Why do art galleries exist

Why do galleries exist? This may strike you as a strange question. For the majority of people reading this article, galleries form an ubiquitous part of their lives and even careers. For many, viewing art also forms an important element of their social and leisure time. Naturally, the first and perhaps the most obvious answer is that galleries exist to show art, to display whatever they see fit.

Fair enough; but it also matters who is attending the gallery. The question of why galleries exist is related to another, key question: Who do galleries exist for? How can we begin to understand or investigate what is a complex relationship between people and institutions?

For the purposes of this article, I am relying on my own experiences as an art viewer with an art degree who has worked at galleries in my hometown of Liverpool; using the microcosm of one city in order the understand the macrocosm of the UK art scene.

Liverpool has galleries within a 20 minute walk of each other that offer an enormous range of artistic practice — from Greek sculpture to the latest digital technology to live performance though they could offer more of the latter. My actions may indicate one reason galleries exist: that they are places to discover art. Reading these listings for the names and locations of my local galleries allowed my imagination to be caught by a provocative exhibition title or description. One of the first galleries I visited would have been Tate Liverpool.

Inside the Tate, I discovered a wealth of modern and contemporary work — exposing me to Marcel Duchamp and Helen Chadwick. At this time, I was taking in the works as an experience, picking up contextual information as I went. In addition to Tate, the Bluecoat was important to my gallery education: an exhibition and performance space, plus studios and book shops, dedicated to contemporary art and artists based in the wider area.

Visiting a gallery like the Bluecoat exposed me to new artists and current trends. Here was the opportunity to learn more about art. Behind an artwork hanging in the walls of a house, there is a route, a story. A road that goes from the moment the artist creates to the day the gallery selects it for an exhibition and shows it to the public. There are different types of galleries, but all of them are open to the public.

Anyone can visit them, enjoy the show and share doubts and thoughts with the gallerist. Art galleries exhibit works by artists known by the general public, drive the career of young contemporary artists or recover the name of those artist whom, despite the quality of their work, for historical reasons have been relegated to the background.

These places have a singular nature: representing the materialisation of artistic consumption and of the art market, galleries are places for both symbolic and economic exchange. They are then places to be seen to assert oneself as an art lover as well as places that need to be visible materially or virtually, in order to allure potential buyers or new users of the urban space. Combining the notion of visibility with the three aforementioned spatial themes art galleries as objects materialising the art market, related to specific location strategies and included in urban renewal dynamics , one can distinguish four perspectives through which galleries have been considered in literature as markers of artistic activity and renewal strategies in the city.

These perspectives are summarised in figure 1. The second part of this paper develops and illustrates these four perspectives through the mention of recent works that have taken art galleries as their core topic.

The main hypotheses and several issues that these studies and their results raise are also examined. The third part of this text presents the empirical data and research methodology through which these issues are addressed in the case of Paris. It also unravels first empirical results, shedding lights on the geography and spatial visibility of art galleries within the space of contemporary City of Paris.

Figure 1. Made by the author. The common idea today will be the vision of a brightly lit space, glowing through a large window that offers the artworks to the view of passers-by. Behind the glass, on immaculate white walls, paintings and photographs are hung from picture rails with large space between them. Discreet pedestals support the small three dimensional artworks, while larger objects sit directly on a neutral floor made of wood or smooth concrete.

Art historians have stressed how several changes in the organization of the art market translated into new exhibition places and new location within the city , from the gigantic periodical Salons offering an outlet for the growing number of painters in the second half of the 19th century Wolf to the alternative private spaces that welcomed small avant-garde shows at the end of the same century Brogniez and Debroux forthcoming , or the increase of art galleries in the first decades of the 20th century and the installation of these places as essential elements for the modern art market Greffe In a similar way but for other time and space, alternative places developed in New York in the s in reaction to the lack of exhibition spaces for young artists, while traditional art galleries selected first and foremost recognised artists, and museums were not interested in the avant-garde art Terroni Such places would transform after de Second World War into even more simplicity, in an attempt to make the setting of the artworks disappear an amusing thing to note is that the simplicity of the white cube is transposed today on the websites that are also offering visibility to the gallery.

There is obviously a parallel to be drawn between the visual identity of white cube art galleries and their virtual identities. In the newly designed white cube, all the focus is placed on the works, through the white walls, the bright light and the new attitude of the visitors, seemingly paying respect to sanctified creations. In her works on Parisian art galleries in the s until the s, the historian Julie Verlaine has documented this shift in form of the gallery, but also the changes in the sociability associated with the visit to the art exhibition Verlaine , In a preliminary research done on galleries in Brussels, cartographic results and field exploration have revealed the coexistence of two primary architectural models Debroux and Wayens The first and most common of these consists of reusing ground floors formerly dedicated to retail activity: due to the shrinking of small shop activity from the s precisely when the local art market and galleries began to flourish , these types of spaces are easily accessible and also easier to fit out into a gallery than non-commercial places in terms of room, access, activity regulations and also in terms of rent outside the most central areas of the city.

These art galleries in converted retail locations have often preserved the old shop window, even if the interior has been refurbished, making them easily identifiable. The second model is linked to the transformation of historical buildings, often much bigger than the previous spaces and suitable for galleries specialised into big-sized artworks. Such spaces are typically former warehouses, small factories, or even old sports facilities converted into a white cube with a postindustrial touch.

Figure 2. Two models of contemporary art galleries in Brussels. Below: A double historical skating rink converted into a double gallery. Right: Rue Veydt, Saint-Gilles. The bigger gallery is next door to the Brussels branch of the gallery Daniel Templon, set back from the street and only visible with a plaque. Photographs taken by the author, March On other occasions, the plaque indicates a location at the first floor.

This rather unusual location — and almost inexistent material visibility — has also been pointed by Molotch and Treskon in their meticulous description of the changes in the art gallery landscape in Manhattan since the s Molotch and Treskon In SoHo and Chelsea in particular, where the concentration is high, available space is limited: for the galleries who are not showing heavy or massive artworks, a location above the ground floor can be a less expensive alternative, and a way to maintain themselves in a coveted neighbourhood.

The concentration of art galleries described in the case of Manhattan is of course exceptional but corresponds to a general tendency of clustering. The accumulation of such exhibition places in a street or a neighbourhood is another important element of their visibility, outside of their architectural specificity.

The case of Manhattan, the highest concentration of galleries in the world since New York became the major art capital in the s, has been the subject of several research projects, and notably the aforementioned work of Molotch and Treskon These authors focused on the evolution of the geography of galleries, using empirical data and producing meaningful maps that revealed the constraints and opportunities that such exhibition places had experienced in the evolving urban fabric of central New York.

More recently, two other researchers have considered the Manhattan art scene and its art galleries in order to understand their location factors with the help of statistical tests and models applied to an exhaustive database Schuetz and Green The main reasons of the observed geography and the clustering phenomenon lay in agglomeration economies and preferences over location-specific amenities.

The likeliness for a new gallery to open in a neighbourhood with existing galleries is high and explained by an expected longer lifespan in these clusters. Despite of a short average lifespan of individual galleries, major concentrations remain stable for long periods of time: this implies a high replacement rate and a frequent reuse of the same addresses.

This agglomeration phenomenon and its permanence were also demonstrated for the city of Paris through an impressive data collection and mapping from until Saint-Raymond et al. Rius Ulldemolins has studied the distribution of art galleries in Barcelona from a sociological perspective and has published interesting findings regarding the spatial organisation of a professional field.

His work confirms the existence of a main historical concentration in the centre of the city. The analysis focuses then on a few galleries located outside this main cluster, in peripheral portions of the city. Relying on the local artistic ground, these places are often small in size and have short life expectancies. Their untraditional location pattern is dictated by proximity with the artists that cannot afford the rents of the city centre and attract in turn these small galleries outside of the main gallery clusters.

The French sociologist Raymonde Moulin in her influential work on the art market also stressed the importance of such small galleries that operate at the margins of the big galleries but which nurture the market with their local search for talents Moulin The heterogeneity in nature of the art galleries from artists run spaces to big commercial galleries must also be considered if one intends to finely understand their general location pattern and its evolutions.

Galleries, due to their architecture and their concentration in specific neighbourhoods or streets, are perceptible elements of the art world. Since the description of the events located in SoHo, New York, and the transformation of a decayed neighbourhood after artists settled in the cast iron buildings Simpson , Zukin , researchers have dealt with the issue of the influence of artists on the change of perception of impoverished neighbourhoods Gravereau , Murzyn-Kupisz and Dzialek , Ryberg et al.

In addition, from a methodological perspective, the visibility of painters, sculptors, performers, video artists… in the traditional sources used by researchers is also a delicate issue. Some authors have then considered alternative data to identify artistic concentrations, moving their perspective from creation to consumption of art, and considering art galleries as indicators Mathews Today, with the professionalization of the galleries, their diversification and the changes in artistic commission works depending on public subsidies , the relation between these two segments of the art market, and their comparison within space, have become more complex and questionable.

Furthermore, the nature and location of these art galleries exclude them from the usual narrative of artist-led gentrification Schuetz Yet, because of their architectural visibility and the symbolic activity they represent, art galleries may participate in other renewal processes linked to retail gentrification and to the change of functions and of users in central urban areas. On opening nights, they even transform into a show: from the street, the view of the white cube and its artworks is replaced by the view of a crowd, sometimes very large and that takes over the pavement in front of the galleries.

In various cities where clusters exist, professional associations or local authorities have initiated collective openings in order to combine the audiences, and make all galleries benefit from their vicinity. These initiatives can also be part of public or private strategies aiming at the aestheticisation of public space, the branding and commodification of the city centre through the presence of art galleries, while in some more distant cases they are part of planned refurbishment of an entire neighbourhood as in the Art Zone in Beijing, China or the renewal of the local art scene through political planning Kim Very few attempts have been made however to spatially consider the local art market through precise mapping excepted for the first attempt of Moulin in or the Artl s project.

Paris is also well documented for the regeneration processes that have occurred in many of its neighbourhoods, sometimes involving artistic activities Clerval , Collet The ongoing research project presented in this paper investigates the relationship between the geographical distribution of art galleries in Paris and the production of urban space since the end of the s.

It also examines how the sites for and practices of art consumption in the French capital can both open up and close off urban space, materially and symbolically. In doing so, the project extended previous empirical work Maupeou and Saint-Raymond , Added to the address collection of the Artl s Project , the new data authorised a long-term spatial analysis of the geography of the Parisian art market throughout two centuries.

In particular, I intend to examine how exclusive spaces are established as sites that become inaccessible for the majority of uses and users including in the art world , sometimes forcing their relocation. The existence of such exclusive spaces associated with the consumption of art refers to the transformation of residential and retail spaces since the start of gentrification processes in the s Fleury and Van Criekingen , Patch , Shkuda Alongside the material transformation of space expressed through changes in urban functions and real-estate increase, other transformations operate at symbolic level.

Such changes may result in the creation of a singular urban landscape Cosgrove , Zukin identified through the art-related places they host Mathews , and which materialise into space the elite dimension of art consumption Fogle , Hanquinet et al. You get the drift. A myriad of bad experiences were being listed one after another.

This was disheartening to say the least. As I now have a better understanding of both sides of the story. Yes, there is a perceived notion that art galleries are all high end, snobby, exclusive and so on. But I also know this is not the case everywhere. Maybe you had a bad experience with one and now lump them all into the same pod.

This was not accurate at all. Art galleries are an important part of the arts. They give artists a professional platform to showcase and sell their artwork. They offer artists the chance to reach a new clientele which often includes collectors of the arts. Art is meant to be seen in person.