Talk:Art museum

Not NPOV?
"In the late 20th century the dry old-fashioned view of art galleries was increasingly replaced with architecturally bold modern art galleries, often seen as international destinations for tourists."

This is not neutral objective language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.233.42.65 (talk) 17:53, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Art Gallery Redirect
"Art Museum" redirects to this page, but the connotation of "gallery" as a room in an art museum seems much less relevant than the connotation of "commercial gallery." Opening the article with a phrase that implies they are interchangeable words seems misleading. Perhaps there should be a separate article for "commercial gallery" and this page should be renamed "Art museum" with a disambiguation if you look up "gallery". What do you think? Btw The contemporary art page needs your help! Flange P. Vibrator 20:46, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Someone added R.W.Norton Art Foundation to the list of on-line galleries; I put it up in the main galleries since it looks like it has very little on-line presence in terms of either catalogues or images. But it might be good for whoever posted that to set up a Norton Foundation page -- it looks like a good place with an interesting collection.

Smawnmahlau 20:40, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I tried to organize the listing of online museums and galleries, and have deleted a number of entries that were either dead links or commercial links to bricks and mortar galleries with online sites that were little more than advertisements.

I limited the on-line Museum collections I added to those with "substantial" collections, and cut it off at 50,000 paintings, sculpture and other works other than works on paper. I have limited the works on paper and photographic collections I added to sites with hundreds of thousands, and am sure there are may not listed once we begin looking at major libraries. Are these the right limits? I have my own charts showing smaller collections. There are many museums with good small on-line collections, and often very information on-line exhibits (such as the Frick), but there are also many prominent Museums that simply haven't developed a real on-line catalogue (for example, the Met has fewer than 6,000 works in its catalogue out of its collection of millions of works). By using a numerical cut-off, I missed places like the Frick people might find interesting but avoided places like the Met that really should be left off for now.

Also, for the galleries section to be useful I propose that it be limited to collections that are designed to be on-line only galleries, not adjuncts to commercial galleries, and that there be some description of each gallery that seeks to quantify and describe the collection. Descriptions like "HUGE" or self-aggrandizing descriptions really don't have a place. I have nothing against self-publicity, as long as the descriptions are factual and meaningful and not mere puffery, and as long as the gallery fits in the article. I know there are many other on-line galleries that are quite good, and will try to update this to add some of the better ones, but does anyone have a more comprehensive view?

Smawnmahlau 16:29, 2 May 2006 (UTC)smawnmahlau

"Art galleries are found in metropolitan areas and in areas where artists have congregated such as in Taos, New Mexico where the Taos art colony made Taos a artistic center." But this is not the only place art galleries are located? There are greater concentrations of galleries in metropolitan areas but they are also found in small towns and even the middle of nowhere! Plus why the focus on Taos? --Daniel C. Boyer

Agreed. One could easily cite, say, the artistic community around St Ives, Cornwall, UK which arguably lead to this being a good location for the new Tate gallery there. Perhaps such examples of artistic communities or centres of activity belong below the list of gallery links in terms of priorities??? If indeed they belong at this sort of meta level at all, perhaps the upward link from Taos is all that's required?


 * I've fiddled a bit, but kept in Taos as an example, and added St. Ives as another. I've also removed the suggestion that "art gallery" is a term which refers to only commercial galleries because, well, it doesn't. --Camembert

External link to greenmuseum.org an online museum of environmental art was probably added by its owner itself: see the 5 dec 2002 entry in.

The link does not look too relevant to the article. Should it stay ? FvdP 02:19 Dec 5, 2002 (UTC)
 * No! &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 198.22.121.110 (talk &bull; contribs) 16:12, 29 November 2005.

Isn't 'art museum' an Americanism for 'gallery' or 'art gallery'? I've lived in the UK and the US for significant periods and the 'museum' usage seems more common in American English. DavidFarmbrough (talk) 23:07, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Commercial links
See WP:SPAM: The section on commercial galleries seems counter to spam guidelines. Wikipedia is not for advertising/promoting certain sites. If a particular art gallery is notable, it could have its own Wikipedia article; in which case, it might be appropriate to add the article to a "See also" section.

I'm going to leave this note here for feedback. &mdash; ERcheck (talk) 04:37, 5 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Take a look at what I just did - eliminating an area that looked like a link-farm, moving relevant "keepers" (like the French government site for access to a wide range of French museum collections) elsewhere, and changing the text of the seciton on "Independent on-line galleries", which now cites just four sites (Sotheby's, Christies, Artprice.com, and Bridgeman's), each of which are separately notable (though Artprice doesn't now have its own page). I'd weed heavily beyond these.  Sam 15:47, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Terminology
The naming and use of terminology on pages such as Art gallery, Art museum, Contemporary art gallery, Artist-run space etc needs a bit of clarifying so that it makes as much sense as possible globally. Certainly from the UK perspective the current arrangement makes little sense.

For example in the UK the Ikon Gallery would be thought of as an Art gallery (because it shows art) but not an Art museum (because it holds no collections of its own), but here the one article redirects to the other. The Ikon would also be described as a Contemporary art gallery (because it shows contemporary art), but the Contemporary art gallery article suggests that contemporary art galleries are fundamentally commercial which the Ikon isn't - it is publicly-funded and its exhibits are not for sale.

My understanding of the terminology from a British perspective is thus:


 * "Art gallery": any building or part of a building whose purpose is the exhibition of art - of whatever type, by whomever and for whatever reason. The following are all sub-classes of "Art gallery"...


 * "Commercial art gallery": an art gallery which exhibits art, either contemporary or historic, primarily for the purpose of selling it.
 * "Art museum": an art gallery that collects, conserves and exhibits a permanent collection of artworks. Generally publicly-run but not necessarily so (eg the Saatchi Gallery).
 * "Contemporary art gallery": an art gallery which primarily exhibits contemporary art. Can be commercial or non-commercial, can have its own permanent collection or purely be a venue for exhibitions of visiting works.
 * "Artist-run gallery" or "Artist-run exhibition space": an art gallery which is neither commercial nor publicly-run, but run by a group of artists themselves (though not necessarily limited to showing their own work), normally to advance a specific curatorial agenda.

An "Artist-run space" could be an artist-run exhibition space, but could also be an artist-run studio space or project space, whose main purpose would be creating rather than exhibiting art.

If anybody with a different understanding of these or related terms could explain them so that divergences can be mapped that would probably be useful, partly to reduce any avoidable geographical bias and resulting confusion in article naming and partly because any ambiguity in the uses of the terms should probably be covered in the articles themselves.

JimmyGuano 16:49, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

These are some very good and interesting points. I agree with the definitions, though I would suggest bringing in the concept of study and research in a scientific manner. commercial art galleries for example don't have curators who analyze and inquire into a subject, art piece or movement that Art Museums do. Museums have a didactic function, in display and publication, they offer the opportunity to do ones own research. Whereas commercial galleries are more interested in promoting their artists.

--smombartz (talk) 03:21, 30 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Why does Art gallery forward to this article? An art gallery and an art museum are very different things, at least to me, and should have separate articles.

List of Art Museums
This article is currently a strange mixture of a list page and an actual article. May I suggest that it be split into two pages - leave the bulk of the text (the article material) here, and create a page called List of Art Museums or List of Notable Art Museums (I'm not sure which of those two would be more appropriate. See WP:LIST for the basic guidelines for lists. --└Smith120bh/TALK┐ 17:54, 12 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree we should split the article in two pages, being one of them a list of art museums (which, I believe, would be better named as "List of art museums", avoiding POV). Besides, no pattern has been followed in the inclusion of names in this article. There're articles to almost every art museum in Europe and USA listed, many of them being of very low importante, causing an ackward feeling of the existence of a American-European vision about what's relevant in here, IMO. I agree that content of English speaking countries should be valued in EN-Wiki, but this kind of construction drives the reader to the wrong conclusions. Dornicke (talk) 02:51, 21 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I also agree...the list of art museums should be a separate page. FieldMarine (talk) 16:44, 2 December 2008 (UTC)


 * The list of art museums should be a separate page from this article. Who is going to do it? (WP:BB)--DThomsen8 (talk) 12:34, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Moved list to a separate page. Vlad b 2:30, 6 Sept 2011

List of UK Art Galleries
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/museums/art-museums-in-the-uk.html

133 UK Art Museums are listed here - []

A list of London Galleries - http://www.london-galleries.co.uk/

There are also art musuems in UK country houses such as Compton Verney [], The Rothschild Collection at Waddeston Manor [] and Chatsworth House [] to name but a few.

There are believed to be over 500 Art Galleries of various types in the UK [] and London alone is home to over 200 musuems. []

NB. Many European Galleries such as the Louvre in Paris contain more historic paintings than many entire national collections.

--90.211.214.116 (talk) 14:44, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

External links modified
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Gallery
Building on a question which has been raised in the section "Art Gallery Redirect", I think it is necessary to start a page dedicated to Gallery as a specific place to show works of art. This has to tie in with the gallery as a building type and other things, and is therefore quite complex. Maybe someone has the courage and stamina of starting this.

"Gallery" and "Museum" have, however, historically been used nearly interchangeably for collections, and still are with a multitude of National Galleries and National Museums - gallery generally pointing more towards art while museum can refer to any type of collection.

Some historic examples to start with might be the "Museo Cartaceo" of Cassiano dal Pozzo and the "Galleria Palatina" in the Palazzo Pitti.

Gerbis (talk) 14:56, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure your changes are very helpful. I think we are stuck with dealing with commercial galleries and art museums on the same page, as the words are so interchangable. "Gallery (art)" as an architectural article might be of interest, though that space is already rather full. Johnbod (talk) 16:18, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

On reconsideration, I think "Gallery (architecture)" is what is required with links to the specific form you're indicating. It's from there that all the other meanings derive, and it is not properly addressed in Wikipedia. For starters: John Fleming/Hugh Honour/Nikolaus Pevsner, Dictionary of Architecture, Penguin Books, 4th ed. 1991, s.v. Gallery (that's all I have to hand right now but I'm sure there are updated and extended versions and further research if you look for it).

As you might have noticed, I moved all the commercial aspects out of this page and moved it to "art dealers". They make much more sense there.

Gerbis (talk) 17:21, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Contemporary art gallery which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 22:48, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

Clarifying gallery vs museum
There is discussion in past years regarding making a clear distinction between a museum that holds artworks in public trust and a commercial gallery that is in the business of selling art. The resolution of this discussion has been difficult because of the word "gallery" - any place that displays art, is used for both entities even though everyone recognizes they are distinct topics. The past solution has been to have "Art gallery" redirect to "Art museum", have "Commercial gallery" redirect to "Art dealer", and have "Contemporary art gallery" as the only article on galleries selling art.

I was editing Art world when I encountered this problem. In the subculture identified as the art world there is no confusion; everyone knows that an art gallery sells art (not necessarily contemporary art), and an art museum holds "masterpieces" that preserve visual culture for the world. Everyone knows that the National Gallery of Art in DC is a museum, and describes itself as such. The Wikipedia problem is to try to determine what a worldwide audience would use as a search term to find these entities, and how to disambiguate them.

A discussion of my proposed to move "Contemporary art gallery" to "Art gallery" has resulted in a consensus to keep the "Contemporary" article but change Art gallery to an article on the general topic with a hatnote pointing to Art museum. To complete this solution I have place a hatnote and edited the lead to clarify topic definitions here. --WriterArtistDC (talk) 22:58, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

 Rema goxer  (talk) 23:26, 25 February 2023 (UTC)