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.