Arguing that “far more people see art on screens than in museums,” Loney Abrams thinks Facebook, Tumblr, and contemporary art blogs could supplant the traditional white cube:
As documentations – photographs or videos that capture a finished work of art, usually installed within a gallery – are posted to the Internet and then dispersed and multiplied via likes and shares, online viewers become the overwhelming majority of an exhibition’s audience. … The gallery, then, serves not as the “true” exhibition venue but the site of a photo shoot — the backdrop to the installation photo. It provides the opportunity to document art within an institutionalized context in preparation for its release into online circulation.
The logical next step may be online-only galleries:
Without the expenses demanded by the physical gallery (i.e. high rent, utility bills, property insurance, art insurance, building maintenance, etc.), an online gallery would need to generate significantly less income to cover its cost of operations. With virtually no overhead expenses, these “galleries” could afford to offer their artists a significantly larger percentage of money from sales while generating the same profit margin for themselves. … [And] as galleries have been the home of art objects, URLs are the homes of documentation images and could potentially connote the prestige and cultural value traditionally monopolized by the institution. URLs will stand side-by-side with the names of reputable galleries on artists’ curriculum vitae, and artists will be rewarded as much for their self-sufficiency as for their ability to game the gallery system.
Previous Dish on the decline of gallery shows here.
(Nicholas Knight’s Taking Pictures (Becher and Becher) displayed at Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco. Photo by Steve Rhodes.)
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