Questions about starting an art gallery.

[Cyxos]

Hi fellow entropians

I am the spokesperson for a group of contemporary artists based around the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden.
We are thinking of starting an artist run gallery in EU to investigate the possibilities of virtual universes. We are also interested in creating a place with regular changing exhibitions by artists, beside ourselves, that are in some way affected, inspired or/and influenced by the futuristic atmosphere in EU and hopefully will take the form of everything from drawings, performances and video art.

But as you surely notice we are new to this platform and we humbly ask for some advice from those interested and more experienced.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a good place to start? Where should we
buy the apartment?

We visited some amazing galleries in EU but does anyone have any information about how many galleries that exist and where?

Is there an interest for another art gallery?

Thanks beforehand of possible answers.

Best Regards Cyxos Cyx Hax

[Hulyss]

All i can say ( i dont have gallery though) is that will cost u a certain amount of peds. At one time, i had an appartement, and i equiped it with a Plasma sign PC and downloaded form my comp a photo of 2 cow in a field.

It costed me a lot trust me.

So, if u wanna download something to SHOW, it will be on ur proper money and depend of the amount of pictures u will download.
If u wanna download for SALE, then good luck, u need to be a freakin artist to hook potential buyers.

Regards.

[Cyxos]

We calculated on the cost and discovered that in the long run it would be cheaper and more interesting to have a gallery in EU than if you compare to virtual worlds like Second Life. We will hopefully also be in some amount sponsored by the university.
We also work 100 % as artists IRL after our degrees in Fine Art and have no problem seeing this as a good investment in our careers.
If you compare it with just to exhibit in a real gallery the cost is absurdly small

[Nighthawk]

I know that some guys have a gallery that you can check out at vrarthouse or something.

Other than that I just want to say welcome and hope it will work out fine

[Fin]

This is very good news- hope it goes very well for you all.

On finding galleries; the rest of this section of the forum probably gives you links to most of them, although a few of the earliest ones posted here may not now be around. At a guess there are probably about 50-60 "pictures on walls" artists in EU, but there could be far more people who make their own work and just keep it in their apartments. To get an idea of the range you can see work by about 30 artists in the new exhibition in the Fine Arts Museum- see siggie below for details. Another big area is design- there are very attractive examples around EU in areas like clothing, EF signatures and shop signs. Separate pm sent about the location issue.

Good luck with this- looking forward to seeing your work in due course

[kira-red]

I think the first question you have to ask yourself is: are you interested in protecting your copyrights?

if you don't care about this, you can purchace an apartment or shop to function as the gallery. then, you can upload you digital artwork (or media) into the "participant content" (PC) items like the video screen and static signs. you can then sell them as you choose.

unfortuately, there is no mechanism to prevent someone from making a copy of your work and thus a knock-off of your PC item. I believe the PC item will register your name as the orginator but I don't know how much that will stop people from instead purchasing the knock-off.

if you wish to protect your copyrights, you should visit the galleries at new oxford. these are run by artists associated with 21st century art. in this case, they have a deal with MA to provide ingame copies of their work (which cannot be cloned) as well as a mechanism to purchase the real physical print. I have no idea what the details of the deal is, though.

in short, if you want to protect your work, you'd best contact MA and see what they can do for you. the easist being to have them "protect" your artwork items. it'll likely up your costs somewhat but it will still likely be much cheaper than a real life gallery.

[Cyxos]

Thanks everyone for good responses. We found an apartment at Bilton Towers 3, 5C that was more than sufficient for our needs and in due time we will have our first exhibition. Thanks kira-red for your response about copyright. This is something we absolutely need to contact MA for. There will in some cases be artists that encourage copying of their work for the sake of artistic investigation but in that cases the artworks will be free from the start
Looking forward seeing you all in the future.

Best Regards Cyxos Cyx Hax