Art museum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 artrooms 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 Egypt Gallery, for example.
The term contemporary art gallery refers to a usually a privately-owned for-profit commercial 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.
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[edit] Architecture
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
- Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, van Gogh Museum
- Atlanta: High Museum of Art
- Baltimore Museum of Art
- Beijing: Palace Museum
- Berlin: Museum Island
- Bilbao: Guggenheim Museum
- Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
- Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery
- Cambridge (USA): Harvard Art Museums
- Cambridge (UK): Fitzwilliam Museum
- Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago
- Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art
- Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook Art Museum, University of Michigan-Museum of Art
- Dresden: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister
- Dublin: Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Ireland,
- Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland
- Florence: Galleria degli Uffizi, Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze
- Glasgow: Gallery of Modern Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Burrell Collection
- Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum
- Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts
- Jacksonville: Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville
- Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
- Little Rock, Arkansas: Arkansas Arts Center
- London: National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Saatchi Gallery
- Los Angeles: Getty Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- Madrid: Museo del Prado, Museo Reina Sofia, Museo Thyssen Bornemisza
- Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria
- Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
- Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, Pushkin Museum, Kremlin Armoury
- Munich: Alte Pinakothek, Neue Pinakothek, Pinakothek der Moderne
- New Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Arts
- New Orleans, Louisiana: Ogden Museum of Southern Art
- New York: The Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Frick Museum
- North Adams (Mass): Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
- Oberlin (Ohio): Allen Memorial Art Museum
- Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada
- Oxford: Ashmolean Museum
- Paris: Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, Musée Rodin, Centre Pompidou
- Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art
- Richmond, Virginia: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
- Rome: Vatican Museum, Galleria Borghese
- St. Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum
- St. Petersburg: Hermitage, Russian Museum
- Salem (Mass.): Peabody Essex Museum
- San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California Palace of the Legion of Honor
- São Paulo: São Paulo Art Museum
- Seattle: Soil Art Gallery
- Shanghai: Shanghai Museum
- Shreveport, Louisiana
- Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie
- Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales
- Taganrog: Taganrog Museum of Art
- Taipei, Taiwan: National Palace Museum
- Tallinn, Estonia
- Tokyo: Tokyo National Museum
- Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario
- Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection
- Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
- Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Phillips Collection
- Wellington: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
- Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery
- Zürich: Foundation E.G. Bührle
[edit] List of notable contemporary galleries
- London: Saatchi Gallery
- London: Victoria Miro Gallery
- London: Alwin Gallery
- Paris: Yvon Lambert
- Paris: Emmanuel Perrotin
- Paris: Daniel Templon
- Tampa: Contemporary Art Museum
- Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art
- Mexico City: Galeria OMR
- New York: Gagosian Gallery
- New York: Zach Feuer Gallery
- New York: Bodley Gallery
- New York: Park Place Gallery
- Bombay: The Arts Trust
- Belgium: Mulier Mulier Gallery
[edit] Online museums
[edit] Museums with major web presences
Most art Museums have only limited online collections, but a few Museums, as well as some libraries and government agencies, have developed substantial online catalogues. Museums, libraries and government agencies with substantial online collections of prints, photographs, and other works on paper include:
- Library of Congress, prints (C19 on) and photographs collection (several million entries).[1]
- Peabody Essex Museum, with over 1 million entries (many being prints and works on paper).[2]
Museums, libraries and government agencies with substantial online collections with more focus on paintings and sculpture include:
- Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with over 330,000 works, most with images. Good for prints.[3]
- The Mona Lisa Database of French Museums - Joconde (from the French Ministry of Culture) in French [4]
- Louvre, with over 80,000 works in various databases, with a large number of images, as well as another 140,000 drawings.[5]
- National Gallery of Art, with over 108,000 works catalogued, though with only 6,000 images.[6]
- Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, with over 85,000 works. Good for prints[7]
- Harvard Art Museums, with over 81,000 works, about half of which have very low resolution images. [8]
- Five College Museums/Historic Deerfield, with over 60,000 works, most with images. [9]
[edit] Online art collections
There are 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.
A limited number of such sites have independent importance in the artworld. 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. Bridgeman Art Library serves as a central source of reproductions of artwork, with access limited to museums, art dealers and other professionals or professional organizations. 1st-Art-Gallery.com, with a database of over 3 million high resolution images, serves as a source of information for painters who seek to improve their skills - the gallery allows artists to obtain half ready reproductions of thousands of paintings so they can practice their skills by completing the work.
[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:
