The Art World and the World Wide Web by exhibit-E

THE

ART WORLD AND THE

WORLD WIDE WEB

p 2014 Essays, Interviews, Case Studies, and a Story by A.M. Homes

the Art World and the World Wide Web

the

Art World and the

World Wide Web

Essays, Interviews, Case Studies, and a Story by A.M. Homes

2014

Copyright ÂŠ 2014 by exhibit-E, LLC All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this brochure may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the permission in writing from the copyright owner. Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material is fully protected by copyright and is subject to royalty. Requests for permissions should be addressed in writing to exhibit-E, LLC, 601 West 26th Street, Suite M223, New York, NY 10001

CONTENTS 7 Introduction 11 The Art World and the World Wide Web 31 Interview with Gallerist Sandra Gering 37 Interview with Artist Laurie Simmons 47 Google for Galleries 53 Interview with Gallerist David Maupin 61 Mobile Responsive Design 73 Interview with Gallerist Howard Shaw 91 Video and the Internet 99 Interview with Tom Powel, Photographer for the Art World 108 Fair Art by A.M. Homes 117 Web-Based Gallery Management 123 galleryManager by exhibit-E SM

137 Four Case Studies: speronewestwater.com 138

richardprince.com 150

matthewmarks.com 158 carrolldunham.net 164 1 71 Sample Websites 204 Glossary

Introduction

Written for art world insiders, this book is meant to be a guide to using the World Wide Web as an essential tool for doing business in the global art market. With case studies, sample websites, interviews, and essays, The Art World and the World Wide Web identifies key strategies and offers insights for galleries to consider as they create and manage their own websites. As technology continues to evolve, opportunities seem boundless for galleries to use the Web in compelling ways to promote their art, and the artists who make it. But it cannot be overstated that sound website design, both technical and graphical, is critical to staying ahead of the technology curve. Galleries rely on their websites on an everyday basis to promote, educate, and communicate. Unfortunately, cumbersome user interfaces, poor graphic design, and poor programming hamper far too many websites. As the artist Laurie Simmons observes, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I find myself shocked sometimes that certain entities and individuals can endorse their own sites, given how difficult they make it to get around.â&#x20AC;? See page 37 for our interview with Simmons, where she talks about her website, what the digital world means to her, and how she has utilized her site to bring together projects she has worked on throughout her life as an artist. 7

Our text on Mobile Responsive Design (see page 61) focuses on the challenges of designing gallery sites that work well on the ever-increasing number of mobile devices. Here we explain what responsive design means and why galleries should harness this new approach to website design to expand their reach to mobile users. Our interview with Howard Shaw, President and Director of Hammer Galleries (see page 73), talks about how important it is for galleries to incorporate technology into their business mix—but in thoughtful, artful ways that serve to reinforce the gallery’s brand. Shaw is a digital fan, but skeptical of technology fads. He believes that, just as a gallery’s physical space should be designed in a way that best frames the artworks it sells, so too should the gallery’s website. Any gallery that has tried to present an overview of its exhibition history knows how essential it is to document exhibitions and the artists’ work—the gallery’s most valuable assets. In our interview with Tom Powel (see page 99), he talks about how he got started providing photography and video services to the art world and the importance of high quality documentation of exhibitions. Featured on page 138 is a case study of Sperone Westwater Gallery’s elegant new website, which showcases the benefits of responsive design. It’s a dynamic website with a beautiful sense of authority and a design sensibility that respects and reinforces the gallery’s well established and admired print identity. Navigation is easy and the site displays pleasingly across a wide range of devices, from desktop computers to tablets to smartphones. Over the years, many gallerists have asked themselves, “If I can manage my website and email online, why can’t I manage 8

my gallery’s inventory the same way?” They have the answer they’ve been hoping for, as web-based gallery management is now available from exhibit-E in the form of a new product called galleryManager. As described on page 123, this breakthrough tool moves galleries away from the current collection of clunky management programs, and offers a mobile, streamlined, and sensible way of handling gallery business. Accessible anytime and anywhere, web-based gallery management lifts a huge weight off the shoulders of galleries that have had to worry about the safety and reliability of inventory on local servers and extra hard drives, a benefit anyone who lived through Hurricane Sandy can appreciate. In our interview on page 117, Billy Maker, galleryManager’s Senior Account Director, and I shine some light on the development of this important product. We are particularly excited to launch our new galleryManager iPad app for presenting artworks and collections offline. With the app galleries have instant access to sets of artworks and information critical to gallery staff when they are on the go and find themselves in an area where internet service is less than optimal—as is often the case at art fairs. The app is not some kind of add-on—it is a standard feature of galleryManager and can be downloaded for free from the Apple Store by any galleryManager subscriber.

Dan Miller March 1, 2014 New York

The Art World and the World Wide Web

Art galleries, based on the nature of their business and their internal structure, have unique needs when it comes to websites. Their business depends on information from and communication with clients, collectors and gallerists. With seasonal exhibitions coming and going, gallery websites require regular updates and maintenance. Internally, galleries rely on a sophisticated array of management software to track inventory and sales records. (To read more about gallery management systems, see page

117.) Like the rest of the world at large, the art world is firmly implanted in the Information Age. But who does the work? Traditionally, website maintenance would require a fairly skilled person with some knowledge of HTML programming. It is very unlikely that an art gallery would hire its own in-house Web designer or programmer. Galleries have had to work within their existing staffing structure to figure out who is responsible for site maintenance. But most gallery staffers are focused on the job at handâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;working with museums and collectors, organizing exhibitions, managing and supporting the gallery artists, and, in most cases, managing a public exhibition space. So the task of website maintenance can sometimes be lost in the shuffle. For gallery websites to be successful, they must be kept up to date; so a maintenance solution that simplifies operations has become an absolutely crucial piece of the Web puzzle. the unique function of art gallery websites

Art is not a commodity. Although it is sold from a gallery to a collector or museum, the process is much more complicated than selling books, CDs or consumer electronics. E-commerce, with few exceptions, is not what drives an art gallery in its search for a website. The primary purpose of an art gallery website is to represent the gallery, its exhibitions and artists, to the art-loving public. It is a mission of communication and presentation: the website must serve as an extension of the gallery, both in its content and its look. Each gallery has its own identity, and it is the job of the website designer to capture the feel of the gallery and deliver an online version of that experience to anyone using 12

the gallery’s website. Design and the “artfulness” of a website are nearly as important as its function. But a website must work properly as well. The information must be accurate, and it must be easy to access. Gallerists and collectors are likely to be experienced but not expert Web users. With the immense amount of information stored in a gallery website, the site must be organized well, and a premium should be placed on clear navigation. For art lovers and collectors, a gallery’s website can serve many purposes. At its most basic level, the website should provide information about current and upcoming exhibitions and highlight what’s new at the gallery. It can provide information about artists and present some of their work online. It can provide a cummunication channel for art lovers or collectors who wish to inquire about an artist or a particular piece of art. It is a digital resource that can contain a virtually unlimited amount of information. Because the nature of their business involves representing unique and highly individualized artists and artworks, art galleries have singular needs when it comes to websites. Their business is primarily relationship driven. Recognizing this, a gallery’s website should provide a host of capabilities and content designed to strengthen the bond between the art-loving public and gallery, including utilizing social media, (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and blogs) to create bigger networks and channel the gallery’s influence to a broader audience. With time, more and more content consumption will become inextricably linked to the gallery’s social graph.

automation for galleries

Galleries are regularly changing and installing new exhibitions. For galleries with websites, that means updating the site with new content: digital pictures of works in the exhibition, biographies of the artists involved, press releases, et cetera. Conventional design and programming for multiple pieces of content is time-consuming, and if an outside party (nongallery staff) is updating the site, it can be a cumbersome and expensive process (see illustration, page 16). For a gallery’s website to work, the site must stay up to date with this new content; otherwise it ceases to be relevant not only to the visitor, but to search engines (see page 47). The website’s ideal function should be to communicate gallery activities and other essential gallery information. It can also serve as a useful internal resource, an instantly accessible archive of a gallery’s current and past activities. A good website is particularly useful to a gallery because of the international nature of the art business. Collectors are located all over the world, and their tastes and interests tend not to be confined to their local region. The website can serve as a communication bridge—if a London collector can’t physically visit a New York gallery, they can visit the gallery’s website to know what’s going on. Like almost any company today, a gallery represents a brand, a particular type of experience. Among in-theknow artists and collectors, certain galleries do have a cachet, a unique “vibe” that resonates with the art public, and a gallery website must be designed to reinforce that impression. For any gallery website to be relevant and practical, it has to accomplish a number of diverse tasks. The ideal solution is to automate the website’s functions and to make that automation 14

as easy as possible. Some galleries choose to work with Web design companies that can automate their gallery website for in-house maintenance, placing the gallery website on equal footing with other everyday gallery administration tools. By simplifying the process and working with a Web designer that offers an automated solution, the gallery can bring those tasks in-house. A gallery’s staff already uses computer software as part of its daily routines —Microsoft Word and Excel, Adobe Photoshop and the gallery inventory database, (i.e., galleryManager by exhibit-E, ArtBase or ArtSystems). There’s no reason that, with the right administrative package, updating a website shouldn’t be included as one of those tasks. the standard syntax of gallery websites

While there is no set format that a gallery website should follow, there is a remarkable consistency between sites regarding their content. A common syntax of content, in terms of what content is presented, appears to have developed among almost every gallery website. This is not due to collusion among Web designers and galleries. Rather, this similarity reflects a common purpose—galleries need certain content online, and over time, a design and navigation logic has emerged. This is a positive, informal development that facilitates ease of use. Typically, sites are broken down into an arrangement of the following content: Exhibitions: A list of upcoming, current, or past exhibitions

at the gallery. Exhibition information usually includes links to the press release, images, publications, biography, and artist’s page. 15

4Start

Email exhibition details to designer

FedEx, dropbox or email images to designer ‘

‘

5 min.

Wait for designer to get back to you

10 min. - 1 day

‘

Review mockups

Problems with corrupt images?

1 hour - 2 days

‘

‘ Problems with exhibition details or image color?

3 hours - 1 day

‘

5 min.

‘

‘ 20 min.

Wait for designer to post changes to website

‘

Dictate changes to designer

‘

Wait for designer to get back to you

Problems going live with site?

‘ Done

End3 Total 1 to 5 Days

The old method of updating websites, as outlined here, can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and expensive. 16

4Start Prepare images

1 hour

‘ Add images and text 20 min.

‘ Add press release and biography 5 min.

‘ Review website and instantly revise or approve 5 min.

‘ Done

End3 Total 1.5 hours

The new exhibit-E process for updating your website in-house has proven to be easy, efficient, and cost-effective. 17

A list of the artists represented by the gallery or works that are available. Detail pages include artist biographies, images of artwork, media, news, catalogues and a list of artist exhibitions. Artists:

Publications / Catalogues: Publications relating to exhibitions and artists that the gallery has published.

General contact information about the gallery such as directions, history, visiting hours, and email addresses. Gallery:

While this syntax has made gallery site browsing a familiar experience, this does not mean that all websites are the same. In terms of design, most gallery websites tend to be individual and unique, with major differences in layout, website hierarchy, user interfaces, menu setup, etc., to distinguish the sites from one another. If a user is browsing with an eye toward design, each site viewed is a different experience from the last: some are satisfying and pleasing, some can be frustrating and confusing. But beyond the look, feel, and design of the websites, there is a startling similarity and reliance on certain conventions that has made the experience of browsing gallery websites remarkably similar. When you think of it, this shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be all that surprising, since the art world is a finite group of people who communicate regularly, with a high level of mutual respect and interest among peers. Websites are the ideal vehicle for keeping current on whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s going on at other galleries. So when it comes to building a website, it would be natural for gallery owners to choose what they want on their site based on their own browsing experience. 18

who is designing art gallery websites ?

When the Internet exploded into the global consciousness around 1996, galleries, like many companies, looked to individual designers (some still in college) to design their websites. But there was a lot of confusion, and the galleries were unable to update the sites themselves. They had difficulty getting the

Our Top Recommendations º Create beautiful content and manage it beautifully. º Avoid gimmicks. º The technology should never distract. º Don’t add features or functionality that you can’t support with content. º Always be mindful of SEO.

individual website designers to make the updates and revisions necessary to keep the site current. These early clunkers quickly fossilized. By 1998, out of frustration, galleries sought out all-in-one Web design firms, some hiring expensive agencies with no experience working with art galleries. With no firm out there specializing in the art world, galleries settled for overly technical, bulky websites or over-simplified HTML sites that looked more like financial-services sites than art world sites. 19

Website Development History Over the last 16 years we have seen dramatic innovation in website development, with trends coming and going. But today as the chart below illustrates, website programming has seen standardization because of the use of multiple platforms.

</html>

1998

2000

2005

2007

Basic HTML

Rise of Flash

YouTube

iPhone

2008

2010

2011

2014

Death of Flash

Mobile Web

Responsive Web

Cloud Social Media Web Standards

Even today, few companies have taken a leadership role in the field. Only one, exhibit-E, has branded itself as a design firm specifically focused on providing art world websites and has the portfolio to back up the claim. With its roots in the art world, exhibit-E is unique. It has a deep understanding of the needs of the art world, has a reputation for world-class website design, and offers automated solutions that allow in-house gallery staff to make routine updates to the gallery website. This last capability solves the most vexing problem facing art world websites: keeping the site current and up-to-date using existing gallery staff resources. With gallery staff updating their exhibit-E websites, using them just as they would any other software application, exhibit-E has become the world leader in art gallery website design. It is an easy-to-use option for more and more galleries worldwide. Template Sites for Galleries

In 1998, when exhibit-E was just starting, the idea was to create a low-cost template solution for galleries. But limitations of the “readymade” website held no interest for galleries. Fundamentally, that has changed as technology has evolved and today, there are many jaw-dropping template solutions on the market (i.e., tumblr, wordpress, etc), offering companies—a coffee roasting company or pediatric center—amazing template solutions, because they have very generalized admin areas. But art world insiders need a template solution that speaks the language of galleries. exhibit-E has evolved with this trend and today offers a new, turnkey website solution in the form of template designs that enable a gallery to launch a sophisticated and functionally 22

www.davidrisleygallery.com

www.tierneygardarin.com

robust website on a leaner budget, very quickly. With these template solutions, a non-technical person can build and manage a great looking website and have it up and running in days. These websites, while not custom, are totally customizable, and more importantly, they are tailored for the art world. You can see samples of exhibit-E’s new gallery template sites on pages 23, 24 and at www.exhibit-e.com/news/template-sites. Social Media

To maximize the utility of their websites, galleries must embrace strategies that take full advantage of social media tools. Unlike just a few years ago when it was difficult to find gallery staff comfortable with even the most rudimentary computer tasks, most galleries today have staff that are completely at ease with computers and technology—power users who text, tweet, Instagram and frequent Facebook. The social media phenomenon has taken the digital world by storm—Facebook now has over 1 billion members—and represents an important networking opportunity that galleries cannot afford to overlook. With few exceptions, a gallery should have a Facebook page and its website should link to it. The two portals are inextricably intertwined and should be managed together. With Facebook, you have an Internet user who has reached out and literally befriended the gallery, brought it into his own social network, and publicly announced the relationship to all his friends— free advertising with the potential to grow gallery website visits exponentially. The gallery needs to feed and nurture these friendships by participating in Facebook frequently through announcements, discussions, postings of images and videos, and so on. The content of these Facebook postings should be 25

managed in coordination with the website; the two portals have a symbiotic relationship, with the gallery’s website containing rich, broad content and the Facebook page being more interactive and headline-oriented. Microblogging sites like Twitter and Instagram are the third leg of the social-media stool and should be used by galleries in concert with their Facebook pages and websites. The more channels of influence a gallery can enter, the more successful its business will become. While it’s easy to see the benefits from a business perspective, it’s also easy to downplay the amount of commitment required for a gallery to truly harness the potential of social media. Real success requires a deep and ongoing commitment to managing and refreshing the website content, managing the gallery’s Facebook presence, and integrating Twitter and Instagram into the communications mix. summary

To an outsider, the art world appears vast. But while it is big, there are some clear observations that can be made. A website has become an essential part of a gallery’s effort to promote, educate, and communicate. More and more, art world players are spending time thinking about their website design and its effectiveness in promoting the gallery and its artists. If they want a website, they will want to identify the most reliable company, one that understands the art world and offers the best design, customer service, and technical support and go with it. Obviously, this doesn’t take into account the eccentricities and personal tastes of art world principals. But as opposed to big retailers or e-commerce firms that can require 26

Top Tools for Gallery Websites Website Admin (CMS) Video Mobile/Responsive Website SEO/Analytics QR Codes Zoom View 360 View Issuu.com eBook Reader Private Rooms Email Marketing Social Media The Power of Good Content

extensive and massive technical requirements for a website, with few exceptions an art gallery is more likely to go with the best-looking and best-priced option that meets all of their technical needs. Balancing out these values must be a consideration of time and energy. Which site offers the best solution when it comes to updating new content? Which site is the easiest to operate? What staff will handle these updates? The ultimate goal is for a gallery to end up with a future-facing website thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s built to grow with a minimum of headaches, that looks great, and that represents what the gallery is all about.

top trends

Continuous scrolling allows you to browse a website uninterrupted from top to bottom, without having to jump from page to page. Add a sticky menu and as you scroll the main menu locks to the top of the browser window, so the user has quick access to every area of the site. This is perfect for browsing from any device.

Sandra Gering Inc. Sandra Gering Inc. has positioned itself as both a gallery and a launchpad for the project-focused activities of its roster of international artists. The gallery continues to promote and exhibit emerging and mid-career talent while expanding its focus to include the management of activities outside of the gallery environment. The gallery is located in a town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side at 14 East 63rd Street. Interviewed by Dan Miller.

Can you tell us about your recent move to 14 East 63rd Street, and how this move is shaping your plans for artists and the gallery program? The move to East 63rd Street is key to shaping the future of our artists and program. Most of our artists are doing projects all around the world, and we consider this space a strategic headquarters for getting things done for the artists. You’ve seen the space! It’s wonderfully intimate with a lot of room for my team. The front space offers intimacy for presenting and 31

showing art. The back space is the businessâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;our headquarters for large projects. We are intentionally not calling it a gallery because our intention is differentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;broader and on a larger, more expansive scale. Artists are working in fashion, film, architecture, and public spaces. We need this type of space in order to support these kinds of grand projects. This is what we are doing now. Much more so than selling to the private collector. Everyone is so excited about this new way. Our artists appreciate the kind of support we can give them for these global projects. They are coming to us. And now from this ideal location, we have the means to help them and this location is key to that. I have always been on the edge of things to come, I can feel what should be the next move, and for me this makes perfect sense. So that is why I did it. What are the things that you like about your new website? We have never used an online store to sell editions and books before, and I am looking forward with great anticipation to seeing how successful this will be for our artists. It was also important to me to have larger visual images as well as videos, because many of my artists work with software code to create changing light works and moving imagery. Leo Villareal is one example. I find our new website much more visually informative, which is very important when your business is art. Yes, we maintain very active Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages, as do many of our artists. We love the blogosphere and appreciate all of the generous attention artists have given the gallery. 32

www.sandrageringinc.com 33

Surprisingly, these social-network platforms are quite transgenerational, and have helped us connect virtually and in person with clients, writers, and artists of all ages. I think this is a great advancement in technological connectivity for society. Do you think that there is a social-media benefit to having a video-rich website? Yes. In addition to being more visually stimulating and attentiongrabbing, the video component helps viewers become familiar with our physical space and new media works. With the advent of sites like YouTube and Vimeo, it is clear that the public responds well to video content online. We have had several virtual tours of our exhibitions videorecorded by members of the press, which we can then place online, heightening the realism of the experience a visitor to our website receives. Do you think your artists are pleased with your website and your overall Web strategy? Can you talk about that strategy? Yes, our artists love our website. In our news section, we share links to our artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; personal websites, upcoming events, and press online. The artists participate in turn, linking visitors to their sites back to our website. We function as their virtual gallery as well as their physical one. The majority of my artists are active online, with websites, blogs, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages, et cetera. They promote each other and the gallery. We have formed an extensive network that generates press and sales together, with our artists using our website as a home base.

For over 25 years, Sandra Gering has maintained an influential presence in the New York art world. After an early start in the West Village, she opened her first gallery space in SoHo. Several years later the gallery relocated to Chelsea and, after much growth, moved further uptown to Fifth Avenue. For several years in the historic Crown Building, with partner Javier Lopez, the gallery expanded its program and established its largest exhibition space to date. Adjusting once again to currents in the field, Sandra Gering Inc. acquired space at 14 East 63rd Street, a town house on Manhattanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Upper East Side, which is now its current home. Throughout, Gering has introduced or maintained the careers of numerous established artists such as Janine Antoni, William Anastasi, Xavier Veilhan, John F. Simon, Jr., KAWS, and Leo Villareal, as well as many others. View more at www.sandrageringinc.com

pictured on page 30: Leo Villareal, Cylinder II, 2012, White LEDs, mirror finished stainless steel, custom software, electrical hardware, steel, 147 x 116 x 116 inches (373.8 x 294.6 x 294.6 cm), Courtesy the artist & Sandra Gering Inc., Image by James Ewing Photography

Laurie Simmons Regarded as one of the most important artists to emerge from the Pictures Generation, Laurie Simmons has been the recipient of many awards and the subject of major exhibitions at such museums as MoMA and the Walker Art Center. Known primarily for her photographs, she has also worked in film and clothing design with the likes of Meryl Streep and Thakoon Panichgul. Interviewed by Adam Lehner.

Some artists feel very sensitive to changes in technology while others insist theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; d be doing the same thing no matter what was happening in the realm of the machines. Do you feel that you fall into either of these categories? Sometimes I feel like Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve embraced technology too enthusiastically in my personal life. I love everything it can do for me, and since Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m an A.D.D. kind of thinker, I now seek and 37

get answers at a speed I could only dream of in my pre-digital life. But in my work I’ve been a little slower on the uptake. So much of the sensibility of my art has relied on what I could not easily do, both scale-wise and truth-wise. The digital world, of course, provides answers for me seamlessly, and I’ve had to be systematic about rejecting those answers and continuing to do things in my own flat-footed way. Even though I’m pretty well versed in digital-photographic technologies, I’m still holding on to film. I still feel there is some inescapable beauty and difference with that medium. Much of your work reflects upon various conditions of domesticity and confinement. How do you feel about the Internet? Does it feel infinitely expansive? If so, does that challenge the confined world? Or does it rather allow the “infinite” world to be confined as well? The Internet reminds me of a couple summers (many years ago) when I rented a big old crumbling house right on the Atlantic Ocean. By day I felt excited and infinitely connected to the rest of the world, but by night I was petrified. What I could take in and see in broad daylight made sense, but what I couldn’t see and could only imagine filled me with terror— hurricanes, tidal waves, pirates. The infinitely expansive part of the Web that I’m aware of (sexual predators, bizarre fringe political/religious groups, fake identities, and subversive websites/chat rooms) is actually kind of scary to me—I’m surprisingly uncurious about it all. The Web I use daily—the one that’s useful to me—feels like another small world where I can fulfill all my needs: gather information, find props, shop, write letters, make phone calls, read the paper. What I control, I’m completely comfortable with. 38

A couple of annoying or unfulfilling clicks and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m gone.

www.lauriesimmons.net

Do you think of your site as a work of art? If not, have you ever considered making any Web pieces? I think of my site as one-stop window-shopping for Laurie Simmons. I’ve done so many disparate kinds of projects throughout my life and my website is the only place that brings them all together. Not only my pictures, but my writing, products, fashion collaborations. No one person or entity has ever been motivated to bring all these things together, besides me. How has the website affected the way people relate to your art— or rather, how they relate to you about your art? Do you get fan mail? Better-informed questions? I do get more fan mail. I assume people think they have easier access and of course there is general studio contact info on the website. Better-informed questions? Not really—still pretty crazy. Do you think there’s any effect—positive, negative, or other—in having people (including yourself) be able to take in your whole career at a glance? As much as I love the romantic idea of the mysterious and withholding artist, I’m way too excited about having so much of what I’ve done in one place. I don’t assume that every person that goes to my site reads every word and looks at every picture, but if anyone is interested, it’s there. What differences between your gallery site and your artist site do you consider to be most important? Obviously, the galleries I work with are presenting the works that are the most relevant to them at the moment—meaning 42

exhibit-E had developed my husbandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website and I was really jealous of the design, so I told Dan and his team to make mine even better!

the ones they’re working with in a commercial sense—so our priorities are completely different. Your site works very well with the serial nature of your work. The projects are so easy to navigate and one gets a very good sense of your work over time. Was this important to you? Are you happy with this result? I wanted my site to be super navigable. Since I spend a lot of time online and am an eager student of Web design, I have very little patience for sites that are hard to navigate. I find myself shocked sometimes that certain entities and individuals can endorse their own sites, given how difficult they make it to get around. A couple of annoying or unfulfilling clicks and I’m gone. Not everyone is sophisticated about the Web and its potential. And of course not everyone hires the right designer! You have a depth of material in your site, but it doesn’t feel busy, it actually seems to do a good job of focusing attention on the images. Was this difficult to achieve? I just felt that people who were searching me out as an artist would naturally go to the artwork first. I love that there’s a choice of things to engage. And again, people can go as far or deep as they want. Having your own website is a big responsibility because you have control of your online image in a broader context. So doing it well is important. Did you feel any pressure or burden because of that? I don’t feel any pressure because I’m not trying to brand myself. The information and categories on my site created themselves 44

because I’m putting most of what I’ve done in chronological order. It’s more like a visual bio. Were you more interested in documenting and organizing your work or in controlling its “online message”? I think my primary interest was in presenting the depth of my work and in documenting and organizing. Controlling the online message would be tantamount to controlling all the works that I let out of my studio, which I’ve already done through years of editing. About how much time do you spend thinking about the site? How much time working on it? That part is pretty organic: As I make new works and new projects and participate in exhibitions, we just naturally include them. When you came to exhibit-E what did you tell them you were looking for in a website? I didn’t exactly say it, but I was thinking about the K.I.S.S. acronym: keep it simple, stupid. And of course it had to be great to look at. exhibit-E had developed my husband’s website and I was really jealous of the design, so I told Dan and his team to make mine even better ! View more at www.lauriesimmons.net

pictured on page 36: Laurie Simmons, The Love Doll/Day 11 (Yellow), 2010, Fuji Matte print, 70 x 47 inches (177.8 x 119.4 cm), Edition of 5.

Google for Galleries

Search Engine Optimization

Getting visitors to your website is the oxymoronic practice known as “driving traffic,” and it’s been one of the biggest challenges for Web developers since the Internet first became a mass phenomenon. Alternatively, Web users can have difficulty finding the information and content they’re looking for. To simplify, the vast majority rely on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to get to the webpages they need. Harnessing the power of these search engines can be a powerful tool for anyone trying to drive traffic to their website. This is particularly pronounced if you can position your website 47

on the first page of a search engine’s results page. If one were to search Google for “Andy Warhol,” for instance, more than 1.3 million results would be returned. One would be more likely to visit a site that turns up on the first few pages rather than continuing through hundreds of pages. The numbers bear this out— a study by OneUpWeb.com found that a month after a website turned up on the second or third page of a Google search, traffic increased by five times from the previous month. But getting your gallery website to turn up in those searches is no easy trick, and many galleries are willing to pay to get there. That’s why there’s so much talk among Web developers about search engine optimization (SEO) these days. In fact, there’s a whole cottage industry of SEO consultants that has sprung up—firms that pledge to improve search engine performance with a mixed bag of tricks. While some SEO consultants are doing good work, many are peddling snake oil, claiming that they can guarantee number-one placement with little or no work required on your part, or promising instant results when it usually takes three to five months. Some use tactics frowned upon by search engines; the worst offenders can even get a client’s website banned from Google. The reality is that there’s not just one quick fix for getting good search engine results. It’s a holistic process that must take into consideration everything from the site’s structure, to the copy, the technical components, and the design. It’s best to have your site optimized for search engine ranking by the company that built it.

Searching by Artist Name

Where does your gallery rank? Galleries in particular can benefit from quality search engine optimization. One of the greatest hopes of a gallery is to come up high in a search engine ranking when someone searches for one of their artists. This is not easy to do, especially for galleries that are getting started late. But it is possible. If a Web user searches by the gallery’s name, galleries will generally come up on top. The battle is in the more general searches, e.g., when searching by an artist’s name, style or period of art. If a gallery’s website comes up when someone searches by an artist’s name, then the SEO is working well. For example, if you Google Fred Tomaselli, James Cohan Gallery ranks in the top position. That’s what you want. Aside from a custom “content-only” solution, getting that top placement requires a lot of time, persistence, hard work, and regular brushing up on search engine metrics. But even all that won’t guarantee a top placement. Freshness, Words, Links and More: Other Ways to Increase Your Ranking

Keep Content Fresh: Regularly updating the content on sites

is one way to get the attention of search engines. Websites that keep content fresh tend to get more traffic, which translates to a higher ranking. A site that doesn’t update is neither very useful nor interesting and will be passed over in favor of a fresher site. Aside from the search engines, adding new content is good practice in general.

All of your gallery’s advertising, exhibition catalogues, announcement cards and emails that go out should include your gallery’s Web address. Try to get your website URL featured everywhere that your gallery is mentioned. If you circulate a press release announcing an exhibition, include the URL in it. If that URL gets picked up and posted on other websites, that will increase the visibility of your site and the likelihood that it gets picked up by a search engine. Get Your URL Out There:

Links and More Links: Other

qualified websites linking into your website play a major role in search engine ranking; some experts think links are the best way to get higher rankings. The more sites that link to your website, the greater chance that your website will rank above a competitor’s. Therefore, getting your site linked from portals and industry resources like the BBC, NY Times, Artnet.com, Artforum.com, and passive traffic like Wikipedia is highly recommended. People clicking from these related sites to your website will increase your ranking. Write for the Web: In addition to incoming links, optimizing

your website so the content-to-code ratio attracts search engine spiders is another important step for increasing your search engine ranking. Web searchers search by keywords, looking for things like “contemporary American sculpture” or “Ed Ruscha catalogue.” A site won’t turn up on a search engine if it doesn’t feature relevant keywords that describe its content specifically. Try to keep that in mind when writing headlines and text for your site. 50

Use Paid Advertising: Target your artists and keywords by using paid advertising services such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. A search for “Ed Ruscha” will display a prominent link to your artist, exhibition or publication. AdWords and Search Marketing also allow you to tailor your ads and keywords on the fly and get instant feedback on what keywords prompt people to click to your website. These services include extensive reporting to track your progress, and their costs are negligible. Talk to Your Designer or Web Developer: Any competent Web

firm knows the importance of search engine ranking these days and has developed strategies they can implement to improve performance. Again, there is no magic spell they can cast to instantly boost Web traffic, but there are proven techniques (like “content-only” solutions) that can be employed to put your website in a better position. Search engines exist to connect Web searches with the content they’re looking for, so let the Internet do some work for you. There’s no reason that your site can’t be harnessing some of the search engine traffic that’s out there now. Even if you capture one new client, all the effort and expense will have been worth it.

David Maupin David Maupin founded Lehmann Maupin with his partner, Rachel Lehmann, in 1996. The gallery has organized and curated exhibitions for an array of international contemporary artists working in painting, sculpture, photography, video, and new media. Interviewed by Adam Lehner.

I think your website is an unusual combination of the raw and the beautiful, and I was wondering how you came up with that. Funny you should mention that. Raw and beautiful—that’s what we call honesty. And honesty is not a moral issue! It’s more about things being interesting-looking. Elegant, attractive, pleasing. And it also just makes sense—it’s easy to use. So,

yes, we want our website to be honest. This desire for honesty, for example, was behind our approach to the artist page. I was going to mention the artist page. It’s quite distinctive. For example, for every artist, you have a big author photograph. The artist page is really important to our overall approach to the site. We want the site to function as part of the network of our artists, and in some way our context. After all, we have artists who live all over the world. It’s very hard to create a community when they are all so far apart. We have artists in Germany, China, Korea, Brazil, a couple in Japan, a few in England, a few in New York, a few throughout the United States. It’s just hard to keep it all together as a family this way! The website is a really good way of establishing a real context and community. Can you give me more of a sense of how you see this happening? Number one, we made a decision that we were going to keep our website really up to date. We have someone who works on it almost full-time. So we are always in communication with the artists, finding out what they’re thinking, what they’re up to, et cetera. We also decided really early on to use photographs of the artists. I have to say, it was my idea. It’s an attempt to try to establish and maintain a kind of intimacy with the artists—and between the artists. We regularly change the pictures, at least once a year, or something like that. It sets the tone we want: high-tech intimacy. I’m just looking at the site now, and I see Tony Oursler has a new portrait up —I haven’t seen it before. He probably contacted us and wanted us to change his picture. He’s done that several times. On the other hand, we haven’t changed Ross Bleckner’s picture since 54

we first set up the site. It’s too perfect! He was moving studios, and I saw that he had a box of photographs and I saw the picture of him as a young boy pointing at the announcement of his bar mitzvah outside a synagogue and I said, “This is it! It’s just too funny not to use!” It sounds to me like one of the things you’re doing is giving artists a way of visualizing and participating in the gallery even if they live thousands of miles away. I would imagine that makes a huge difference. It would be so easy for them to feel totally disconnected, like they had no idea what was going on and nobody cared. But the website must really help bridge that gap. Yes, I think it does. Also, our artists tend to be interested in what other artists are doing. They want to know what their exhibitions look like. And so we’ve emphasized putting exhibition photos and even photos of art fairs online. It wasn’t so clear that we should do that a few years ago. Art fairs were more trade shows then. Now they’ve developed into satellite galleries with three- or four-day-long life spans. As that shift has happened, you’re really trying to have the booths represent the gallery, a kind of curated booth. You really do have good coverage of your exhibitions and art fair installations. This must be a good way to keep your artists engaged in the creative process of coming up with ideas for installations. They don’t have to attend the art fairs, but they see what’s going on, which must help them try to come up with even better ideas for you. Absolutely. Our artists don’t usually appear at fairs, and we don’t encourage them to do so. But they are part of the process. We program art fairs the way we used to program the gallery ten 55

years ago. And art fairs are so intensive and involve so much work and creativity. And yet they’re so brief—a lot of people don’t see them. So our documenting of the exhibitions and art fairs is a way of using the website as an archive. Now you can have video and great images. Another change is we have started selling large editions on the site. I’m kind of excited about that. Of course, it’s been happening forever in other businesses, with books, et cetera, but the art world is very old-fashioned—that’s the charm of it—but I think things have gotten to the point where people will go online and buy a Tracey Emin edition or a Gilbert & George edition or a Do Ho Suh edition. I didn’t think that five years ago. What has changed? The comfort level. People have gotten used to using their computers and websites to buy things. One of the things that turned me off was how slow things were. Another thing that turned me off was people didn’t keep their websites up to date. But I think people are getting better at both of those things now, and so the climate is changing. It occurs to me that one of the benefits of the upgrade to higher quality images on your site is that you make it easier for clients to feel comfortable buying things without seeing them in person. No, there is no substitute for seeing the work in person. Okay, but I was just thinking that improved image quality might make clients even more comfortable with this process. Aren’t you doing more business that way?

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It really depends on the work. With many kinds of photographs and paintings, yes, jpegs can persuasively convey something important about the actual works. But sculpture, video, animation, work that has a minimalist aspect, work with any kind of optical illusion—with these kinds of pieces, the work doesn’t usually translate well into jpegs. You begin the conversation with emails. You do the background work, you do the homework, with emails. But then you meet at the gallery or at an art fair. I sense that there’s an unusually close fit between the identity and mission of your gallery and the identity and mission of your website. When you started the gallery in 1996, did you have a specific vision in mind for what Lehmann Maupin Gallery should become? Yes, absolutely. The fundamental thought behind starting the gallery was that the art world was undergoing a de-centralization. Great artists could live anywhere in the world. We wanted to give those artists their first shows—in New York in particular. With a lot of the artists, that happened. That wasn’t our only idea—there are nuances to our program that deal with identity, and so on. But we gave Do Ho Suh, Tracey Emin, Kutlug Ataman—we gave them their first shows in New York. Anya Gallaccio. Sergio Prego. Mr. So we realized what we set out to accomplish. And of course we also began to include older artists, people who expanded our program. That’s what the Web does—it brings us into one place. So you wanted to be unusually international? Yes, that was our identity. Every gallery has an identity. This was ours.

Founded by partners Rachel Lehmann and David Maupin in 1996, Lehmann Maupin presents exhibitions that examine the work of both emerging and well-established artists whose work impacts contemporary art and culture. The gallery has given important artists their first oneperson exhibitions in New York, including Kutlug Ataman, Tracey Emin, Anya Gallaccio, Shirazeh Houshiary, Do Ho Suh, and Adriana Varejão. In addition, the gallery has exposed emerging talents—such as Suling Wang and the Japanese artist Mr.—through exhibitions at the gallery and participation in select art fairs. The gallery’s program also includes important established artists such as Ashley Bickerton, Gilbert & George, and Tony Oursler. First opened in SoHo, Lehmann Maupin moved in September of 2002 to its present location in Chelsea. A second New York gallery space opened in late 2007 at 201 Chrystie Street in Manhattan’s new cultural hub, the Lower East Side. Most recently, Lehmann Maupin opened its first international gallery space in March 2013 at the 407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street in Central, Hong Kong View more at www.lehmannmaupin.com

pictured on page 52: Do Ho Suh, Reflection, 2004, nylon and stainless-steel tube, dimensions variable, edition of two, courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.

www.twopalms.us on the iPad

Mobile Responsive Design

With art fairs, collections, artists, and clients located around the world, and recognizing that art world insiders and the gallery-going public travel extensively, gallery owners want a website that can deliver a satisfying mobile experience. These mobile users have come to expect ease of use when accessing information on the go. They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just happen to stumble on your website; theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re familiar with you, value your gallery, and talk about you. What they want most is quick access to essential information. With the rise of mobile, galleries need to prioritize mobile design. 61

www.faggionato.com on the iPhone

MULTI-DEVICE WORLD

A website needs to serve all kinds of devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. This presents design challenges to Web designers, who are learning to optimize Web content for such a wide variety of user interfaces, many of which have quite limited display, interaction, and bandwidth capabilities. Smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous in our culture. They come in all sizes and shapes; most have touchscreens ranging in size from 3 inches to more than 10. Anyone who has used an iPhone to browse the Web can testify to its usefulness as a mobile tool, but it can be frustrating too: some sites seem to take forever to load and navigate, and intensive browsing can be taxing and clumsy, not at all like the seamless, rich experience you get using a computer with a large monitor and full-sized keyboard. In large part, this is due to the inherent limitations of the mobile devices themselves, but a contributing factor is the design of websites, many of which are not optimized for handheld devices. Smartphones have become much more capable devices over the last few years, with screen sizes and processing power increasing significantly. Network and device responsiveness continue to improve but remain an issue for Web designers. The design for any good website needs to be clean, simple, and intuitive; this is doubly true when a smartphone is used to browse the site. Gallerists should keep in mind that the functions important to a mobile user may be different from those of a desktop or laptop user. Simple and quick navigation is paramount. A website optimized for mobile devices should display all the important navigation options in easy-to-read fashion on the 64

home page. Graphics, images, and other content must be sized for quick loading, especially on a smartphone. TABLETS

With Appleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s phenomenally successful introduction of the iPad in 2010, tablets have emerged as a game-changing market force. The iPad set a new standard for richness of features and elegance of design and launched an explosion in popularity for these devices. The iPad appears to be tailor-made for the art world. The slate-like design is compelling and sexy, one of those rare aesthetic and practical triumphs we can all admire, and it is hardly surprising that tablets are showing up as the de rigueur accessory at galleries and art fairs. The appeal is easy to explainâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;they offer a crisp and vibrant viewing experience in a format that is substantially larger than a smartphone but almost as portable. Moreover, tablets are very capable platforms for a host of activities usually associated with laptop or desktop computers. As iPads and other tablets proliferate, gallerists are seeing an increasing number of their patrons using them to browse their sites. In the Q2 2013 edition of Digital Index, Adobe reports that, although there are many more smartphones in the world, tablets now drive more traffic to websites and the likelihood that these visits will result in a purchase is significantly higher. Tablets offer a strong platform for audio and visual media, including video playback. Consequently, gallery owners should include in their websites abundant and readily accessible images of artworks, as well as rich video content. To take advantage of other capabilities inherent in the tablet, such as the innovative 65

touch interface and the ability to scroll easily with a tap, pinch, or swipe, gallery websites can implement solutions using modern Javascript libraries such as JQTouch, Sencha, and others. Ultimately, the success of a galleryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website is all about content and the way it is presented: images, video, text, gallery publications, and artist e-books created for on-the-go presentations. This kind of content is perfectly suited for mobile devices. RESPONSIVE DESIGN

How can a gallery deliver a rich and consistent website experience to mobile users when the range of mobile devices is so diverse? Web designers have struggled with this question since smartphones first appeared on the market. Initial efforts involved designing separate mobile-specific websites (M-dot sites for smartphones and T-dot sites for tablets), each customized and simplified in terms of functionality to fit the smaller mobile format and its limitations. Each type of phone or tablet required its own custom mobile site. The alternative was a single version of the website that invariably displayed poorly on different devices. But despite the usefulness of a custom mobile site, this approach is no longer good enough. Now websites have the ability to be viewable on multiple devices using â&#x20AC;&#x153;responsive design.â&#x20AC;? Responsive design is a unified, one-Web approach to mobile website design. It is a philosophy of website design that evolved to address the problem of adapting websites for smartphones and tablets without compromising content, search ranking, speed, analytics, and business resources. The term comes from a May 2010 article written by Web designer and developer Ethan Marcotte, published in the journal A List Apart. To simplify, a website created using responsive 66

Tablets and smartphones are essential tools for the global art business, and galleries need to be thinking about how to optimize their websites for mobile devices.

design has the ability to adjust according to the device screen size—it’s a single website solution that works on all devices. This eliminates the need for a customized mobile version of your website. Responsive design uses fluid, proportion-based grids and flexible images and layouts, determined by the website through CSS (cascading style sheets) queries. The result is a pleasurable viewing experience that minimizes the need for the user to resize, pan, and scroll through pages. Responsive design has been widely adopted by Web designers and is recommended by Google in its Webmasters Guide because it eliminates the need for multiple urls for each type of device, which optimizes search-engine ranking by making it easier for Google to find and index content from the site. Ultimately, responsive websites are elegant and smart, and make sense from a business point of view. “Progressive enhancement” is another design strategy that dovetails nicely with responsive design. It has its roots in an older approach known as “graceful degradation,” in which designers would create Web pages for the latest browsers but also enable these pages to be displayed in degraded but still presentable form on older browsers. Progressive enhancement turns this approach on its head. The Web designer first creates a basic document that can be displayed on even the most primitive browser, then adds presentation enhancements and functionality to the page by using CSS, JavaScript, or other technologies. The website detects which browser is being used and which types of features that browser supports. If the browser doesn’t support a particular feature—CSS box-shadows, for example—it will be removed to prevent errors. This prevents data that is unusable by certain browsers from being unnecessarily downloaded. 68

Progressive design and responsive design are widely used together by Web designers to create sites that download quickly and display content beautifully on almost any device. One of the biggest advantages for galleries is the effect it has on search engine optimization: when you offer a single website that is compatible with any smartphone, tablet, or computer, you increase your search engine standing, since all traffic is driven to one unique Web address rather than multiple urls. This means your website will be ranked higher when a customer does a Google search. Galleries should take note: you don’t want to fall behind and watch as competitors launch responsive design websites, while you are stuck in the past. APPS FOR GALLERIES (PERHAPS NOT)

For gallery owners, another issue related to mobile devices is the temptation to design special smartphone apps for promoting and enriching a gallery’s Web presence. We believe galleries should rethink this strategy. Unless you have a program with content equivalent to that of a museum or a magazine, an app doesn’t make sense. And even if you are fortunate enough to possess sufficient unique content, dedicated mobile applications are expensive and time consuming to create and maintain, and they must be developed separately for each platform—iOS, Android, Windows, etc. It’s true that an app well done can be immensely satisfying, but apps represent a huge resource commitment, both up front and over the long term. Moreover, they can’t be updated as rapidly as websites and they merely duplicate information that is, or should be, available on the gallery’s website.

In essence, a phone app, which involves a full softwaredevelopment life cycle, is in most cases nothing more than an app wrapped around a website. Since an iPhone app will work only on an iPhone, and since many of the galleryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s customers own other brands of smartphones, a separate app would have to be developed for each smartphone operating system used by customers the gallery wants to connect with. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a poor use of scarce gallery resources. A better and much more economical solution is to create rich content for your website, either on your own or with the assistance of your Web developer, and then optimize that content for mobile devices with a responsive design strategy.

top trends

Responsive Design is a unified, one-Web approach to mobile website design. It is a philosophy of website design that evolved to address the problem of adapting websites for smartphones and tablets without compromising content, search ranking, speed, analytics and business resources.

Howard Shaw As Hammer Galleries’ President and Director, with over 30 years of experience, Howard Shaw runs one of the world’s leading galleries specializing in Impressionist and Modern Masters. Founded in 1928 by industrialist and philanthropist Dr. Armand Hammer, the gallery focuses on artists such as Monet, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, and Chagall. Interviewed by Genevieve Reichle.

Let’s start at the very beginning. One of the things I wanted to talk about was how long you have worked with the gallery, and what the gallery means to you today. I started as an intern at Hammer Galleries in the summer of 1981 when I was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, intending to go on to law school. But art got into my blood, and 33 years later, I’m still here and still in love with the art business. From almost the very beginning, I have been interested in technology’s place in the art world. 73

I personally computerized Hammer Galleries when I was a young assistant in 1985, using an IBM 286 personal computer with a 40-MB hard drive. Your phone has a bigger hard drive than that today. We had only one computer and had to do backups on floppy disks. And once we got the hang of it we thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But you knew it was the right way to go. You intuitively felt like it would make a difference. The personal computer had just been invented and it dramatically lowered the cost of computerization for small businesses like art galleries. My boss at the time (and mentor in the art business), Richard Lynch, said to me, “I will only allow you to buy a computer if I never have to touch it and if I ask for something, it can be brought to me the same way it always has been.” At the time, the business was, I used to say, still very much a “19th-century business,” and we were trying to pull it into the 20th century. A lot of galleries and dealers at that time were somewhat intimidated by technology, not sure which way to go with it. You also have to remember that the technology was much less reliable at the time. Hard disks went bad very frequently and using a computer could be a very frustrating experience. Your gallery is magnificent, and you handle some very serious work. Somehow when you’re here, the works feel particularly substantial. But what’s amazing is that one gets something of the same feeling from your website. How does that work? How does technology work to convey the feeling and experience for people who aren’t physically here? 74

This is an interesting question that we’ve been talking a lot about at the gallery lately because everyone under the sun is pitching us some new kind of digital platform, online auction service or some other new idea for using technology in the art world. The new “new thing” always sounds exciting, but having watched the development of the personal computer and Internet from their beginnings, I have seen many, many potentially “transformative” digital ideas for the art business end up going nowhere. Even the major auction houses have had a difficult (and costly) time figuring out how to best use the Internet. We were one of the first galleries to launch a website. But the downside of being an early adopter of a new technology is that the technology rapidly improves — and then the people who wait and jump in later often end up with something much better. So in 2013, it seemed clear that it was time for an upgrade. There is an old saying that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and these days our website is often our clients’ first impression of the gallery. You can think of it in terms of how you frame a painting. As dealers in Impressionist and Modern Masters, we are very fortunate to be handling museum quality works by some of the greatest artists of the 19th- and 20th-century. We spend a lot of time working with the top framers in the city to select the best frames for the paintings we exhibit. We want a great painting to look its best with the perfect frame. For example, the extraordinary Modigliani in our current exhibition happens to have, rather than a modern frame, a magnificent 18thcentury antique frame. Of course, there are limits to framing: you can’t put a bad painting in a great frame and expect it to 75

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be transformed into a great painting. To continue the analogy, we want our location here on Park Avenue and 57th Street to be the perfect frame for the art. We try to replicate the look of our gallery at the major art fairs, such as Art Basel Miami Beach and TEFAF Maastricht, again to provide the “perfect frame” for our paintings. In the virtual world, our website is the “frame.” So you decided to redo your graphic identity and website. What made you decide to go with exhibit-E? About four years ago, we had two significant changes at Hammer. We moved the gallery into its present location on Park Avenue and the co-director of the gallery decided to retire, resulting in my becoming sole director of Hammer Galleries. These changes gave me the opportunity to rethink the direction in which we were going and decide if we wanted to perhaps change a bit. So we focused on upgrading the physical space and the gallery’s identity as a whole. With the website, I noticed that every time I received an elegantly designed e-announcement from another gallery, I’d look at the bottom and see the exhibit-E logo. And when I visited websites that I felt had a beautifully organized layout, I was not surprised to find that they had been designed by exhibit-E. This literally happened dozens of times. So eventually it dawned on me that perhaps I too should call exhibit-E. So once you decided to work with the people at exhibit-E what was the actual process like? Were they able to meet your needs? The process was great. Going into it, my one concern was that most of their clients seemed to be contemporary galleries. The 78

websites had a certain look, often showcasing these minimalist, airplane-hangar-like spaces. But Hammer is a more traditional gallery, specializing in Impressionist and Modern Masters, so I wasn’t sure if exhibit-E was the right fit for us. When I first talked with Billy and Dan, they invited me to come down to their offices so they could show me design options on their computers, but I said, “No thank you, you need to come up here. I want you to see the space, see the art, see what we do, and then, based on that, we can talk a little bit about the look and the feel we’re going for.” And so that’s what we did. The conversation we had was extremely productive. The fact that it was not their typical project only made them all the more excited. Which came first, the rebranding or the website? We knew from the outset that we wanted to do both, but as a practical matter we first redesigned our stationery, our business cards, picked new fonts, new logos, etc. This had to be done first because the website would be based on the new look and fonts and so forth. I remember when the design team came up for the first meeting, we brought together the entire staff, and the designers put about 50 different business cards in different sizes with different fonts and compositions on a table in front of us. The first meeting was probably an hour and a half of looking at fonts and talking about style and talking about how it relates to the artwork. Then we honed it down and finally we came up with something we were happy with. It was only after that we started talking about the design of the website and what we wanted our new look to be.

Once all the design decisions had been made, both for your re-branding and your website, how did the launch of the site go? And how did your public receive it? The most difficult parts of the process for us were the stylistic choices, both for the re-branding and the redesigning of the website. Once we gave Dan and his team the green light, they took care of everything, all the behind-the-scenes work. It was very smooth. The launch was seamless, easy, a piece of cake. And your longtime clients, did they notice the difference? Yes, we continue to get great feedback from longtime clients as well as great comments from new clients. In fact, just two days ago, I had a call from Asia in which I was offered a major painting. I eventually asked the caller what had made the sellers think of us, and the answer was twofold: we had been recommended by someone I had done business with many years ago, but also, the gentleman said, “we sat down and pulled up your website and were just so impressed—with the work you had on exhibition and the notable sales that you’ve made in the past.” And then he added, “And the website was so easy to use and to navigate—it was a real pleasure. So we decided that you would be the right gallery to handle the work.” I immediately called Dan to ask him if it had actually been him on the line, disguising his voice. But all joking aside, the design and website are everything we had hoped for and the call was a great validation of the choices we had made. Can you speak more to what makes your website special? One big part of the website is our virtual tour. I should say that this is not a feature from exhibit-E but rather something 80

we developed, prior to working with exhibit-E that has now become synonymous with Hammer. My feeling has always been that the reproductions of artworks that are on most websites don’t really give you much of a sense of the works. A few years ago when we were exhibiting at the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, our booth was photographed and put on their website as a virtual tour. Though it has the feel of a video, it is actually produced using panoramic photography and special software. It allows you to see the framed paintings hanging on the wall, as well as the gallery and the furniture, which gives more of a sense of the scale. Once the rooms have been photographed, the company we work with uses special software to drop high-resolution images of the works into the frames. It looks spectacular and our clients love it. This completely elevates the level of the picture. Someone recently asked me, “Aren’t you afraid that the virtual tour is so good that people won’t bother coming into the gallery?” Seeing a painting online will never replace the experience of seeing the work in person, but we want the online experience to be good enough to make the viewer want to visit the gallery to see the actual painting. We certainly could have gone with an off-the-shelf template for a fraction of what we ended up spending. But we wanted the best possible design and we wanted it to be for the long term. It’s OK if it doesn’t lead to an immediate sale. That’s why we went with exhibit-E, and by the way, that’s also why we went with responsive design. I was just going to ask you how you felt about responsive design, which, to clarify for readers, is an approach to website design that 81

www.hammergalleries.com on the iPad

www.hammergalleries.com on the iPhone

addresses the problem of adapting websites for smartphones and tablets—a single website solution that works on all devices. Dan said, “Look, this is not something you can add later, so I’d strongly recommend that you do it now: everyone looks at things on mobile devices these days, whether it’s a phone or an iPad.” He really pushed me to do it, and I’m glad he did. Just yesterday, I was looking at our website on my new iPad and was amazed how easy it was to navigate. On the iPad, the site used to be somewhat erratic. Now it’s just like looking at it on a regular computer. I think that ties back to your commitment to brand consistency. If your gallery didn’t have responsive design, someone on a mobile device would have a totally different—and much worse — sense of what the gallery is like than someone on a computer because the functionality is so frustrating. Yes. Exactly. You just mentioned iPads. Can you talk a little bit about what impact they’ve had on your business? An iPad is a fantastic tool for an art fair. In the old days, we would bring big notebooks filled with documents — provenances, catalogue raisonné xeroxes, certificates of authenticity, condition reports. Now all that’s on the iPad, and the whole process is a pleasure. At an art fair, you have thousands of people coming through. They’re visiting hundreds of booths—if you have 30 seconds of someone’s attention, you’re lucky. Having everything at your fingertips is invaluable. If someone wants a condition report or a high-res photo, we can email it as we’re talking. If someone wants to see works 84

that are back in the gallery, we can call them up right then and there. Something else that we do with an iPad at art fairs is a bit of an innovation of ours: we had our framer create a special iPad frame that we can hang on the wall to show works that are on view back at our gallery in New York. Or we can use it to play a slideshow of period photographs of the artist in his or her studio. An interesting thing happened the first time we used it, when we inaugurated our new gallery space with a one-man Renoir exhibition which we also toured to several fairs. We ran a slideshow on our framed iPad with great old photos of Renoir and people were just mesmerized. Then at one fair, we didn’t have the wall space, so instead we took the iPad out of its beautiful gold frame and put it on a plastic stand that I had picked up at the airport. But even though it was just as easy to watch, no one looked at it—the same exact slideshow, but no one looked at it. Yet when it was framed on the wall, everyone was mesmerized. This speaks to how we react to presentation. I computerized Hammer in 1985 and over the last 30 years all sorts of ideas, related to technology, computers, and the art world have been pitched to me. What I’ve learned is that you have to be very selective because a lot of the ideas originate on the tech side. Someone who has a great software background says, “I have this program that does x, y, and z in these other industries, so naturally it should work for the art world.” And that’s not always the case. For example, Facebook and Twitter may be wonderful for some businesses but for our gallery at this stage they’re insignificant. 85

I should add that our Web presence hasn’t replaced the printed catalogues that we’ve always produced. In fact, we’re printing more elaborate, more beautiful and more expensive catalogues than ever before. Of course, we could rely on digital “e-catalogues”—the distribution cost is essentially zero—but we feel they can’t replace the experience of sitting down with a beautifully printed full-color catalogue. Even this interview is being printed in one of exhibit-E’s annual books. In addition to our exhibition catalogues, for the last several years we have been producing hardcover coffee-table books for our clients for the works they acquire from our gallery. There are now such economies of scale in online production that the same companies that turn your vacation photos into hardcover albums can be used to make beautiful, customized coffee-table art books for our clients. In the old days, we had a black notebook with xeroxes and plastic sleeves filled with documents. Today we scan everything—including related works and biographical material, all the literature regarding the works — and we make a unique hardcover book for just about every major painting we handle. And then you can order them as needed right? Well that’s the beauty of it—you don’t have to print a thousand. We literally print two at a time. So if we give them away to clients we just print two more. And you can change the book— you can update it easily. Yes, if our research turns up some new and interesting information, we can easily update the book and reprint it. Invariably a copy of the book ends up on the coffee table of the purchaser. In fact, these books have become so popular with our clients 86

that sometimes a client will insist that a custom-made book on his or her new painting is part of the deal. Let’s stick with the world of art fairs. Do you feel like the website and the tools help at the fairs beyond people coming in and browsing the iPad? Yes. We’re now thinking a lot about how we can use some of these new extra tools on our website that we never had before. For example, I recently had a meeting with the former curator of a major museum. I was talking to him about doing a video for one of the paintings we’re going to take to Maastricht— we wanted to do something special, in addition to the wall card with an essay. But we can’t put a video in our booth because it’s too crowded there, and it would be too noisy in our booth. And for our staff, listening to a three-minute video loop for eight hours a day for the 11 days of the Maastricht fair would be a bit too much. Then it occurred to us that we can put the video in the news section of the website. So when we’re talking to people in front of the work, we can say, “Later when you’re at lunch or you’re back in your hotel room, please watch this video.” It’s the kind of thing I want to do a lot more of. That gives an added value, doesn’t it? Being able to present the backstory of works in video form? Both for potential buyers and for people who aren’t buying but want to be educated about art: It gives them history about a world, and a business, we love. In the discussion I had with this curator, again vis-à-vis the long term, I said, “I don’t want the focus to be on selling the painting. I want this to be a scholarly piece. Only do it if you are excited about the work and think it will be fun to talk 87

about.” We’re not simply looking to make a quick sale. We want to expand the web experience for our clients. Another area we’re interested in exploring is how to use the “private room.” When you get paintings at this level, many of which are in the multi-million-dollar price range, you have conflicting goals: on the one hand, you want to keep things very quiet, very exclusive, to show important works one by one to your major clients. On the other hand, so many people view our website and/or portals that we advertise on, such as Artnet, and we don’t want to miss out on someone who may be searching for just the kind of work we have. By using the private room, I might meet someone at a fair and either open up the room for them right there, or I can say, “Here’s a password. This is a very important painting and if you want to show it to your spouse later over dinner you can view it in this private room.” We’re hoping to set up a few of them before we go to Maastricht. We spend a lot of time trying to get everything right. We sell very high-end, museum-quality artworks. They are not inexpensive, and it’s rare that someone just walks in and says, “I love it. I’ll take it.” You have to work hard every day at finding great works of art, at researching them, at presenting them in their best possible light, and at establishing relationships with clients— the website can help in a variety of ways with all of that. It’s important to get it right.

Hammer Galleries rose to prominence in the early 1930s, when it exhibited the world-famous Russian Imperial Easter eggs by court jeweler Karl Fabergé—seen for the first time in the West. For more than 50 years Hammer has focused on 19th- and 20th-century European and American Masters. Exhibitions at the gallery have included extraordinary works by European artists such as Bouguereau, Corot, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, and Chagall as well as American artists such as Chase, Wyeth, Cassatt, Hassam, and Sargent. View more at www.hammergalleries.com

pictured on page 72: Howard Shaw, President and Director, and Iris Krenzis Cohen, Vice President, seated in front of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani (Italian, 1884–1920), Jeune fille assise, les cheveux dénoues (Jeune fille en bleu), 1919, oil on canvas, 39K x 25G inches, (100 x 64.1 cm), Signed upper right: Modigliani.

Video and the Internet

Today even the most casual Web user watches video content online via sites like nytimes.com, cnn.com, or facebook.com. You see it almost everywhere. And not surprisingly, YouTube is now the second most popular search engine, after Google. In short, using your computer or smartphone to watch videos has become commonplace. Dozens of websites specializing in user-submitted videos sprouted up seemingly overnight. Led by YouTube and artcentric sites like Vimeo, the popularity of these websites has spread at a viral pace. The success of YouTube and Vimeo (two 91

of our favorite options for video uploading), and the fact that so many consumers are comfortable viewing video content online, presents enormous opportunities for galleries. It is easy to upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo, and both sites offer a way to embed the uploaded videos onto your own website, where they can be viewed by anyone with a click of the mouse. To use a video-hosting site like YouTube or Vimeo, all you have to do is go to the site and open a free account. Once you’ve done this, uploading video files is easy: • Click on the Upload Video button. • Select a video file to upload from your computer. • Click OK, and the file is uploaded and then automatically converted from its original format for web viewing. • Give the video a title, a description, and a “tag” (a keyword that describes the video so it can be found by other Web users). The process is almost as simple as adding an attachment to an email. Anyone who has experience adding photos to sites like Facebook or Flickr will be comfortable adding video content to YouTube or Vimeo. Viewing videos is even simpler. Just type a keyword (or keywords) into the “search” box prominently displayed at the top of the site, and pages and pages of thumbnailed videos will 92

be displayed. Clicking on a video takes the user to a page where the video automatically loads, with buttons to pause, rewind, and control the volume and a drag bar that navigates through the video itself. To share the video, a URL is included, as well as HTML code that can be used to “embed” the video on a Web page. The videos are displayed in HTML5, eliminating any need to have a multitude of plug-ins or players on a machine and are mobile-ready for tablet and smart phone viewing. Vimeo is popular with the creative community and has a less commercial interface, while YouTube is more mainstream, with a much larger share of the market. YouTube has a file limit of ten minutes. Vimeo allows videos of longer duration and offers better video quality, two attributes that result in good artistic content for a more discerning and creative audience. It’s the embedding function that has made YouTube and Vimeo such a phenomenon, as it allows videos hosted on these sites to be played on any website. With the embedding feature, a blogger, for example, can simply paste the “embed” code into his website and the video will appear, complete with pause and playback controls. This allows for quick and easy “viral” transmission of videos, as “hot” videos are posted repeatedly on other blogs, websites, message boards, and Facebook pages. Whereas most photo-sharing sites are used to share photos among friends and families, videosharing sites have become video repositories for everything from lost TV shows, current events, curious personal creations, old music videos— all the detritus of pop culture’s history. Pretty much anything that’s ever been captured on film makes it onto YouTube or Vimeo, and the content library is ever growing. 93

In an incredibly short amount of time (even by Web standards), video-sharing sites, especially YouTube, have had a profound impact on the Internet. Aside from the billiondollar deals and piquing the interest of marketers, the sharing of videos itself has become a medium of communication. Web users express themselves by choosing certain videos to place on their sites; viewers can comment on a video in blogs or on YouTube itself. Telling someone to go “YouTube” a clip has already become part of almost every Web user’s lexicon.

What are some of the implications of video for art world websites?

The advent of online video has opened up enormous opportunities for art world websites. Whether featuring their own video art collections online or using the phenomenon of video-sharing sites as a way to promote the gallery, artists, and exhibitions, online video gives galleries a powerful and wide-reaching medium for interacting with Internet users. All galleries can do this, not just galleries with video art collections. Websites like YouTube and Vimeo make it simple for galleries to upload videos of art pieces to the Internet and quickly share them with the art-loving public. By selecting and uploading short clips and samples of video art pieces to YouTube or Vimeo, and tagging them properly, a gallery can use the widespread reach of these host sites as a way to help build traffic to the gallery site. Since a Google search often turns up YouTube as a first link, this is a way for galleries to take advantage of YouTube’s high search engine results.

Internally, galleries can use the technology behind sites like YouTube and Vimeo as a quick way to catalogue and feature their video art collections on their own websites. A gallery could host its videos on YouTube or Vimeo and then use the embedding feature to encode the video directly into a webpage. There’s no need for complicated coding and customizing of a video player when someone else has done all the work for you. Security is a concern for galleries that don’t want their video art to be taken off a site and distributed without authorization. While the low-quality and limited “artistic” value of online video cannot compare with the impact of an installation or a gallery setting, galleries should still take steps to ensure that their content is protected. One idea is to select only excerpts or short clips from video pieces and bookend them with information about an exhibition, a gallery, or an artist. Brief samples of a video piece can only create more interest about the artist and the gallery itself. Galleries should not ignore video content as a way to build gallery awareness and Web traffic. Gallery tours, artist video interviews, documentaries, commentary, event footage—all are content ideas that can be realized and distributed with online video. Galleries can generate their own video pieces, feature them as content on their own website, and distribute them throughout the Internet via YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sites. Galleries can also reach out to art blogs and other online media to spread the word about the new pieces and videos. The biggest challenge for a gallery seriously considering producing original video content is the production process itself. Generating finished, high-quality video is a multi-step process,

from scripting and shooting to post-production. Expertise and experience are required, skills that might not necessarily be found in-house at a gallery. But any gallery that can add this type of content to their website will earn immediate dividends in terms of increased visibility, exposure, and buzz. After all, high-quality video has the potential to capture a viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention far beyond that of flat images and text. The explosive growth in popularity of YouTube, Vimeo, and other sites has made Web video virtually ubiquitous. Now is the time for galleries to decide what role video will play in their websites.

Tom Powel, Photographer for the Art World Tom Powel, founder of Tom Powel Imaging, Inc., provides photography, video, and related imaging solutions to the art world. Based in the heart of New York’s Chelsea art district, Tom has worked with many of the world’s top galleries, museums, foundations, artists and collectors. He has been the subject of numerous feature articles, including a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal. Interviewed by Dan Miller.

When you were in college you worked as a studio assistant for the artist Philip Pearlstein, is that correct? Yes, that was a great internship. It allowed me to experience a real practicing artist’s life, to learn what the challenges and opportunities were, and it was a way to explore and help

me understand what I really wanted in my life. It was so gratifying—I mean, I literally spent from 8:00 in the morning until midnight, five days a week, working for this guy. So, you were an intern? Yeah, I would set up his modeling sessions every morning— he had one from 8:00 in the morning until noon. And then afternoons were spent doing chores and errands and office stuff—studio organization. And in the evening, from 8:00 til midnight. He had two separate modeling sessions each day. So, he basically was working on ten different works of art at any one given time—all from life models. So what I would do is make sure that all of his props, all of his models, all of his tools, paints, canvases, et cetera were organized and set up. Once that was done, I could then set up my own materials and work. So while I was doing this I had the opportunity to do my own work right next to this guy—this legend of an artist—during the sessions. Sounds like a phenomenal opportunity. How did this internship come about? I was a senior at Ohio Wesleyan and they have an intern program—a lot of small midwestern colleges operate out of an organization called the Great Lakes Colleges Association, which sets up professional internships for juniors and seniors in various cities around the country. It’s part of their “theory to practice” philosophy. Where did you live while you were interning? I lived at the Windermere Hotel in the West End; Pearlstein’s 100

studio was on 88th and Columbus. This was back in ‘78 before gentrification up there. It was a great experience, and a way for me to realize my potential but also to face the challenge of what it takes to be an artist full time as a career path. And quite frankly, it freaked me out. Pearlstein didn’t paint from photographs? No, he’s all from real life models. How did you get interested in photography? My interest in photography started when I was seven years old and my father handed me my first camera, an old Leica, and then from there I got into doing black and white printing. I had a little lab in a bathroom next to my bedroom. It was great. My father was an inventor, so he always nurtured that part of me. The painting came much later in my life, but photography was always the basis of how I see. So, you had aspirations to be a painter but you loved photography? At that point in my life, in my college years, painting and photography were separate in some ways. The immediacy of photography was what made it so appealing—the fact that I could work on compositional elements without laboring over a single object or project for months on end. And in fact I had a self-portrait project in painting that took me two semesters to complete, and it almost killed me—it was one of those things that kept getting better and better as I worked on it, so I’d have to go back and re-work it. And it just became this really frustrating process, so photography was the relief to that tedium. 101

Above: Two sample spreads from Remembering Henryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Show, a 240-page fully-illustrated catalogue published by The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, 2010, on the occasion of their inaugural exhibition. Photography by Tom Powel Imaging. Designed by danmillerdesign.com

In the end, I chose to focus my photography on the art world because I am an artist, I have an affinity for it, and I am able to see and do new work every day. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the subject that interests me.

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Did you start to think of photography as a possible career path during your college years? Yeah, I mean, it always was a focus professionally. Were you thinking of survival or were you worried that you might not make it as a painter? Well, once the Pearlstein experience was over I was struck with the dilemma of like, “Can I do this? Can I be an artist?” As for photography, I think I was more afraid of how much I liked it than whether I could make a living at it. I loved it so much that I felt like this wasn’t practical. How could something you love be something you actually pursue as a career? I mean, honestly, when you’re that age you’re taught all your life that your job should be miserable because it makes money. And it didn’t take me long to realize that that was just a stupid philosophy. In the end, I chose to focus my photography on the art world because I am an artist, I have an affinity for it, and I am able to see and do new work every day. It’s the subject that interests me. How did you get started working with galleries? It’s funny thinking about how long I have been doing this. I mean, we just finished an amazing and challenging project for The Brant Foundation with over 200 image captures. I love doing this and I remember how I got started. I showed up at Metro Pictures one day and said, “Do you need any photography?” As luck would have it, they had this really difficult piece that they couldn’t get a good shot of and they had a photo challenge going on to see who could come up with the best solution. So that was my first job. This was 1986. I 104

went down and did the project, a plexiglass sculpture in the shape of a red “O” from a Mobile sign, a gas station sign—just the “O” on its side, tilted on a 2 x 4 laid on the floor with a fluorescent light behind it. And they couldn’t get a good balance between the object and the environment, so I figured out how to do that. It was challenging. I like that story a lot because it goes back to your father’s influence on you in terms of solving technical problems. You’re right. It was rewarding work, and that fact is what had me gravitating toward doing professional photography for the art world—the work was interesting and challenging, not at all routine. It wasn’t long before you became known as the go-to guy for difficult shoots. Can you give me an example of a recent assignment that was both technically challenging and rewarding for you as a photographer? I was challenged recently to produce a photo of an artist’s studio floor. Now, he has this great studio in Long Island City, and we’d shoot all his paintings out there where he paints. The studio is about 24’ x 30’—that’s one room in a gigantic 10,000 square foot building that’s like a giant warehouse. The studio is basically covered with plywood panels, 4’ x 8’ sheets of plywood that are seamed with autobody Bondo, like a grout almost, and it’s got cigarettes and paint and all kinds of blots and stuff ground into the surfaces. And he wanted to create a photo of the floor that was large enough so he could create literally a 1:1 reproduction in scale of his floor. Now, there’s no camera, even if you split it up into six or eight images, 105

that’s high-res enough to give you an image that’s that big. Plus, to scaffold that would be impossible. I thought, “Okay…” and I figured out that if we shot it in small segments, and then stitched those together in Photoshop, that might work. So I tested out the idea of how I could brace the camera properly, right? And what we ended up doing was just shooting with a Canon EOS 5D, because we can do a live view from the camera itself, and line it up according to a grid. So we gridded out the whole room, both ways (x and y) but only at the edges of the wall, just a mark. Then we’d stretch a piece of blue tape across, between the two marks. And we’d run the tripod down every two feet incrementally, all the way to the end. And we’d line it up for that vertical line, and you could always adjust the camera using its live view function. It took us 185 shots. You’ve done a lot of work with galleries and, of course, museums and artists. Any words of wisdom to pass on to galleries especially? They have to be more conscious of the fact that their exhibition history is the most valuable thing they have. And very few of them allow the viewer to really explore that in a significant way. Galleries spend a lot of time, energy and money putting on exhibitions and after thirty days they’re gone. So galleries depend on their websites to archive their exhibitions. And the historical aspect of keeping these exhibitions alive on the Web, it’s priceless. The past is the future, see what I’m saying? How you preserve it and present it on the Web is critical to a gallery. And mostly what we’re seeing are photographs—still images— that just don’t do justice to the exhibition. If all you’ve got is bad photography, what can you do with it when the exhibition has ended? So I always advise galleries to budget so they have 106

the resources to properly document an exhibition. Get the high quality still images you need. Animate it, create something that’s more dynamic, so that when people go and visit this stuff, they’re looking at it as if it’s something that’s happening now. View more at www.tompowelimaging.com

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Fair Art A Story by A.M. Homes

Cindy Stubenstock is trading up—at a recent auction, she flipped two Gursky’s, an early Yuskavage and her husband’s bonus and was on the phone later live from London topping the bidding on a rare Picasso etching that looks, “beautiful over the fireplace.” “Gives whole new meaning to up in smoke,” the cryptic British auctioneer mumbled under his breath. Now Cindy and her Scarsdale sisterhood—aka the ladies who linger at lunch—are on the tarmac at Teterboro, wandering from plane to plane. “There never used to be so many,” one says. “Do we really need to take two planes?” 108

“Well, there are six of us and I just hate being crowded, and besides what if I want to leave early.” They all nod, knowing the feeling. “Just the thought of being trapped somewhere makes me nervous—does anyone have anything—a little blue, a little yellow?” “I’ve got Ativan.” “I’ll take it.” “We’re going to Miami, it’s not the rain forest, not darkest Peru, you can get a commercial flight out any time you want—just call JetBlue,” one of the women says. And the others look at her horrified, aghast, shocked that she can even say the words commercial flight so easily, without pause. Flying private is one of the perks of being who they are; it’s why they put up with so much. NO airport security. “Soon that will change, they’re going to have scented dogs everywhere.” “It’s not scented dogs, it’s sniffing dogs. Scented dogs would be like soaps, verbena, vanilla, Matchu Pitchu.” “Why do you always correct me? That’s just like what my children do. I’m an old woman—leave me alone.” “You’re 48, you’re not old.” And then there is silence. “Which plane is it? He keeps trading them in. I never know which one is ours.” “She calls it trading them in—he calls it fractional ownership,” one of the women whispers. “G4, Falcon, Citation, Hawker, Learjet—remember when they were all ‘Learjets’? Remember when the word ‘Learjet’ used to mean something?” 109

“Who is that bald man in the wheelchair? He looks familiar— do I know him from somewhere?” “Is it Philip Johnson?” “Philip Johnson died two years ago.” “Really?” “Yes.” “That’s so sad.” “Is that Yule Brenner?” “It’s someone with cancer.” “What’s he doing here?” “He’s getting an Angel Flight back to where he lives,” one of the ground crew says. “People donate flights —for those who are basically too sick to travel.” “Oh, I don’t think I could ever do that—I couldn’t have a sick person on the plane—I mean what about the germs?” “I don’t normally think of cancer as contagious.” “You never know,” she runs her hand through her hair— which she gels in the morning with Purell—prophylactically. The group divides; Sally Stubenstock, the society sister of Cindy, and her “friend,” Tasha, the yoga instructor, go on their own plane. “We want alone time,” Tasha says. “She wants to downward dog me at 10,000 feet.” Sally says. “It’s gross,” someone whispers. “What do you care—they’re not asking you to do it.” “Women kiss better than men—it’s a fact.” “How would you know?” “Because one night Wallis (the weird woman who has a man’s last name for her first name) Wallingford planted one right on me.” 110

“Was she drunk?” “I don’t think so. It felt very good.” “Better than a man?” She nods, “Softer, more thoughtful.” Cindy Stubenstock puts her fingers in her ears and hums loudly and sings, “This is something I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know-oh-o.” The conversation stops. They climb aboard. The pilot pulls the door closed and locks it. The women take their seats and then take other seats. They move around the cabin until they are comfortable. They put all their fur coats together on one seat. “Where are you staying? The Raleigh, the Delano, the Biltmore?” “I’m staying at Pinky and Paulie’s.” “Really?” Cindy asks. Her friend nods. “I’ve never stayed at someone’s house,” Cindy Stubenstock confesses. “How do you do it? When you get there—what do you do—how do you check in?” “It’s like going for dinner or cocktails—you knock on the door and hopefully someone answers.” “Does someone take your bag? Do you tip them? And what if you can’t sleep—what if you need to get up and walk around? Do you have your own bathroom—I can’t stay anyplace without my own bathroom even with my husband. If you pee, do you flush? What if someone hears you? It just seems so stressful.” “When you were growing up did you ever go on a sleepover? “Just once—I got homesick and my father came and got me—it seemed like the middle of the night but my parents always used to tease me—it was really only about 11 pm.” 111

“When I go to someone’s house—I bring a clean sheet,” another woman chimes in. “And remake the bed?” “No, I wrap myself in it—do you know how infrequently most blankets are laundered—including hotel blankets—think of the hundreds of people who have used the same blanket.” “What’s for dinner tonight?” someone asks. “A big corned beef sandwich. That’s what I go to Miami for—Wolfie’s. I get sick every time —but I can’t resist. It reminds me of my grandparents—and of my childhood.” “I thought you were a vegetarian?” “I am.” “By the way, whatever happened with that Brice Marden painting you were trying to buy?” “It’s still pending—we haven’t completed our interview.” “Some of the galleries now have a vetting process—there is a company that will interview potential buyers, about everything from their assets, hobbies, and their intentions for their collections—and once that’s done—they schedule a home visit.” “Exactly, we still need the home visit, but CeeCee has been so busy with the re-do that she won’t let anyone from the gallery into the house.” “What are you doing?” “We’re going from night to day—swapping all the black paintings for white, we sold the Motherwells and the Stills and now she’s bringing in Ryman, Richter and a Whiteread bookcase.” “Sounds great—very relaxing—no color at all.” “I heard you bought a Renoir in London.” 112

“We had a good year. I like it so much I want to fuck it.” “When we got our Rothko—we had sex on the floor in front of it.” “Those were the days….” “And when we got the Pollock.” “Well you got that really big one.” “Fairly big.” “The room is so large it’s all relative.” “Do you remember that time we were all on that art tour and they let us touch a few things—Stanley stroked the Birth of Venus and got excited?” “Stanley the seeing eye horse—or Stanley your husband?” “Stanley, the human. He was mortified.” “I thought it was cute.” “Where is Stanley this weekend?” “Stan, the man, is playing golf and Stanley the seeing eye horse is having his teeth cleaned this weekend and so the society gave me a stick.” She holds up a white cane, “Like this is going to do me any good. I’ve got a docent meeting me for the fair—a young curator.” “God, I remember when Stanley, the horse, tried to mount the stuffed pony that your parents sent your son….” “We were all there—the Chanukah party.” “It plagued my son—the sight of Stanley trying to “hop” the pony. He said hop—instead of hump—it was soo sweet.” “There are people who are into that—stuffed animals. ‘Plushies’ they call them.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Sex parties!” “And they invite stuffed animals?” 113

“Speaking of animal behavior—are we preparing for takeoff yet?” “I’m sorry Mrs. Stubenstock,” the pilot says, “There’s military aircraft in the area—and the airspace has been closed down.” Oh now, is the President coming to town again? Thank god we’re leaving—he always blocks traffic.” “We’re third in line for takeoff as soon as the air opens.” “We usually fly on Larry’s plane, he redecorates it for every flight. Different art work depending on where we’re going. Something for LA, something for Basel, something for Venice.” “That’s because he’s trying to sell you something.” “No, I don’t think so. We always ask and he tells us that whatever it is we want—it’s not for sale.” “That’s how he does it—that’s how he gets you.” “Did you hear about Sarah and Steve’s Warhol worries?” “No what?” “Turns out their Warhols aren’t Warhols—they’re knockoffs like cheap Louis Vuittons on Canal Street. “But they have Polaroids of Andy signing the pictures. Andy and Steve standing together while Andy signed them.” “Apparently he would sign anything, but that didn’t mean that he made it.” “They were banking on those pictures—literally.” “Well you know what they say—you should never be dependent on your art collection to do anything for you that you can’t do for yourself.”

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“Are you invited to the VIP party?” “The VIP parties aren’t the good parties—there are no invites for the real parties, you just have to know where they are.” “I told Susie that I would go to the dinner but only as long as I didn’t have to sit next to an artist—I never know what to say to them.” “I always ask them if they’re starving—and they never get it,” Cindy says. “I’ve noticed that most of the younger artists are carnivores. Remember when artists only ate things like sprouts and bags of ‘greens’ that they carried with them. Now they all eat meat—it’s all post-Damien.” “Like how?” “Don’t you remember Damien Hirst’s first big piece was really very small. It was a piece of steak that his father had choked on. Young Damien gave his father the Heimlich maneuver and the steak came flying out of his mouth and he could breathe again. Damien saved the piece of steak and put it in a jar of formaldehyde that he got from school and called it I Saved My Father’s Life—Now What Will Become of Us. “I never heard that story.” Cindy Stubenstock shrugs, “It’s famous. I think the piece is in the Saatchi collection in London.” ** A.M. Homes is the author of numerous novels and short stories, most recently, The Mistress’s Daughter. View more at www.amhomesbooks.com.

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Web-Based Gallery Management

While everyone predicted that using the World Wide Web would become an important part of everyday life, has anyone not been surprised by how fast—and how profoundly—the Web has been integrated into almost everything we do? Think about some of the pre-Web habits of regular life. Ordering take-out from a restaurant. Paying bills. Checking movie times. Keeping yellow pages and phone books around. Is there any activity that hasn’t been replaced, or at the very least made easier or quicker, through some sort of website or app? 117

As the Web has become accepted by the art world, the speed of that migration has accelerated. The most profound shift is happening on your very own computer. All those applications you installed—the ones you brought home in the big boxes with the thick manuals—are finding a new home on the Web. Word processing, spreadsheets, even photo editing and manipulation—all of these applications are being adapted and transformed into “Web applications.” Dramatically less expensive than the regular programs (in some cases free), easy to use, and instantly updated, Web applications are causing people to rethink the way they use their computers. Now these changes are affecting art galleries in the most important place: the inventory-management software that sits at the heart of a gallery’s operations. And as anyone who has worked with the existing management programs knows, this upgrade could not have come a moment too soon. While galleries have become significantly more wired over the last few years—email, websites, and social media are a given now—the management software is still lagging behind the times. Difficult to learn, complicated to use, prohibitively expensive, and essentially immobile, these types of programs have been practically demanding to be revamped and simplified. For a gallery that would like to make things easier on itself from a computer and technical standpoint, transforming the inventorymanagement software into a Web application would have an immediate impact on productivity. exhibit-E’s galleryManager is one of the first software solutions to look at gallery inventory management exclusively from a Web perspective. This is not a Web add-on to some landlocked PC program; this is pure online gallery management, 118

accessed entirely through a Web browser and programmed with the latest in secure website technology. exhibit-E has already set the pace for creating top-of-the-line art gallery websites, all of which are administered by the galleries themselves using a Web interface. Now exhibit-E has applied the same model to the creation of galleryManager: providing users with an easy-to-master solution that doesn’t require extensive upfront training or a hefty manual. Moving inventory-management software to the Web opens up entirely new ways of working, both in and outside of the gallery. Under the old model, the programs were installed on a limited number of computers in the gallery. To work on the program, one had to sit at the actual computer where it was installed, or employ a cumbersome solution to access it remotely. This arrangement limited mobility and accessibility; for a gallerist with a busy travel schedule, it meant always having to update a laptop with the gallery software before hitting the road. Under a Web-based approach, the software can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet with an up-todate browser. That means a gallerist can operate the software at an art fair, at a client’s office or home, or from the comfort of his or her own bedroom. And every authorized user has access to the software in its entirety—you can do the same amount of work at an Internet café in Zurich as you can at your desk in the office. All the information of a gallery—the inventory, the contacts, the transaction history—is instantly accessible with just a few clicks. There might be some skeptics who think that gallerymanagement software won’t work right if it doesn’t come on a compact disc along with a hefty manual and price tag: 119

there must be a catch; there must be something wrong with it. But think about the evolution that has taken place with Web-based applications. You use this type of software anytime you take part in online banking or managing your credit card online. Consider the evolution of email, which for a long time was landlocked, tied down to whichever computer the emails were delivered to. If you wanted to check your email, or get to your old email, you had to have access to that particular computer. But with webmail—meaning sites like Gmail and Hotmail—inboxes can be accessed and checked online from any computer, anywhere, with Internet access. Important documents or emails that were buried in an inbox on your home computer can now be easily accessed if they are in a Gmail inbox. It’s not as if the current boxed programs on the market don’t do the right job for galleries. To say that these programs have already helped streamline gallery operations and reduce redundant work would be putting it mildly. But they require a lot of investment, both financially and personally. These applications tend to be very expensive, with prices for the best programs running into the thousands of dollars. On top of that, they might require the purchase of additional software. Some of them are not compatible with both Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Setting these programs up can be time-consuming, and typically they must be customized for the gallery installing them. And since this is a specialized and relatively small market, getting the users up to speed must be done without the benefit of third-party help; there are no “Art Gallery Management Software for Dummies” books out there. 120

When done right, Web-based gallery management can save a lot of time and prevent a lot of frustration for gallerists who donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feel comfortable studying manuals or taking classes in order to perform routine functions. Web-based management is a broader, easier way to approach gallery operations, and it is a concept that is likely to spread quickly. After all, who doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like making things easier on themselves?

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galleryManager

galleryManager founder Dan Miller and Senior Account Director Billy Maker discuss exhibit-Eâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new online gallery inventory-management system, the origins of the product, and how it compares to the existing offerings on the market. Interviewed by Michael Gwertzman.

Where did the idea for this product come from? We felt we could reduce the headaches that we found many of our clients experience with their old inventory management software. Knowing that their software wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a natural tool, we knew we could make a big contribution. The more we looked into it, the more we found that everyone wanted something 123

that was easier to use, something that didn’t require taking courses to understand, and something that eliminated the need for an in-house server. We realized we had the capabilities to do all that and seamlessly integrate with their websites. So it made sense for us to do this. You guys are known primarily as a design company, as a Web-design company. Has it been a challenge to have your clients think of you in a different way? The gallery inventory-management systems that are already out there come from the technology end of things—trying to force good design on top of the offerings. We’re coming from the opposite end; we’re starting with great design and a good user interface in terms of how both our website and our admin pages function. We understand that really well, so we’re able to hide the complexity of the websites and the admin areas to the point where it’s so amazingly easy to teach someone how to use one of our website admins —people don’t even really think of it as a technology product. Our approach for galleryManager has been the same—the system was designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. Galleries don’t want to be bothered by tools or be hindered by the technology. They just want to get the job done. They want to be efficient and effective for their clients and their artists, and that’s what our focus has always been. How do you see this product being used? Is this going to become the hub of the gallery? By default, any inventory-management system will be at the center of the administrative hub of a gallery, whether it’s ArtBase, Art Systems, or some other system. But we are taking 124

www.gallerymanager.com 125

it a step further in terms of ease of use. Initially, galleries may replace their old inventory systems that are out there now. They might even be moving up from using Excel, or just having file folders filled with images or whatnot. They’ll now be able to store hi-res photos of artworks, contacts of people, invoices, and things like that, all in the same place. If they already have an exhibit-E website, they will be able to integrate it with galleryManager. Has it been difficult for you to get your head around things like accounting and inventory and other administrative functions, the kinds of things that galleries use the existing programs for? The challenge hasn’t been getting our head around these things. It has been to develop the features that galleries will use across the board. Since galleryManager is a software-asa-service [SaaS] platform, we can be very responsive to the galleries’ needs. Our approach has been to gather information from the galleries to make sure that whatever we do is beneficial and useful to everyone. That has been the advantage of having so many eager beta users. They have been providing us with so much valuable feedback and suggestions. And we have put all of the best ideas back into the system. So let’s talk about the offerings that are out there, without going into too many specifics. Do you think these programs traditionally have been a little needlessly complicated, or does that complexity serve a purpose? The existing programs are certainly complicated and that was our sole impetus for developing galleryManager—to eliminate complexity and streamline things. Most of the management 126

software that galleries currently use are application-based, and they can be limiting in terms of what you are able to do with them. On top of that, just getting to learn how to use them can take up a lot of time. You have to read manuals. You can even take classes and get instruction if you’d like. And we just felt that there wasn’t a need for all that complexity—to have such a steep learning curve in order to manage the administrative needs of a gallery. I know people sometimes look at something and see that it’s very complicated and difficult to learn and think, “Oh, well, this must be something very powerful and special.” Do you think galleries will bring that prejudice to what you guys are proposing here? No. This goes to the core of what we are trying to do as a company, which is get rid of all the complexities and make it so it’s really accessible technology, so you can use it without having any kind of training, without having to read through a manual. It’s an SaaS model which by nature is meant to be self-explanatory, and it has all the advantages of on-demand software—ease of use, easy access, free upgrades, and it’s always in sync across all devices. It just makes sense. We’ve been able to do that very well with our websites, and now we’re doing the same thing with galleryManager. So the hope is that people are not daunted by it, so that they look at it and say, ‘Oh, this is easy,’ and just jump right in. I know people get nervous about transferring data and migrating things. Have you thought about that? Will you be able to manage that process with galleryManager? We are export experts. If a gallery has an existing system, we can transfer the data. 127

New galleryManager iPad app

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Knowing how the galleryManager software works, what would you say are the strengths of the program itself ? Definitely ease of use. Reliability. You don’t have to worry about keeping a server on premises, you don’t have to deal with viruses, and your data is reliably backed up. With a normal computer, if something goes wrong, you could have lost your entire collection of data and images and invoices. And that certainly is not going to be an issue with galleryManager. You don’t have to pay for any upgrades. And it’s going to work seamlessly with your exhibit-E website. Hurricane Sandy revealed the fragile nature of location-based inventory management. Sandy was the unimaginable event that nobody wanted to believe could happen. But there were more than a few galleries that were caught unprepared, who did not take all art out of harm’s way, and who had not anticipated what a good soaking would do to their databases. With waterlogged servers and lost data, those galleries were out of commission. After Hurricane Sandy there was much cleaning up to do in Chelsea, but galleries also had to rethink how they store and manage their inventory database. Some of those galleries contacted us looking for a sustainable, long-term, Web-based solution. We got them into galleryManager. What about the mobility? Anyone who has switched to using something like webmail loves the ability to check their email anywhere. Right. You can do it anywhere. You’re not locked to one computer. If you’re at an art fair, if you are at Art Basel Miami and you want to show a selection of inventory to a client down there that you haven’t thought to bring photos of, you just log 130

After Hurricane Sandy there was much cleaning up to do in Chelsea, but galleries also had to rethink how they store and manage their inventory databases.

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right in from your iPad or computer and everything is right there. Or if you want to present a curated selection of inventory from galleryManager you can do that from your iPad or any other tablet or computer. Using the galleryManager iPad app you can view your selections of work online or offline. That feature doesn’t cost anything extra. It’s just part of any galleryManager account! All the information that’s associated with an individual piece of work, or artist, all the information about past clients you’ve worked with, the location of a work, the provenance. Or if you’re a gallery owner and your assistants are away for the day or on vacation and you need them to upload something, they can just hop right on and change it for you. It’s really like a one-stop shop for everything related to running a gallery. In terms of flexibility and mobility, this does sound like an extension of what you’ve already been able to do with exhibit-E. Exactly. It is just one more piece of functionality of the websites that we provide for the galleries. It fits in seamlessly, and it’s one less thing that the galleries have to worry about. Do you think the galleries are worried about that information being exposed, that information being hacked? We think that there’s probably a perception that stuff is exposed. But in reality, well, two points here. One, it’s in the cloud, which offers a much greater level of security, plus we’re doing daily granular backups, and we can roll back any account 14 days. But two, by having this information on our Web servers, we’re adding an extra layer of protection and reliability that some galleries just might not think of. A computer in 132

a gallery might not be as up to date on all the right patches and virus protection. We take all of those headaches out of the equation. It’s more secure than if you were on one of these programs in the gallery, especially when considering the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy. Our galleryManager clients had access to their inventory throughout the crisis. What do you think is next? What are the major things where you can say, “Well, let’s do this next”? One thing that we heard repeatedly from a number of our clients is that galleries needed an offline solution—a quick and easy way to present inventory, on the road, and offline because wi-fi at art fairs can be spotty at best. For galleries every second matters when presenting work. This is why we developed an iPad app for galleryManager. Our solution was simple, we are giving galleryManager users a way to select groups of artworks and information and send them directly to their iPad—no exporting or uploading files or jpegs—it’s automatically in sync with their galleryManager account. This is a much more fluid solution than anything that is currently offered, and the cost of those other systems is high—as much as $100 per month with a per iPad fee. We are offering it free with every galleryManager account. It just makes sense to us. You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get content onto your iPad. The iPad should be a natural extension of the gallery inventory management system and not some add on. What we’re going to do is keep listening to our clients and respond to their needs and demands as new things come up. The art world moves so fast, and there are so many new tools for communicating and exchanging information these days that we 133

have to stay in sync with how the galleries themselves are doing business. More specifically, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re going to keep adding new features and capabilities to our products, improving and developing what we have already started. Technology moves fast. There will be a lot of opportunities to continue to innovate features and just keep getting better. View more at www.gallerymanager.com

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For galleries every second matters when presenting work. So our solution was simple, we are giving galleryManager users a way to select groups of artworks and information and send them directly to their iPad—no exporting or uploading files or jpegs—it’s automatically in sync with their galleryManager account.

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four Case Studies

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Case Study

speronewestwater.com When it opened its iconic new gallery at 257 Bowery in 2010, Sperone Westwater staked its claim at the vanguard of galleries leading the Boweryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s renaissance. Designed by Pritzker- prizewinning Norman Foster + Partners, the sleek, translucent tower, while only 25 feet wide, provides great flexibility in exhibition space: the main gallery is located on the second- floor, doubleheight mezzanine, ideal for large sculptures and paintings; an intimate movable gallery is located in a 12-by-24-foot elevator, its bright-red exterior cabin visible from the street; and private galleries are on the upper floors. Skylights, windows, and glass doors provide abundant natural light, and award-winning use of custom gallery lighting completes the picture. 138

Our design for the recently launched Sperone Westwater website takes its inspiration from the gallery’s sensational eightstory building and big red box. It is a dynamic website with a beautiful sense of authority—deceptively robust and crafted using the principles of responsive design to ensure easy navigation and pleasing display across a wide range of devices, from desktop computers to tablets and smartphones. The site looks simple and clean, and, importantly, it respects and reinforces the gallery’s well-established and admired print identity, not only in its strong masthead and footer but also in the body of the website through the use of custom typography. The website uses nuanced tonal gradients to create a soft design framework, eliminating the need for lines and grids and imparting a sense of naturalness to the organization of the content. The website also incorporates the use of left/right image/text modules, a new strategy to help make extended editorial content less static and more visually appealing. The modules make it easy for gallery staff to add related images to editorial content anywhere in the site, with text wrapping pleasingly around the images. The use of custom typography results in a unified, refined feel to the website—it’s easy on the eyes. The first thing you see when you enter the website is a dramatic full-page black-and-white image of the gallery’s building, looking splendidly futuristic, as if lifted from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Centered at the top of the page, in Sperone Westwater’s signature New Aster typeface, are the words “Sperone Westwater” in red, all caps, superimposed over a full-page photograph of the gallery building. The six main navigation tabs (“Artists,” “Exhibitions,” “Catalogues,” “Art Fairs,” “News,” and “Gallery”) are centered directly under the Sperone Westwater 139

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name, again in red, all caps. The full-page background image changes every six seconds or so, cycling to images from the gallery’s current exhibitions and then back to the home image. Scroll down to the foot of the page and you find the familiar and unwavering Sperone Westwater identity, centered in white type against a solid red background that occupies the entire width of the screen. At the top right of the screen are three sharing tabs—“Email,” “Facebook,” and “Share” (a tab that opens to more social-media choices). This basic design framework, spare and visually arresting, is used throughout the website. Click on “Artists” and you are taken to a page that provides links to each artist affiliated with the gallery. The links are arranged alphabetically on the page in rectangular thumbnails, five across, that include a photo of the artist and the artist’s name. Click on any photo and you are taken to the artist’s page, which includes images of the artist’s work, a biographical profile, and links to past and current exhibitions associated with the artist. You can scroll down the page to access each category of information or use the “Artworks,” “Bio” and “Exhibitions” tab to get there directly. Note that these categories are dynamic—they can be changed at the gallery’s discretion. A tab for video content might be added for one artist, while the tab for biographical content might be omitted for another. Whatever choices the gallery staff might make for an artist’s profile, sparse or packed with content, the page will display beautifully, not look orphaned or, conversely, cluttered. No matter where you are in the site, there are no dead ends. Information is organized in a continuous scroll in each section, allowing you to browse uninterrupted from top to bottom, without having to jump from page to page. Notice 142

as you are scrolling through the site that the main menu locks and remains displayed at the top of your browser window, allowing easy and quick access to every area of the site. Click on “Exhibitions” and you are taken to the section of the website that contains information about the gallery’s current and past exhibitions. Here you’ll see large clickable thumbnails, each an image from a current exhibition, displayed boldly on the page, with information identifying the artist and the exhibition dates. Below that are links to the gallery’s past exhibitions, going back to 1975. These links are cleverly arranged by year, with smaller clickable thumbnails from the most recent year visible on the screen (four across). Choose a year and the thumbnails for that year’s exhibitions appear on the screen. Click on any thumbnail and you are taken to that exhibition’s page, where you are greeted with installation images from the exhibition, presented in a large panel that is about half the size of a computer screen. These images can be scrolled, left and right, using navigation arrows at the edges of the slideshow. (When viewing images of artworks and exhibitions in the slideshow, you can enlarge the view by clicking on an image.) Just above the slideshow is the name of the exhibition; under that are the navigation tabs for this subsection of the site, arranged horizontally. These tabs can be changed at the discretion of the gallery; they represent shortcuts to categories of content viewable further down the page. Click on the Emil Lukas exhibition (January 9, 2013–February 22, 2014), for instance, and you see navigation tabs for “Installations,” “Video,” “Press Release,” “Artists,” and “Press.” In contrast, the Web page for the gallery’s 2013 Alexis Rockman exhibition also has a tab for “Publications” but not for “Video.” 143

www.speronewestwater.com on the iPhone

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www.speronewestwater.com on the iPhone

Included on the page as you scroll down is the information in the tabbed categories, usually integrated into the page itself with generous use of images. Press releases and press reviews can be made available both in the body of the exhibition page and by pdf download. The functionality of the rest of the main navigation tabs is straightforward. Click on the “Catalogues” tab and you are taken to a page of exhibition catalogues available for purchase, arranged by date, each represented by clickable thumbnails that contain a photo of the catalogue. Click on a thumbnail and a large image of the catalogue is displayed, along with information about the publication. Moving to the “Art Fairs” tab, you are taken to a page devoted to art fairs in which the gallery participated. Clickable thumbnails reveal images from Sperone Westwater installations at various art fairs around the world. The “News” tab provides information about the gallery and the artists it represents. Finally, the “Gallery” tab takes you to a page that includes the location (with map) and hours of the gallery, contact information, a company profile, and a list of gallery staff. If you happen to use your tablet or smartphone to access the Sperone Westwater website, you’ll notice how natural the interface feels and displays—like it was custom-built for your mobile device. That’s because it employs responsive design techniques and best practices, allowing the website to query your mobile device to determine its limitations and optimal display capabilities, thus ensuring that data sent to the device is displayed appropriately. If you’re using the latest iPhone, for instance, the Sperone Westwater home page displays in a vertical orientation when the phone is held vertically, with the 147

menu cascading down the page as a list of tabs. Turn the phone to a horizontal position, and the page will orient itself horizontally, appearing very much as it would on a desktop monitor, with the navigation tabs arranged horizontally beneath the Sperone Westwater logo. The site’s continuous scrolling feature is especially suited to mobile devices and has the added benefit of optimizing search-engine placement for the gallery. Day-to-day management of the website by gallery staff is simple and intuitive via exhibit-E’s Web-based contentmanagement system. The website’s dynamic framework makes posting and managing images and editorial content easy. Simple, clean, responsive—these are the hallmarks of a first-rate website.

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top trends

With the flood of web fonts designers are able to utilize a broad array of custom typefaces which has elevated the look and feel of websites and brought a sophisticated editorial quality to website design.

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Case Study

richardprince.com Magazines, books, movies, TV, records, cars, paintings, drawings, sculpture, houses, fashion, sunsets, advertising …welcome to richardprince.com. When Richard Prince, the American artist and collector best known for his appropriations and reiterations of images, approached exhibit-E about designing a new website for him, he provided a clear brief: he needed a website that could handle lots of content, that would be easy to navigate and that would support a broad array of back-end capabilities, giving the artist the flexibility to use the site as a tool of expression. The site he was using at the time was outdated and even the most basic changes were challenging. The only option that would give him the dynamic site he wanted was to custom design a new website. Prince is a prolific artist, collector, writer, receiver of information and obsessive observer. His interests are varied and 150

the website reflects that. Rich in content, the website offers an extensive presentation of his work, interests, writing and collections, and gives him a broad palette to explore and express himself in this newer medium. Our aim was to create a platform for the artist that was visually stunning, slightly irreverent, simple to navigate and easily managed by the artist and his studio. We adopted a bold graphic feel for the design, utilizing a condensed sans serif typeface. The page layouts evoke the aesthetic of a rock poster, with strong graphic elements and an intentional echo of randomness. The design feels intelligent, organized, and current. The website’s home page greets the visitor with a bold “Richard Prince” headline, black font in all caps against a light gray background. Underneath this are the featured content categories, displayed horizontally in line, in gray font, all caps. These categories serve as clickable navigation bars, which take the visitor deeper into the content of the site. Beneath the categories layout are panels displaying artwork, easily changed whenever the artist desires. The effect is concise and visually impactful. Navigating the website is seductively simple, enticing further exploration into the site. The bold, all-caps type is represented in three color states for clarity of navigation: black, gray and blue. It’s a muscle car blue, bright and assertive. The minimalist color palette does not distract. Roll over a category and the typeface changes to blue; click on a category and it changes to black, while the “Richard Prince” header type and all the other navigation type turn light gray. This lends an unexpected softness to the otherwise bold graphic presentation. Then another pleasant surprise—roll over the gray “Richard Prince” header 151

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and it turns blue; roll over any of the gray categories and they turn blue too. The effect is almost tactile. Prince has opted to organize his website into twelve content categories, which serve as the site’s main navigation menu: Photographs, Paintings, Drawings, Exhibitions & Installations, Untitled Originals, Sculptures, Publications, Limited Editions, Own Collection, Writings, Biography, and Contact & News. Click on “Photographs” and you are taken to a section of the site devoted primarily to Prince’s photographic images. A menu of subsections, arranged thematically, appears on the left side of the screen. The site allows him to add new subsections (or subtract existing ones) as the need arises. From a design perspective, it’s a beautifully simple and clean interface, which allows the artwork to occupy center stage without distractions. Click on “Cowboys,” for instance, and you are taken to a page of thumbnail images representing each of the pieces in this category of work. Click on a thumbnail, and you are taken to a gallery where each of the pieces in this category of work is displayed, one at a time, in a spare viewing pane that fills the computer screen. Each piece of art is clearly identified and dated. You can scroll back and forth through this gallery using the generously-sized left and right navigation arrows, or jump back to the subcategory page with a single click. iPad users will find the arrows ideal for navigating with their thumbs. No matter which page you are viewing in the website, the home page menu is always right there at the top of the page, making for easy, intuitive navigation. As you browse through the various categories from the main menu, you will find the same intelligent design framework with subsections consistently placed and clearly displayed on every 154

website page. The artist is free to add, modify, disable, or delete subsections throughout the site, as the need requires. He is not limited by the website design. In terms of layout, in any section of the website where there are thumbnail images, these are displayed on the page in an imperfect grid that appears slightly random, as if the artist has laid the images down on a table for you to view. The slight randomness is intentional and system-generated. Unique to this website, Prince has included glimpses of his own extensive collection of art, books and stuff in general, lending the site the air of a work in progress. The site’s value added is that the artist is using the medium to reveal his creative process—we are gifted with what feels like a very personal view into his hobbies, his obsessions, his library, his homes and other things that lend context to his work. As Prince once said about his art, “A lot of it is experimental, spontaneous. It’s about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.” The website allows us a glimpse into that process. Browse to the “Own Collection” section of the Website, and you’re treated to photographs of Prince’s houses and other buildings, with what appears to be his personal art collection in situ. Also shown are photos of individual paintings, photos of books and manuscripts from his own personal library, and photos of albums, posters and artifacts he’s collected over the years. The “Exhibitions and Installations” section of the Website provides links to artwork from Prince’s recent exhibitions, as well as images of installations featuring his work. In a refreshing variation in the design, the “Exhibitions” page uses a single column format, with featured content displayed in 155

horizontal rectangles, framed by the light gray background common to the rest of the site. The title, venue and dates of each featured exhibition are shown neatly on the left, with an image of art from the show on the right. Click on an exhibition, and you are taken to a page of thumbnails of images of works from that exhibition. Click again on a thumbnail, and you are taken to a gallery where the image is displayed in its own viewing pane, filling the screen. The “Writings” section includes a selection of Prince’s written work. The layout here is suggestive of newspaper clippings. The first few paragraphs of each “story” are shown as gray text against a white background, displayed in vertically oriented rectangular columns, arranged on the page in seemingly random order against a light gray background. If you are hooked on a story after reading the first few lines, click on “Read More” and you are taken to a new page where the entire story is displayed in a wider, letter size format for easy reading. Like all exhibit-E websites, the site has an easy to use administrative interface, which allows the artist to manage content with a minimum of effort. Adding a subsection under one of the twelve menu categories is effortless, requiring just a few keystrokes and clicks of the mouse. So too is populating that new subsection, or an existing one, with images of artwork and with accompanying text. The process is no more involved than attaching a photo to an email.

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Like all exhibit-E websites, the site has an easy to use administrative interface, which allows the artist to manage content with a minimum of effort.

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Case Study

matthewmarks.com Founded in the early 1990s in New York City, the Matthew Marks Gallery is one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most influential gallery spaces for international contemporary artists. The gallery represents over twenty-five American and European artists of different generations and has three locations, all in the heart of Chelsea, with more than 15,000 square feet of exhibition space. The gallery is known for representing both established figures like Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns and younger artists like Nayland Blake, Nan Goldin, and Darren Almond. Matthew Marks was one of the pioneers in the Chelsea district and is known for its deep commitment to its artists. When the gallery approached exhibit-E about creating a new website, they had firm views about the kind of user experience they were after. 158

They wanted a state-of-the-art website with an elegant and intelligent design that would reflect both the vibrant contemporary side of the gallery and the established 20th-century masters as well. They also needed an efficient interface that would allow them to easily update website content. They knew their old site was in need of an overhaul; artist information was hard to find, search engine ranking was poor, and managing the site was cumbersome. The new website features a beautifully spare and intuitive design. Our goal was to make everything easily accessible to the user. The clean look has the appearance of simplicity, but in fact the website is deceptively robustâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it is rich with content and features, including e-commerce, downloadable PDF press packets for each artist, links to museum exhibitions (both present and past) for gallery artists, and links to private rooms. The architecture of the website achieves a new level in gallery website design. The first thing you see when you arrive at the site is a large image announcing the current exhibition against a black background, with the website menu arranged horizontally at the top of the screen. The screen transitions to a new image every three seconds or so, revealing other current Matthew Marks exhibitions at the galleryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s various locations. The website can facilitate up to eight current exhibitions on the opening page. Clicking on one of these thumbnails takes you to the exhibition page, where you find information about the artist and the exhibition on the right half of the page, with a clickable image filling the left half of the page. Click on this image (or the button below it) and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re taken to a screen full of large thumbnails, each an image of artwork from the exhibition 159

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immaculately framed with a white border. Click on one of these, and an eye-popping image of the artwork fills the screen, again framed attractively in a white border against the black background. Here the black background becomes an active element exploiting the white border and activating the space around the artworks with an irresistible clarity. It’s a beautiful device for displaying artwork on the Web. As you move from page to page, the menu bar is always displayed at the top of the page, allowing for easy navigation wherever you go in the site. Another navigational aid is available when you are viewing full-sized images: near the top of the screen, just below the left side of the menu bar, are three simple directional arrows which enable you to move backward or forward one image at a time, or jump one layer up the menu to the thumbnail page. Also on the exhibition page is a button taking you to another corridor in the site, this one devoted to the artist and his body of work. The organizational structure for this section gives the gallery the ability to share a generous amount of information about the artists. Here you will find selected images of the artist’s work; biographical information about the artist and a brief description of his work; the artist’s exhibition history; links to publications available for purchase; links to press packets (in PDF format); and links to current and past museum exhibitions for the artist. The artist’s previous Matthew Marks Gallery exhibitions are also archived here, with full-page images of the artworks available for viewing. The menu bar gives you the choice to navigate by “Artist” or “Current Exhibitions.” Another menu choice lets you view a list of museum exhibitions featuring artists represented by 162

Matthew Marks; there are links here to the museum websites, where images of artworks and descriptions of the exhibitions can be found. Customers can click on the “Books & Posters” menu option to view a gorgeous display of items available for purchase directly from the gallery. The site is fully set up for e-commerce. It should come as no surprise that Matthew Marks, an active promoter of art fairs, would include a menu button taking you to information about art fairs where the work of the gallery’s artists are represented (“Art Fair Installation Views”). Another menu option takes you to news about the gallery and its artists. A fun and interesting feature here is a tab called “Diary,” which takes you behind the scenes for a more intimate look at gallery artists, events, installations, and interviews. This area also includes content from years past. In addition, there is an option here to view video content in the form of links to YouTube files; the site supports custom Flash video as well. The decision to embed video or use Flash video is up to the gallery, depending on its need. But this special feature, developed especially for the Matthew Marks Gallery website, is a capability most gallery websites don’t have. The menu also includes a search tool, which sorts results logically by artist, exhibitions, and books. The Matthew Marks website is driven by a powerful back-end. The site is entirely managed by gallery staff via a simple-to-use, intuitive Web interface. The result is a totally integrated gallery solution, with an elegant public interface and a refined back-end interface that makes the day-to-day maintenance of the site easy for the gallery staff.

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Case Study

carrolldunham.net The Carroll Dunham website is exactly what an artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website should be. It provides access to the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, writings, interviews, lectures, video, publications, articles, and reviews, all within easy reach and organized in a way that helps the Web user understand more about the artist at any given period in his career. The result is a Web experience that is rich and informative for the art connoisseur, scholar, student and art lover. For instance, one feature that differentiates this site is its ability to aggregate information from every period of Dunhamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s career in a way that would make it possible for a site user to easily view artworks and writings from one specific period. That capability is a powerful tool for research and comparison. 164

Artworks are organized by period. To view images of paintings from 2000–2002, the user clicks the “Paintings” tab, then clicks on the “2000–2002” button and images of paintings from this period are displayed. The user can opt to view thumbnails or scroll through large screen-sized views of the art, all displayed against the backdrop of a clean white background, like an exhibition space. When viewing an individual image, the user can page down further and find links to other artworks, writings, essays, and reviews from this same period of time. The beauty of this is that when you are looking at a particular period of paintings you can also see drawing, prints, sculpture, and writings from the same period. That logic applies to any menu section the user visits. This ability to drill down to another layer of detail enriches the user experience, giving the user the freedom to wander through the site retrospectively and contextually, but with ample information to digest, ponder, and enjoy. The design of the website is graphically simple, providing a clean canvas for the art itself. The first thing a user sees when he goes into the site is the art—images of paintings drift up the screen, past a prominent “Carroll Dunham” banner at the top of the screen. When the user clicks on the banner, the menu bar is revealed, with buttons for paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, writings, press, publications, biography, and contact information. Observant users will notice that the shape of the menu bar is suggestive of the hat worn by Dunham’s notorious “Killer” character, seen so often in his paintings between 1997 and 2006. For the artist, maintaining the website is simple and intuitive. With exhibit-E’s web-based back-end, the artist can 165

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quickly and easily add images and other content, and the structure of the site is designed to support unlimited growth. The site is not intended for commerceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;for this, there are links to the galleries that represent the artist. The website gives the artist enormous flexibility in the way content is organized. Dunham is free to create different categories and date ranges. For instance, instead of categorizing works by period, he might sort them by series or specific date. The data, though, remains fully associative, enabling the artist to easily build an intersecting web of information regardless of how he organizes the site.

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This ability to drill down to another layer of detail enriches the user experience, giving the user the freedom to wander through the site retrospectively and contextually.

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16 sample Websites

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www.jamescohan.com

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www.mnuchingallery.com

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www.faggionato.com

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www.andrearosengallery.com

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www.paulkasmingallery.com

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www.twopalms.us

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www.bronxmuseum.org

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www.miandn.com

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www.101exhibit.com

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www.kerlin.ie

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www.mapplethorpe.org

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www.taymourgrahne.com

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www.danzigergallery.com

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www.rayjohnsonestate.com

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www.moellerfineart.com

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www.skny.com

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Glossary Adaptive Design

Adapts content to the size of the screen and also takes into account the capabilities of the device, offering a much better user experience as the whole design will be based on context. AdBlock

A very popular browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox and Safari that allows users to visit websites without having to view ads. Admin

The section of your website where you update and make changes to the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s content. Adwords (Google Adwords)

A Google advertising service where you pay only when users click on your ad. Apps

Apps are single-purpose applications for mobile devices, including the iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. Blog

A website where entries are display in chronological order. It is also the process of posting to a website. Browser

The application used to navigate the Internet and view websites. Popular browsers include Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera. 204

Browser Cache

Memory on your computer that is used to store frequently accessed webpages, allowing you to access these sites more quickly upon subsequent visits. Byte

A unit of digital information corresponding to one character. Cloud Computing

Is location independent, allowing technologists to use computational resources on demand, similar to how the electrical grid functions. Expertise in the systems being used is unnecessary, as the technology infrastructure in the cloud is fully supported. Users interact with the cloud through a web-browser, and data is stored on remote servers, typically in a grid. CMS

Content Management System (same definition as Admin, above) Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A globally distributed network of servers designed to improve webpage loading times by mirroring the webpage in a location that is geographically close to the user. Cookies

A small file that certain websites send to your computer to keep track of your preferred settings or to keep you logged in, for example, Hotmail or Gmail.

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DNS (Domain Name Service or Domain Name Servers)

Computers that translate the domain name you type into your browser into the website serverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s IP address. Every computer on the Internet has a unique IP address, which is its location. Domain Name

The address/URL of a website that corresponds to the unique IP address of a computer on the Internet, for example, www.exhibit-E.com or www.google.com. (e)nnouncement

A custom mass email solution (with mailing list administration) produced by exhibit-E, allowing galleries to create email promotions designed to integrate with the gallery identity. Facebook

A social networking service with over 800 million users. Flash

A format that allows the addition of dynamic movement or animation to a website, offering the Web designer a broader array of design options. FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Method of uploading files to a server over the Internet. GIF

A graphics format that is adept at displaying type and solid objects on a webpage. GB (Gigabytes)

A storage measurement that consists of 1,000 megabytes.

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Hashtag

A word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol #, a form of metadata tag. Also, short messages on microblogging social networking services such as Twitter or Instagram may be tagged by including one or more with multiple words concatenated. HTML5

A standard for the primary website programming language that allows sites to display rich multimedia without proprietary plugins like Flash. HTML5 is also capable of displaying video, and dynamic drawing of 2D shapes. http:// (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)

The standard protocol for information transfer on the Internet. Domain names are prefixed by this in the browserâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s address bar. Image Optimization

The act of preparing an image, whether scanned or imported from a digital camera, for the Web, using resizing, cropping and compression. IP Address

The unique numerical address of a computer on the Internet, for example, 216.239.37.99. Javascript

A scripting language embedded in Web browsers that allows advanced functionality to be added to a website. JPEG / JPG

A graphics format that is adept at displaying images.

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Keywords

Words that are used to summarize sections of content; they are integral to searching the Internet and optimizing websites for search engines and particularly effective if integrated into the site content. KB (Kilobytes)

A storage measurement that consists of 1,000 bytes. MB (Megabytes)

A storage measurement that consists of 1,000 kilobytes. META Keywords

An obsolete method of identifying keywords with a particular webpage. The modern search engines ignore the contents of META keywords. Metadata

Specialized terms and keywords used to describe a website to machine-learning algorithms. Operating System

The brain of the computer; the operating system runs all of the programs on your computer. The most popular are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. PDF (Portable Document Format)

A standard format used for transferring documents over the Internet that preserves the style of the original file. Photoshop

The most popular program for optimizing images. Pixels

The smallest unit of measurement on a screen. It is used for dimensions of images that end up on the Internet. 208

PNG

A graphics standard created to improve upon, and replace the GIF standard. Podcast

A Web feed of audio or video that can be subscribed to and downloaded to your MP3 player automatically. You can then listen or watch the content whenever and wherever you want. Pop-up Blocker

A utility that prevents unwanted pop-up windows from appearing on your screen. QR Codes

QR Codes are 2D barcodes that can encode all sorts of information. Commonly used for URL embedding, they present a way for galleries to have artful URL redirecting. Responsive Design

An approach to web design in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experienceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrollingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones). RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

A Web feed format that summarizes the content on a website. It allows you to track any new content on a website without having to frequently go to the site. Quicktime

A video plugin developed by Apple Computer capable of playing back video and sound.

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Screen Resolution

The width and height of a screen measured in pixels. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search Engine Optimization is the art of improving site visibility and page rank in search engines through natural (unpaid) search. Search Engine Rankings

A measure of how well a website performs on a particular search engine. Server

A computer that is used to offer information to other computers for download, for example, the computer that hosts a website. Site Traffic Report

A summary of site traffic over time for a website. It can show at a glance the number of unique visitors, when people accessed a website, how long they stayed there, what country they were from and a wealth of other valuable information. Social Graph

Publicly available information about a person that represent a userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s online identity. Social Networking

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are all media used to facilitate social networking, i.e., social structure, relationships and friendships online. TIFF / TIF

A file format used for storing uncompressed images.

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Twitter

Twitter is a web-based application that allows users to post 160-character updates from their phones, the website or from smart phone apps. url (Uniform Resource Locator)

Describes the location and access method of a resource on the Internet, also referred to as the websiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s address, for example, http://www.exhibit-E.com. Web Application

An application with similar functionality to a desktop application, but written a language that web browsers can understand. Unlike desktop applications, web applications can run on any computer, as long as it has a web browser and internet connection. Web Shortening

Web shortening is a technique that allows very, very long URLs to be shortened for easy portability. Web shortening services include bit.ly, ow.ly, and NanoURL. Wikipedia

This is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers; with rare exceptions, its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the website. The name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Its primary servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

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Michael Gwertzman is a freelance writer living in New York City covering cultural news and urban affairs. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, the New York Post, XLR8R magazine and URB magazine. Adam Lehner is the Managing Editor of October magazine and author of The Rearrangement, a fictional account of an interior decorator’s descent into madness, published in 2008 by MER. Paper Kunsthalle. Genevieve Reichle is a consultant who focuses on creating strategic growth while maintaining brand integrity. She has worked with companies across a broad spectrum of industries including fashion, art and public relations. Designed and edited by Dan Miller, exhibit-E Special thanks to Jim Cholakis and Mike Miller. Digitally printed and bound by Meridian Printing, East Greenwich, RI in an edition of 500. Copyright © 2014 by exhibit-E, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing by exhibit-E.

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tel 212 625 9 910 fax 212 966 4425 info @ exhibit-e.com www.exhibit-e.com