Art galleries

This thesis aims to test various forms of methodology for visitor development with particular reference to the Art Gallery of South Australia.

That's artertainment! Art galleries, events and city life

This key note address uses branding, as one way for galleries to tell their stories about 'artertainment' to enrich the wider story of the city to their various audiences.  Despite the centrality of telling stories in galleries as a means of positioning city cultural life, rarely has branding 'artetainment' been explored in the marketing literature.  What do case studies reveal about the marketing techniques used by art galleries as far as representing culture in the city? Using historical research methods, annual reports and interviews, the paper views art galleries from the inside out as a means of branding city cultural life through 'artertainment'.  The originality of this article is in its depiction of case studies of art galleries from the inside out as brands for city cultural life.

Marketing artertainment : are museums jumping on the bandwagon

The purpose of this paper is to argue that greater awareness of the traditions and innovations in marketing language, as exemplified in museum marketing, leads to enhanced ability to understand branding as a strategic tool. Successful art galleries can be thought of as branding “artertainment", actively engaged in bringing the art world and popular culture together in a competitive aesthetic arena. This paper sees branding straddling culture and linguistic criticism to look at its complex underpinnings in verbal and linguistic processes that link to larger socio-cultural issues on how brands work. It generates novel concepts and develops theory for marketers.

Image featuring for retrieval of multimedia documents

The utilization of massive multimedia documents collections, such as multimedia documents in the global Internet, needs search engines which can rank using both text and image evidence. Massive size and (dynamic) nature of collection can make manual indexing prohibitively expensive in such situations. Traditional search engines utilize only text components of multimedia documents. But there are information needs, which require the utilization of image evidence. In this paper, we investigate image-feature for large and heterogeneous collections. Both the nature and complexities of information needs are key elements for an effective retrieval. Retrieval needs that depend on perceptual similarities (as found in art galleries, building architecture) require the utilization of visual cues. In such situations, the retrieval of multimedia document based on image ranking can provide higher effectiveness. Experimental results show that effectiveness of ranking based on image feature can be higher where perceptual similarities are key elements for retrieval than the retrieval effectiveness of algorithms based on text ranking algorithms

SCOPE Galleries Art Award: Art Concerning Environment

Curated by Liza McCosh, a major exhibition of pre-selected artwork that includes painting, drawing and sculpture. The exhibition included fifty five preselected artists/artworks from across Australia.The Art Concerning Environment Award is a national biennial award and the exhibition attempts to provide a platform that facilitates debate and promotes art as a catalyst for change.  The exhibition was supported by a public lecture on Climate Change (June 2, Warrnambool Art gallery) and facilitated by Guy Abrahams (guest judge).

See:  
www.scopegalleries.com
www.warrnambool.vic.gov.au/index.php?q=node/1266
Ziegeler, Bonnie, "Artworks with a green hue vie for %5000 award in Warrnambool", The Standard, June 3, 2012.

Melbourne 2006: marketing south-eastern Australian aboriginal art

The Aboriginal cultural sector is dynamic and highly valuable to the Australian economy, returning an estimated $100 million dollars annually. The majority of Aboriginal artists and art works have been perceived to be in northern Australia— eighty per cent of them are in fact in this region—but Aboriginal artists in south-eastern Australia are emerging as a strong force as they struggle for recognition from commercial and national galleries, curators, art dealers, newspaper critics, and buyers. If marketing is to be effectual, the Aboriginality of the art must be presented in a form that is understood and accepted by the audience. Thus changing public perceptions is crucial to marketing south-eastern Aboriginal art. The primary task of this article is to discuss this marketing priority for Aboriginal art and artists in south-eastern Australia, previously neglected in marketing literature. Specifically, the upcoming Melbourne Commonwealth Games are proposed as an opportunity for intensive marketing of the region’s Aboriginal arts.

Changing perceptions : marketing south eastern Australian aboriginal art

The Aboriginal cultural sector is dynamic and highly valuable to the Australian economy, returning an estimated $100 million dollars annually. The majority of Aboriginal artists and art works have been perceived to be in northern Australia-eighty percent of them are in fact in this region-but Aboriginal artists in South Eastern Australia are emerging as a strong force as they struggle for recognition from commercial and national galleries, curators, art dealers, newspaper critics, and buyers. If marketing is to be effectual, the Aboriginality of the art must be presented in a form that is understood and accepted by the audience. 1 Thus changing public perceptions is crucial to marketing South Eastern Aboriginal art. The primary task of this paper is to discuss this marketing priority for Aboriginal art and artists in South Eastern Australia, previously neglected in marketing literature. Specifically, the upcoming Melbourne Commonwealth Games are proposed as an opportunity for intensive marketing of the region's Aboriginal arts.

An examination of the range of self-funding options available to regional galleries and an assessment of their suitability for use in those institutions

Researches the suitability of a variety of self-funding options available to regional galleries in Australia. An overview of the range of current self-funding practices is given. Each option is mapped according to its impact on core/value added services and its effect on primary/secondary users and assessed for suitability using these criteria.

Picture words : toward an art-critical methodology

“Phiction: Lies, Illusion and the Phantasm in Australian Photography” is a curatorial experiment in assembling a survey exhibition from a significant collection. Its formulation, presentation and the outcomes of its tour of eleven regional and metropolitan Victorian galleries provide a case study for this paper. The exhibition Phiction (the title amalgamates photography and fiction) challenges audiences’ reading of photographs, and confronts some curatorial assumptions, by juxtaposing the images with extracts of Australian fiction instead of the usual gallery fact sheet, list of provenance or expert gloss. In this way the exhibition forces a confrontation between ‘dumb’ image and ‘blind’ text and while examples are examined, a review of the exhibition is not the purpose of this paper. A consideration its process and effect is discussed in the paper to propose a comparative tool in the study, investigation and evaluation of art. It is offered to visual art school researchers, lecturers and students contemplating the most appropriate and effective, or alternative, methodologies to employ. With reference to the dominant systems of critique which have come to us from other disciplines, the paper considers the art practitioner’s perspective by drawing on the example of Phiction to pose the open question; “How might we use one artform to explore another?”.

Spring 1883: Art Fair at the Windsor Hotel

Exhibition of three works by Patrick Pound as part of the Spring 1883 exhibition. Art works entitled: 'Spring Street' a collection of vintage postcards each showing the street the exhibition hotel is located on, the 'Collector' a collection of John Fowles' novel the 'Collector' in numerous editions, and 'The Apartment' a collage of a derelict apartment block. These works were exhibited by Hamish McKay Gallery.The brainchild of Melbourne gallerists Vasili Kaliman (Station), Geoff Newton (Neon Parc), and Vikki McInnes (Sarah Scout Presents), SPRING 1883, the exhibition took place at Melbourne’s historic Hotel Windsor from August 14-17, 2014.The fair drew on the traditions of New York’s hotel-based Gramercy Park Fair and presented the best of contemporary art practice from Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States.“Providing a boutique site for dialogue and interaction between galleries, artists and collectors, the fair will create a new energy for the contemporary art market in Australia”

Serious play: the art of Kevin Mortensen

Kevin Mortensen came to prominence in Australia and internationally as an early and highly regarded practitioner of performance art. He represented Australia at an early Venice Biennale and was a major figure in the Mildura Sculpture Triennials, which helped establish contemporary sculpture in this country in the 1960s and 1970s after a long period in which the art form languished. The new sculpture of this time was strongly related to American performance art, Happenings and Earth Art, and in Australia took on environmental concerns and facets of Australia's landscape, flora and fauna. Mortensen's art is highly environmental. More recently Mortensen has practised as a sculptor and also made prints and drawings. He was Head of Sculpture at RMIT University in the 1980s and early 1990s but, today almost a recluse, continues to exhibit new work at Australian Galleries in Melbourne and Sydney. Author Rob Haysom provides a beautifully written and researched account of Mortensen's entire career and the book is lavishly illustrated.