese dissident artist that we discussed in another post recently. Mr. Ai had also recently been hosted by Toronto for an installation that was located outside city hall entitled "Forever Bicycles", a truly beautiful piece, although sadly a temporary one. New exhibits are hosted regularly, and there's almost something worth seeing.
There are a huge number of lesser known galleries scattered throughout the city, but there is a high concentration of young, fresh-faced galleries in an area just west of downtown known as Queen West, located (unsurprisingly) on Queen Street West, between Gladstone Ave and Bathurst Street. It's easy to pass an entire day wandering along the strip, taking in the various sights and sounds, as long as the occasional hipster throng doesn't put you off - in fact, it's sort of expected in this area.
If film is more your style, Toronto also plays host to the annual Toronto International Film Festival, which is usually held in September - but those of you already fantasizing about going would do well to start planning your trip well in advance, as the entire downtown core tends to get rather booked up by mid-Summer. Stars, glitz, glamour and great movies are a sure thing.
If you happen to find yourself in London in the middle of January, be sure to take some time to drop by the annual London Art Fair, being hosted at its usual residence in Islington, the Business Design Centre. There are several new features this year, as well as the return of a few old favourites, but most notable this year is the participation of the Hepworth Wakefield.
In case you're not up on the UK gallery scene lately, the Hepworth Wakefield is one of the most exciting new galleries around, based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. The building was designed by famous British architect David Chipperfield for an impressive £35 million, but the cost was easily vindicated by the impressive attendance numbers racked up in the first 5 weeks it was open, with over 100,000 visitors gracing its halls. The Hepworth Wakefield's contribution to the London Art Fair will be an exhibit titled 'Barbara Hepworth and the development of British Modernism' curated by Frances Guy, Head of Collections.
Many other galleries from around the world will also be contributing various exhibitions, including a presentation of 1950s Japanese avant-garde group GUTAI by the Whitestone Gallery out of Tokyo, which recently concluded a major exhibit of the works at the Guggenheim in New York City. Nearly 100 galleries in total have contributed works to be exhibited, ensuring the London Art Fair's place as one of the largest exhibitions of its kind in the United Kingdom.
Among the returning favourites this year are the 'Art Projects' and 'Photo50' sections of the fair. This year, Art Projects will be curated by Adam Carr, who has acted as guest curator at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy. This year, the focus will be on collaborative and interactive pieces from galleries around the world, many of which will be working together for the first time. Photo50 will be curated thisd year by Charlie Fellowes and Jeremy Epstein, both of whom are directors of the Edel Assanti Gallery. The exhibit is entitled 'Immaterial Matter', and explores the increasingly blurry distinctions between the digital world and the material world.
The London Art Fair is open from Wednesday, January 15 until Sunday, January 19, with tickets at the door costing £17.00 (although you can save yourself £2 and buy online in advance for £15.00), and children under 12 can attend for free.
Posted on December 30th 2013 on 11:58pm
0 Comments
As we mentioned in our recent piece on the documentary Samsara, the winter months can be rough for artists. Well, they can be rough for everyone, but lack of sunlight and the inhospitable outdoors can lead us down the road to lethargy and creative blocks. If you spend a little bit of time thinking about your work and how you could use freezing temperatures as a means to experiment with something new, you'll start to realize that the things you originally saw as blocks can actually be guides that allow you to step outside your traditional assumptions.
If that doesn't pique your curiosity, then perhaps you'll find some inspiration in the stunning winter-only works of artist Simon Beck. His day job involves map-making, and he took those skills, combined it with his love of precision and turned into some beautiful artwork. Originally from Bracknell, Berkshire, he spends his winters in ski-friendly areas of France where snow is plentiful. But his artwork is highly unusual for one simple reason: he creates it entirely with snowshoes.
Sometimes walking as much as 40 kilometers over the course of a 10 hour day, Beck creates truly massive and stunningly intricate mathematically inspired designs in snow. If you've ever seen pictures of 'crop circles', you'll get a sense of what his designs are like, but on a much grander scale. Beck explains, "The biggest was about 10 soccer fields. It's a bit hard to measure, but a decent-sized project is about three soccer fields. That takes one day if conditions are good."
Once the enormous designs have been completed, he then spends time hiking to the top a nearby mountain, if one is available, in order to take pictures. If there isn't one nearby, he sometimes charters a small aircraft to allow him to take aerial pictures of his work. Because each footstep has a distinct and differentiated depth, as the sun progresses across the sky the changes in light and shadow can create some amazing contrasting patterns.
Check out an interview with Beck here, and see how he creates his masterpieces.
If that doesn't get you inspired to get outside and try something new with your art, check back with us soon for a piece on some winter-based experiments for different types of art - no matter what medium you work in, you'll find something that gets you inspired!
Posted on December 27th 2013 on 02:39am
0 Comments
As those of you in the Northern Hemisphere living through it right now know firsthand, winter can be some of the hardest months for artists. There's something about the way the world feel that can block out creative inspiration, and despite the fact that it can make it easier to spend a lot of time in the studio, all the time in the world isn't any use if you're uninspired. This week, we're going to take a look at one of the most beautiful pieces of modern documentary filmmaking, the truly breathtaking film Samsara.
One of the most unique and visually inspiring artefacts out there in the world today, Samsara takes its name from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth found in many of the world's Eastern religions (namely Hinduism and Buddhism, among many others), making it both perfectly timed for the winter months when the world seems most noticeably being reborn and an excellent metaphor for the often-cyclical nature of inspiration.
The entire film is based around the moving image, with a complete lack of dialog or subtitles, only a haunting and moving soundtrack composed especially for the movie. Taking you on a journey around the world from the temples of Tibet to the wilds of America to a Chinese Shaolin school and the depth of Europe's most stunning chapels and many, many other places, the story (such as it is) is told in the sequence of the scenes themselves. It simply has to be seen to be believed, and can't be explained with mere words. The filmmakers were very careful to avoid any political themes in the work, although despite this there does seem to be subtext of the comparisons of what we find beautiful around the world, and what we place the most value on.
Released in 2012, the film was shot over the course of 5 years in 25 different countries widely spaced around the world, shot in truly stunning 70mm film. Currently available in full 1080p HD, it should be watched at the highest resolution you have access to - and if you're one of the lucky few who has decided to take the plunge into the early generation of 4K television, Samsara is one of the few pieces that will be available in the format.
Simply put: watch it, and take yourself away from the winter doldrums for one of the most visually impressive films you'll ever watch in your life. Check out the trailer below - and be sure to watch it in HD, full screen with your sound on. Enjoy!
Posted on December 24th 2013 on 01:49am
0 Comments
In the continuation of our exploration of the lesser-known cities around the world that cater to artists, it's time to move things out of the North and get a break from the relentless winter that just won't seem to let up. Santa Fe, New Mexico is definitely on the lesser-known side of things even to those in North America, and so is probably virtually unknown throughout the rest of the world. Located in a stunning series of geological formations, it has a feel truly all it's own - that has created some truly beautiful pieces of work.
It's no secret that the art world is undergoing some major changes. As we discussed recently, the market for auctionable art has taken a turn for the better in recent years, driven by expanding wealth in Asia and the Middle East, as well as increasing consumer confidence throughout the West. However, in the market for artists still making a name for themselves, a number of other changes are taking place, most notably the transition away from the traditional model of the independent gallery towards online galleries managed by the artists themselves as well as the growing popularity of the 'art fair'.
While it may not be common knowledge in much of Europe, America's car manufacturing heartland is having some troubled times of late. After talks of bailouts of major car companies and successfully saving a few of them, we're finally starting to see some more complete fallout from the 2008 economic collapse that crippled much of American industry. One of the less-expected casualties from this turmoil, however, was the city of Detroit. Known unofficially as 'Motor City', Detroit was at the centre of American car manufacturing for a number of companies, and the city has been left bankrupt and desolate as jobs moved away and with them, the people. Abandoned houses are common, and the city is struggling to balance its debts.
Ever since the global economic meltdown in 2008, the art market has been in some relatively dire straits. Many famous works that were put up for auction by famous auction houses remained unsold, or sold for amounts that were barely eye-catching at the time. Fortunately, the rise in consumer confidence that many nations around the world have begun to experience is also making its way into the global art market, which has once again begun to thrive.
We've discussed a number of different ways you can structure your Gallereo page in order to boost your sales, from taking advantage of search engine optimisation to writing complete descriptions all the way to using social media to build a name for yourself and ideas for maintaining and building readership using your built-in Gallereo blog. There is an element to your Gallereo page that can make an even larger difference to your success - the visual style, of course! We've held back from commenting on this because it's fairly personal in terms of your own unique artistic vision, but there are still some basic design pointers that we can offer that will be especially beneficial to those of you who are new to the whole web design world.
GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF - those of you who are new to the world of digital images might feel a little overwhelmed by the acronyms alone, and they can seem a bit daunting to us old hands as well sometimes. When you're saving your perfectly edited image, whether it's a digital painting or a photograph of your latest sculpture, it can sometimes seem completely impossible to navigate the wide arrays of file formats and settings that you are presented with. The four listed above are really the only ones you're like to need to work with, and we'll take you through the merits of each one.
Last month, we took a look at some of the best cities in the world for art lovers, with the hope of inspiring some of you to shake the dust off and take an art-filled winter vacation. A couple of you wrote to us and said that you'd already been to the cities we mentioned - and to be fair, they were pretty popular options - but popular for good reason. With that in mind, we decided to prepare a short list of some lesser-known cities that have burgeoning art communities, both in terms of established galleries and flourishing smaller scenes. We'll look at a different city each time, and zoom in close to give you an idea of what you can expect if you manage to visit.
If you happen to find yourself in London in the middle of January, be sure to take some time to drop by the annual London Art Fair, being hosted at its usual residence in Islington, the Business Design Centre. There are several new features this year, as well as the return of a few old favourites, but most notable this year is the participation of the Hepworth Wakefield.
