Art gallery

In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s.

Among the modern reasons art may be displayed are aesthetic enjoyment, education, historic preservation, or for marketing purposes.

In the Middle Ages that preceded, painters and sculptors were members of guilds, seeking commissions to produce artworks for aristocratic patrons or churches.

However, the public exhibition of art had to overcome the bias against commercial activity, which was deemed beneath the dignity of artists in many European societies.

[7] Commercial art galleries were well-established by the Victorian era, made possible by the increasing number of people seeking to own objects of cultural and aesthetic value.

Depending upon the expertise of the gallery owner and staff, and the particular market, the artwork shown may be more innovative or more traditional in style and media.

Rather than simply being the broker for sales, Castelli became actively involved in the discovery and development of new artists, while expecting to remain an exclusive agent for their work.

Lacking a selection process to assure the quality of the artworks, and having little incentive to promote sales, vanity galleries are avoided as unprofessional.

[16] Historically, art world activities have benefited from clustering together either in cities[4] or in remote areas offering natural beauty.

[17] The resulting gentrification prompted artists and galleries to move to the adjacent neighborhood "south of Houston" (SoHo) which became gentrified in turn.

[18] Attempting to recreate this natural process, arts districts have been created intentionally by local governments in partnership with private developers as a strategy for revitalizing neighborhoods.

[19] A contemporary practice has been the use of vacant commercial space for art exhibitions that run for periods from a single day to a month.

Now called "popup galleries",[20] a precursor was Artomatic which had its first event in 1999 and has occurred periodically to the present, mainly in the Washington metro area.