Talk:Art museum

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[edit] Art Gallery Redirect

"Art Museum" redirects to this page, but the connotation of "gallery" as a room in an art museum seems much less relevant than the connotation of "commercial gallery." Opening the article with a phrase that implies they are interchangeable words seems misleading. Perhaps there should be a separate article for "commerical gallery" and this page shoudl be renamed "Art museum" with a disambiguation if you look up "gallery". What do you think? Btw The contemporary art page needs your help! Flange P. Vibrator 20:46, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Someone added R.W.Norton Art Foundtion to the list of on-line galleries; I put it up in the main galleries since it looks like it has very little on-line presence in terms of either catalogues or images. But it might be good for whoever posted that to set up a Norton Foundation page -- it looks like a good place with an interesting collection.

Smawnmahlau 20:40, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I tried to organize the listing of online museums and galleries, and have deleted a number of entries that were either dead links or commercial links to bricks and mortar galleries with online sites that were little more than advertisements.

I limited the on-line Museum collections I added to those with "substantial" collections, and cut it off at 50,000 paintings, sculpture and other works other than works on paper. I have limited the works on paper and photographic collections I added to sites with hundreds of thousands, and am sure there are may not listed once we begin looking at major libraries. Are these the right limits? I have my own charts showing smaller collections. There are many museums with good small on-line collections, and often very information on-line exhibits (such as the Frick), but there are also many prominent Museums that simply haven't developed a real on-line catalogue (for example, the Met has fewer than 6,000 works in its catalogue out of its collection of millions of works). By using a numerical cut-off, I missed places like the Frick people might find interesting but avoided places like the Met that really should be left off for now.

Also, for the galleries section to be useful I propose that it be limited to collections that are designed to be on-line only galleries, not adjuncts to commercial galleries, and that there be some description of each gallery that seeks to quantify and describe the collection. Descriptions like "HUGE" or self-aggrandizing descriptions really don't have a place. I have nothing against self-publicity, as long as the descriptions are factual and meaningful and not mere puffery, and as long as the gallery fits in the article. I know there are many other on-line galleries that are quite good, and will try to update this to add some of the better ones, but does anyone have a more comprehensive view?

Smawnmahlau 16:29, 2 May 2006 (UTC)smawnmahlau

"Art galleries are found in metropolitan areas and in areas where artists have congregated such as in Taos, New Mexico where the Taos art colony made Taos a artistic center." But this is not the only place art galleries are located? There are greater concentrations of galleries in metropolitan areas but they are also found in small towns and even the middle of nowhere! Plus why the focus on Taos? --Daniel C. Boyer

Agreed. One could easily cite, say, the artistic community around St Ives, Cornwall, UK which arguably lead to this being a good location for the new Tate gallery there. Perhaps such examples of artistic communities or centres of activity belong below the list of gallery links in terms of priorities??? If indeed they belong at this sort of meta level at all, perhaps the upward link from Taos is all that's required?

I've fiddled a bit, but kept in Taos as an example, and added St. Ives as another. I've also removed the suggestion that "art gallery" is a term which refers to only commercial galleries because, well, it doesn't. --Camembert

External link to greenmuseum.org an online museum of environmental art was probably added by its owner itself: see the 5 dec 2002 entry in [1].

The link does not look too relevant to the article. Should it stay ? FvdP 02:19 Dec 5, 2002 (UTC)

No! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 198.22.121.110 (talk • contribs) 16:12, 29 November 2005.

[edit] Commercial links

See WP:SPAM: The section on commercial galleries seems counter to spam guidelines. Wikipedia is not for advertising/promoting certain sites. If a particular art gallery is notable, it could have its own Wikipedia article; in which case, it might be appropriate to add the article to a "See also" section.

I'm going to leave this note here for feedback. — ERcheck (talk) 04:37, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Take a look at what I just did - eliminating an area that looked like a link-farm, moving relevant "keepers" (like the French government site for access to a wide range of French museum collections) elsewhere, and changing the text of the seciton on "Independent on-line galleries", which now cites just four sites (Sotheby's, Christies, Artprice.com, and Bridgeman's), each of which are separately notable (though Artprice doesn't now have its own page). I'd weed heavily beyond these. Sam 15:47, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Terminology

The naming and use of terminology on pages such as Art gallery, Art museum, Contemporary art gallery, Artist-run space etc needs a bit of clarifying so that it makes as much sense as possible globally. Certainly from the UK perspective the current arrangement makes little sense.

For example in the UK the Ikon Gallery would be thought of as an Art gallery (because it shows art) but not an Art museum (because it holds no collections of its own), but here the one article redirects to the other. The Ikon would also be described as a Contemporary art gallery (because it shows contemporary art), but the Contemporary art gallery article suggests that contemporary art galleries are fundamentally commercial which the Ikon isn't - it is publicly-funded and its exhibits are not for sale.

My understanding of the terminology from a British perspective is thus:

  • "Art gallery": any building or part of a building whose purpose is the exhibition of art - of whatever type, by whomever and for whatever reason. The following are all sub-classes of "Art gallery"...
  • "Commercial art gallery": an art gallery which exhibits art, either contemporary or historic, primarily for the purpose of selling it.
  • "Art museum": an art gallery that collects, conserves and exhibits a permanent collection of artworks. Generally publicly-run but not necessarily so (eg the Saatchi Gallery).
  • "Contemporary art gallery": an art gallery which primarily exhibits contemporary art. Can be commercial or non-commercial, can have its own permanent collection or purely be a venue for exhibitions of visiting works.
  • "Artist-run gallery" or "Artist-run exhibition space": an art gallery which is neither commercial nor publicly-run, but run by a group of artists themselves (though not necessarily limited to showing their own work), normally to advance a specific curatorial agenda.

An "Artist-run space" could be an artist-run exhibition space, but could also be an artist-run studio space or project space, whose main purpose would be creating rather than exhibiting art.

If anybody with a different understanding of these or related terms could explain them so that divergences can be mapped that would probably be useful, partly to reduce any avoidable geographical bias and resulting confusion in article naming and partly because any ambiguity in the uses of the terms should probably be covered in the articles themselves.

JimmyGuano 16:49, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] List of Art Museums

This article is currently a strange mixture of a list page and an actual article. May I suggest that it be split into two pages - leave the bulk of the text (the article material) here, and create a page called List of Art Museums or List of Notable Art Museums (I'm not sure which of those two would be more appropriate. See WP:LIST for the basic guidelines for lists. --└ Smith120bh/TALK ┐ 17:54, 12 June 2007 (UTC)