Social media has not taken away from the gallery experience but
enhanced it!
Artists and dealers know that art must be experienced in person to
truly get a sense of its magnitude.
It will be such a pity if you finally take delivery of your
newest conversation piece just to find out it doesn't fit where you wanted it,
or the color clashes too much with your chartreuse drapes.
The gallery used to be a
place to go to meet up with friends and exchange ideas and build community.
Patrons and students alike would come to see a show and then talk about it with
their peers the next day. With social media coming up, gallery gatherings are
not of the same magnitude, but have enhanced art awareness beyond belief.
Social media does a world of good as a marketing tool for galleries, artists
and the arts as a whole, and helps build an online community.
Galleries are the place to build a community -- a real, true
social network -- your art ecosystem, and that is important. Keeping art
relevant to society and to a diverse audience at any given point in history is
one of the main goals of the art exhibition and one of the reasons it is so
important to the history of art. Therefore, online platforms cannot replace
galleries.
Art exhibitions hold a
precarious yet steadfast role; as undefined yet self- sufficient entities, they
take on multiple identities. Exhibitions are strategically located at the nexus
where artists, their work, the arts institution, and many different publics
intersect. Online media enhances marketing and awareness of the very same
exhibitions hosted by galleries.
After all that is said and done, online art platforms are here to
stay. An ideal situation is for a gallery to have an online portal for display
of variety and, of course, for selling and yet to have physical space and host
exhibitions regularly.
Mandira Sanghi
Artist and Art Columnist
No comments:
Post a Comment