Gallery X: Blog about gallery A. Gallery X is a new private art gallery with a focus on contemporary sculpture and paintings. They currently have an exhibition by Paul Klee and a collection of new paintings by Pablo Picasso. Both collections are on display until January 1st 2014.
Titled “The Greats”, the gallery has as its motto to show only the best art in order to weed out all potentially bad art. In this way, they hope to raise the standards of the whole art industry by showing that fine art can be appreciated by everyone, not just experts and critics. Their goal is to become one of the most admired galleries in their field, and they are sure their selection will impress any viewer of any background or taste.
Gallery X is located at 3456, 54th Street, New York City. Their entrance is between Fortes & Maltas and Ravioli’s Italian Foods and is open every day from 10 AM to 5 PM.*
Gallery X is an art gallery located in New York. The gallery specializes in contemporary art. Gallery X enjoys a good reputation among critics and the public.
Blog about Gallery A is a blog about Gallery X, written by a journalist. The blog has been running for six months, and has seven posts, with one more coming soon. The journalist has been writing the blog since his previous job as a critic for Art Tribune Magazine was eliminated.
The following is an excerpt from the latest post on this blog.
Beauty is hard to define. This may be because it encompasses a wide range of mental states or even emotions, or because it is hard to distinguish from other human responses such as pleasure, interest, love, and admiration. Part of the difficulty in defining beauty stems from its multifaceted nature; another part lies in our inability to agree on what we find beautiful and why.
Each person’s definition of beauty depends on a mixture of personal experience and universal perceptions that are common to all people. Systems of measurement based on factors such as shape, color, line, proportion, and texture have been developed over thousands of years to measure what people consider to be beautiful or aesthetically pleasing.
The standards that apply to one type of beauty generally do not apply
Gallery X and gallery A are in a new exhibition space in the downtown area. I’m not sure how they were chosen; they were two of three galleries I hadn’t heard of before now, and both seem to be showing pretty much the same kind of thing.
The first room is dominated by one huge piece—a complex interweaving of color, light, and shadow. At first glance it’s almost overwhelming, but once you start to look at it, you can see that it’s actually quite simple. It consists of four separate patterns, each with a different dominant color and a different arrangement of shapes. The most effective piece is the one on the left side: all blue rectangles with an off-white circle in the middle—it seems to be some sort of basic building block from which everything else is made. It’s also the only cleanly vertical shape in the painting (which adds to its effectiveness), and the only one whose lines are perfectly horizontal or vertical (which helps draw your eye to it).
It’s interesting how many different ways there are to build these blocks out of a limited number of pieces. Some pieces seem to rotate into new positions; others disappear entirely; still others are just hidden behind parts you can’t see until you walk around
Gallery A is not a very good gallery.
I mean, it’s OK, but it doesn’t do anything special. It’s the kind of place where you go to see stuff you’ve already seen before, and maybe some new things that are about as good as the old ones. The location is convenient, and sometimes there’s an interesting show there that proves to be worth the trip. But you don’t go out of your way to visit it, and if you live in a big city with lots of other galleries nearby, you’re unlikely even to hear of it.
I’m not going to name any names here. I’m not going to attack Gallery A (or B or C). The real problem is not the fault of individual galleries like this one; it’s something deeper. There is a fundamental problem with the art world today that makes places like Gallery A inevitable—maybe unavoidable—and that keeps them open despite their mediocrity.
The Galleries: What Happened?
When I was growing up in New York City in the 1950s, there were dozens of wonderful art galleries in midtown Manhattan: Fraenkel and Kootz and Janis and Leo Castelli and Betty Parsons, who showed Jackson Pollock at his peak; then
“Where To Go, Art Lover” is an online magazine that describes itself as “an online guide to art galleries and museums worldwide.”
The first thing you need to know about the site is that it is well organized. It’s easy to navigate, and there are useful links at the foot of each page. The second thing you need to know is that the writers have a sense of humor. Not only can they describe the art in an insightful way, but they can also describe themselves in a way that makes them seem fun to be with.
It’s impossible for me to choose my favorite part of the site, so I won’t. But I will say that when I visited it, I ended up spending most of my time reading not about art but about the website itself. That was a mistake, because I could have been looking at art instead.
Another way to think about art is as an investment. When you buy a share of stock, you are paying for the right to own a piece of what the company will be worth in the future. When you buy a bond, you are paying for the right to receive regular payments from the company until it repays you at maturity.
When you buy a painting or a sculpture, you are doing pretty much the same thing. You are agreeing to accept smaller payments now in exchange for being able to sell it later for more than you paid. This is called buying on margin: because there are still some people who want to own art even if they can’t afford to pay the full price.
Art is not a thing, but a process. Art begins when you make something that is not only beautiful, but also new. That’s why all the most famous art in history is so different from anything done before. It’s not enough to paint well or carve well; you need to invent new ways of doing it. You have to make things that were never made before, that were never even imagined before.
Trying to make new things is risky, because people will think you are crazy and stop listening to you long before they would have stopped listening to someone who sounded like everyone else. Obviously no one can predict whether any particular new thing will be beautiful or not. But it may still be worth trying, because the payoff if you succeed can be very big.