How Public Should It Be? And 3 Other Essential Questions Every Art Dealer Needs to Consider Before Launching an Online Viewing Room

With social-distancing
requirements having forced thousands of galleries around the world
to temporarily shutter their physical spaces since late February,
there’s a good chance you’ve heard the phrase “online viewing room”
more often in the past six weeks than ever
before. Rather than suggesting a fixed concept,
however, those three words contain multitudes.

Online viewing rooms can range
from simple websites featuring straight-on digital photos of works
described with basic details (artist, title, date, etc.), to
high-production-value destinations
rich in editorial
content—and
sometimes, even market
data. They can be ongoing projects or one-week-only
engagements; online
offshoots of in-person gallery programming, or independent
endeavors entirely. The options seem endless. 

One aspect of online viewing
rooms is most definitely not endless, though: the amount of time
beleaguered galleries have to launch one—at least, if the
initiative is going to meaningfully contribute to their salvation
in some of the most difficult conditions the trade has encountered
in the past century.

To tease out the complexity of
the task, below is a quick tour through the strategic questions any
dealer needs to answer before launching an online viewing
room.

1. How Can You
Distinguish Your Online Viewing Room From Just Another
Shop? 

The good news is that, if all
you want to do is post thumbnail images in a grid view that allows
potential buyers to click through for closer looks at individual
works, it’s a relatively light lift in 2020. Dealers with minimal
technical prowess can achieve that in-house for a few hundred
dollars or less through DIY website-building platforms like
Squarespace—assuming good digital images and info are
already on file, of course. 

Yet one of the most sobering
aspects of fine-art e-commerce is how aggressively it smears the
boundaries between the supposedly elevated process of collecting,
and shopping for literally any other commercial good on the
internet. If the goal is to create something that feels more
culturally enriching than a visit to a particularly bespoke corner
of Amazon, a dealer has to think creatively about the user
experience. 

Will it take detail shots,
installation views, or video footage for the pieces to communicate
what they need to online? Would artists’ statements on individual
works or gallery-generated write-ups with links to source materials
or information on art-historical influences provide useful insight?
And most importantly, what can you achieve within your budget and
your technical and time constraints? Thoughtful answers will help
prevent the onset of digital-mall syndrome.

2. Should Your Online Viewing
Room Observe the Limits of Your Physical Gallery?

For many (if not most) dealers
shoved online by the current crisis, the default response will be
to simply replicate the programming they envisioned for their
brick-and-mortar spaces and mount the same exhibitions the same way
on the same schedule, exhibiting all the works in the show together
for a dedicated period of four to six weeks, then cycling them out
for the next exhibition. 

These standards make sense when
you have a tangible space with fixed dimensions that most visitors
will likely only make the effort to travel to once, but there is no
real imperative to proceed this way with an online viewing room.
After all, “installing” or “uninstalling” a show only means moving
around digital assets, and viewers can easily reach a dealer’s
virtual space from the comfort of their homes with the click of a
mouse, making multiple visits a more appealing proposition if they
have good incentive. 

Would it be more compelling,
then, to take what was previously planned as a six-week show and
subdivide it by rotating in a new grouping of works every week or
two? Could you feature two concurrent solo exhibitions that would
not physically fit inside your tangible space, but would create a
fascinating dialogue in your unconstrained online space? How might
artists think differently about what to make now that virtual
viewing may be the only viewing available? Being separated from
their physical galleries causes dealers some daunting problems, but
it could solve others.

3. How Accessible Should Your
Online Viewing Room Be?

It’s not a secret of the
ancients that the art market’s fetish for exclusivity has
contributed to the slow embrace of digital exhibition and sales
platforms. Although norms have been gradually shifting on this
front, dealers still tend to be deliberately cagey about how much
information they divulge about their inventory, to whom, and after
how much vetting. Launching
an online viewing room foregrounds these issues, since a virtual
space offers fewer monitoring capabilities and visible clues (a
fine timepiece on the wrist, recognizable VIP companions, etc.)
about who exactly is perusing the available works at any given
time. 

As a result, galleries have to
determine their own personal exchange rate in the internet’s
ongoing information trade. Remember, almost anything online can
double as a data-collecting opportunity. Do viewers have to give
you their email addresses or other professional details for access
to your viewing room, or can anyone navigate there anonymously? Are
prices and availability visible for every work, or do users have to
inquire by email? If the latter, who follows up with the client, by
what method, in what time frame—and should your viewing room
clearly state this information for accountability’s sake? These are
not new questions, but the transition to digital makes them newly
salient.

4. How Will You Promote and
Activate Your Online Viewing Room?

To adapt the old Zen koan: If an
online viewing room appears in cyberspace, but no one is around to
look at it, does it make an impact? The answer is clearly
no.

Every gallery would probably
like to believe that it is a meaningful enough destination that
clients—existing and
prospective alike—will check its website of their own volition, or
at least click through the link in an announcement email or a
social-media post. Yet the competition now raging in people’s
inboxes and timelines has never been fiercer, making it
increasingly unlikely that your online viewing room will win
collectors’ valuable attention without you making more than a token
effort.

Instead of hoping mass emails
and Instagram posts will lead to passive viewing, the greater value
lies in stoking social engagement with your audience. Can you
activate your online space by, say, holding a publicly accessible
Zoom webinar with artists and curators about your current
exhibition, or even weekly “remote cocktail receptions” on
HouseParty,
where fans can discuss the works
book-club style? Could you use your social-media accounts to
initiate ongoing, in-depth conversations with commenters instead of
simply posting and ghosting? Most counterintuitively, why not
leverage your online viewing room as an opportunity to personally
reach out to your collectors by phone or email to refresh or
reinforce the relationships that matter most?

In the end, successfully selling
art in a virtual space still depends on the same elements as
selling art in a physical space: thoughtful presentation, a
willingness to think past the status quo, a clear and consistent
philosophy about how to distribute information, and the recognition
of art’s value as a cornerstone for community-building. Applying
these concepts to an online viewing room isn’t easy, especially
with so little time to spare—but that’s precisely why it’s so
important.

The post How Public Should It Be? And 3 Other Essential
Questions Every Art Dealer Needs to Consider Before Launching an
Online Viewing Room appeared first on artnet News.