The Pop-Up Gallery Trend

“It depresses me when people spend their day writing funding applications. They won’t do anything unless they have a big budget, so they’re always waiting for money. It’s much more interesting to just get on with things.”-Katie Guggenheim, an aspiring artist and self-propelled gallery organizer

You might have noticed that I have been placing special focus in my blog posts recently on how the art world is faring in the contemporary economic tempest. Museums and galleries have gone through fundamental changes, displaying pieces from their permanent collections before seeking out traveling exhibitions or paying good money to borrow important works to bump up attendance. The art world is not only working with, but in some ways benefiting from the steady decline in funding. An article in the Art Newspaper features a new surge in art galleries and impromptu shows going on in poor London neighborhoods, abandoned warehouses and even prime real-estate property that can’t rent or sell otherwise. This pattern vaguely resembles cyclical gentrification patterns: art galleries take up spaces in cheap, abandoned warehouses in poor neighborhoods and establish a cool factor in said neighborhoods; then, young middle-class people start moving in because of cheap real estate and a new vibrant cultural and artistic presence. The current situation is a bit different, however, because these art galleries are not necessarily moving into cheaper, poorer neighborhoods; they are establishing themselves in rich neighborhoods where the real estate is priced too high to sell at the moment. Gallery organizers pay a small price to rent the spaces or nothing at all. Some aspiring art dealers, like James Tregaskes, are even using their empty apartments as galleries. I always pay special attention to the comment section in articles, and this one had particularly interesting takes on the subject. Dr. Krishna Kumari Challe, from Hyderabad, India, writes that the new monetary accessibility of art spaces could also revolutionize foreign art, in particular Indian art, in the West: “This sounds very interesting. Because artists from third world countries should be millionaires & billionaires to organize shows in the West. Only well established artists can have shows there now. Upcoming & new artists can only dream about the shows there. So the exposure of art works of these artists in the West is almost nil! Now they too can have shows at least in London.” These free and cheap galleries have the potential to revolutionize contemporary art by giving more artists with humble pecuniary backgrounds the potential to exhibit. Moreover, the low gallery rent is allowing artists to place less emphasis on drawing in a large audience in hopes of paying off gallery costs. Essentially, this means that with less focus fund raising, artists will place more emphasis on developping a more sincere result. How exciting is that?