Saatchi Online Gallery to Showcase 1,000 Curator-Selected Artists

Date.: 18 July 2012
Publication.: News
Author.: MELENA RYZIK

Saatchi Online Gallery to Showcase 1,000 Curator-Selected Artists

Saatchi Online, the six-year-old digital gallery founded by the advertising magnate and art collector Charles Saatchi, is starting a new push to promote its platform for up-and-coming artists. This week the gallery is introducing its first exhibition under its new chief executive, Margo Spiritus, “100 Curators 100 Days.” For the show 100 curators from around the world each chose 10 artists to showcase on the site for a day. In addition to independent curators, the list of participants includes experts from the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Vienna Kunsthalle and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The 1,000 artists were chosen from among 60,000 represented on Saatchi Online.

The idea for the initiative came from Rebecca Wilson, director of the Saatchi Gallery in London; Ms. Wilson also helped select the curators.

Ms. Spiritus, who was named chief executive about a year ago after a career spent mostly at start-ups, said the project was “exactly what our mission is as Saatchi Online: It gives increased exposure to artists around the globe, puts them in front of well known curators” and consumers.

Saatchi Online added an e-commerce function about a year ago. The artists, many of them little known, have uploaded their work and priced it themselves; they will earn 70 percent of sale prices, Ms. Spiritus said. “The concept of the business was always to help artists generate revenue from being an artist,” she added.

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