This is the first year I haven’t closed TTP for the summer.  This year I introduced the compare chart for museums, which DON’T close or limit their hours in the summer so  I thought it would be helpful to keep that open.  As long as the site is open, I’m doing my best to see as many galleries as I can every single day (due to limited gallery hours and my day job, I only have about 20 minutes a day to see shows).

Most shows in the summer are “group shows” – either curated by someone special (like this) or organized around a particular theme (like this) or just a collection of artists that the gallery represents (like this).  So rather than pick “shows”, I’m really picking pieces within those shows.  At the time of this post, every one of those pieces (see the top five) is a film/video.   Not sure what that says, but if you do like art films, or are curious what that even means, now is a great time to check it out (if you can get off work on a weekday afternoon).

We’re about 2 weeks away from “summer hours” at the galleries.  Galleries will either close entirely or limit their hours to near-impossible visiting times.  They will be closed on weekends and only open on afternoons during the week.  Most art magazines don’t publish in the summer and other publications generally stop recommending/reviewing gallery shows.  I myself welcome the break – I use the time to focus on improvements to the website and catch up on an enormous pile of reading.   I will still visit the galleries once a month or so and make a few recommendations, but content will be thin, and like I said – often difficult to see.

I will update the blog regularly to talk about what I’m working on this summer.  Here’s a quick list of my goals for the Fall.

• Improving the “mouse over” function of the “Review” thumbnail archive and creating a complete archive of my reviews (right now you can only see the last 4 reviews)
• Finally completing the “2% to go” feature with some exciting new tools.
• More content to the “Collecting” section so you can learn about how each piece was acquired plus my overall thoughts on building a collection.
• Integrating weekly video content to the site.
• Creating a second website!!!! – “The Two Percent” evolved pretty organically over several years and I could not be more proud of it.  The new site is something different - extremely specific, far more unique, much more interactive, and appeals to an audience that reaches far beyond NYC. The project is already well underway and I’ll be revealing more throughout the summer.

What are you doing going to galleries this weekend?! Matthew Barney’s COMPLETE Cremaster Cycle is playing at IFC this weekend (thru June 3rd). Discount tickets are available if you see them all in one day (The theater has grouped the 5 films into 3 long showings). I was extremely tempted to go for the “all day pass” but realized that my motivation for doing so was not to get more out of each film, but to test my endurance and gain some sort of bragging rights. After careful consideration I decided the experience would be best if I saw one showing a day for 3 days in a row– which hopefully gives me time to digest each film, but still places them in rapid succession so the links between the films will be fresh.

For reasons that will be revealed in about a month, I am compiling a list of every gallery in New York in alphabetical order. Since no listing contains every gallery, I’m transcribing and combining every listing I can find - this weekend I picked up the listings from GalleryGuide and ChelseaArt.

GalleryGuide is one of the most incorrect listings I’ve found – containing at least 1 gallery that hasn’t existed for over a year, multiple incorrect gallery names, and multiple listings that are alphabetically out of order. Now I certainly make my share of typos and spelling errors - but it seems like if ALL you do is sell advertising and list galleries – someone should double-check that stuff.

While ChelseaArt doesn’t make those simple errors, both publications disagree just HOW galleries should be alphabetically organized. The main issue is that when a gallery name is one person (Mary Boone Gallery) it is sorted by last name (“B”), but when the gallery name is two people (Luhring Augustine Gallery) it is filed by the first word (“L”).  The PROBLEM is that most people (including the guides themselves apparently) are confused as to WHEN it’s one full name and when it’s two last names.

This is just one of the reasons the two percent is organized by address – to actually make things EASIER to look up.   However for this new project I do actually need to sort things alphabetically, so I did some research.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~recmgmt/Forms/FilingRules.pdf
http://www.ehow.com/how_6064320_alphabetize-business-names.html

In short, when a business name is a first/last name, it should be organized by last name, but there is an important exception: the first name SHOULD be used if and when the business name is so common that there is confusion if it is sorted by last name (see rule #7 in the first link, and rule #2 in the second link).

This is my conclusion: The gallery names are not “common” but there is certainly confusion, so I have therefore decided to sort everything by the first proper noun in the gallery name, regardless of if it’s a first name or a last name.

As to why I’m creating this list in the first place…. You’ll have to wait.