Since 2003... the 11th highest ranked art blog on the planet! And with over SEVEN million visitors, F. Lennox Campello's art news, information, gallery openings, commentary, criticism, happenings, opportunities, and everything associated with the global visual arts scene with a special focus on the Greater Washington, DC area.
Photograph: Jennifer Yiu/Honi Soit
"Eighteen vulvas. All belong to women of Sydney University, and feature on the cover of Honi Soit, the university's student newspaper. We were told to cover them with ugly black bars before publishing. Why, even after complying with this, were the issues taken off the stands?"
And that's cool! 
Some
artists, such as Richard Serra’s crayon drawing of an Abu Ghraib prisoner with the caption "STOP BUSH”, employed that time sensitive and horrifying war issue to achieve
instant fame, and now the minimalist sculptor is perhaps best known for that rather simplistic and powerful piece,
which essentially got him a ticket to a Venice Biennale. |
| “He’s Making a (Kill) List” by Dana Ellyn |
Traditionally, we think of the gallery as having the following functions: providing an exhibition space that allows the public to view art; offering the artist and the curator exposure and access to their consumers; and acting as an intermediary between artists and the market, providing artists with the potential to earn an income as a professional. The first two functions, which connect cultural producers with their audiences, can be executed much more efficiently on the Internet. Artists have the ability to create vast social networks online, promote themselves and their artworks, and use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr to share images themselves. Further, while galleries restrict how, when, and where their represented artists show their work to keep demand high, the attention economy rewards artists who produce and share frequently, encouraging artists to be productive and prolific. The Internet allows the artist more autonomy, more agency over the dispersion and reception of their work. Artists can be more effectual than the gallery in cultivating attention and connecting with their audiences. Yet the gallery continues to have the upper hand in connoting value within the art market, and the white cube continues to be the quintessential marker of art-world status.Read the whole article in The New Inquiry here.
Dealers worldwide earned about 36 percent of their sales on average through local or international art fairs in 2012, an increase of 6 percentage points from 2010, according to the European Fine Art Foundation’s Art Market Report by Arts Economics, which surveyed 6,000 dealers.For some, the share is even higher: according to Mr. VeneKlasen, 75 percent of his sales 10 years ago were made in his galleries, but now nearly two-thirds of revenues are earned on the road.
