Gallery of Ideas

What's a poor art gallery to do these days? Galleries that have begun to dabble in works of electronic art are facing more than a few daunting challenges. As a result, galleries that depend on the sale of exhibited work as a portion of their revenue are becoming more reluctant to specialize in electronic art. The ones that do are dealing with the fact that most patrons don't want to deal with complicated, high-maintenance media due to the technical attention it requires.

In the age of increasing public funds cuts to arts groups, how can non-saleable pieces pay the rent? CyberStage posed that question to Roger Ricco, co-curator of the Ricco/Maresca Art Gallery in New York City, a gallery that has begun the brave journey towards electronic installation art along with its more traditional mainstays. CODE, a major exhibit recently commissioned by the Ricco/Maresca Gallery, took up enough space to fill their entire hall from front to back, all at no profit to them.

We asked Ricco to describe how their gallery got involved in electronic art, why he feels it's necessary to give this type of art attention, and how they plan on paying the bills.

RR: We're a very traditional gallery in that we sell physical objects. However, in the last few years I have had a real interest for the possibilities lying underneath the work coming out of the electronic medium. I think that was first initially inspired by the fact that we had some clients, in particular Robert Greenburg, who owns the R/GA Studios here in New York and in L.A. and produces a lot of commercials and special effects, and more recently, digital images for print. Robert Greenburg was buying the art that we are most noted for: both general contemporary and self-taught art, the work of the typical self-taught outsider. The rent has been paid by selling traditional work, physical rather than electronic. Still, after having seen what was going on with R/GA, I became more and more interested in electronic art outside of the communications/film industry. That led me into seeing what was being done with this field. The idea wasn't that we had a means of supporting ourselves through this work, but that we had to face the fact that there was art being made with these tools.

The purpose of CODE was simply -- or not so simply, rather expensively actually (laughs) -- to put out a rather major event which responded to and demonstrated the growing excitement and energies in this field without any real sense of how we were going to make money off of it. I figured, and I still do, that the economics would reveal themselves in time. As a dealer, I've always gone with interests and excites me first and assume others will see it too. At that juncture, the economics tend to fall into place. That, in a nutshell, is our job as an art gallery.

Prior to my interest in electronic medium, I began to miss the once vital dialogue that I was familiar with in the art world. And honestly, I was becoming enormously bored with the closed, generally conservative, protective attitudes that I was beginning to notice. There was a noticeable medium chauvinism, something I am not personally comfortable with. I was finding a kind of electric energy, a raging energy in this new medium that I hadn't seen in art since I was in college. This renewed energy made me feel that perhaps something wonderful was beginning to happen here. The intellect, the philosophy of these people, was stimulating. Some vital art coming out of this, and hopeful I would be awake to notice it.

We are known for developing "the outsider art" in terms of our books and such, making it almost commercial. It didn't have a commercial base twelve or fourteen years ago. The outsider, if you're not familiar with it, had to do with mental patients and people who were self-taught, art-brute type of thing. So we were always on the outside or on the fringe of things anyway. Our background has always been in the investment of contemporary art.

We started looking into electronic pieces about four years ago, and it was quite primitive at that time. You basically had low-end equipment and software.

Tell me about your financial position for these kinds of works, do you think there's any hope of them being a financially profitable thing? How do we sell these works if we're going to continue to develop them?

The gallery world is built on a physical-object-purchase type of thing -- because people like to possess/show/enjoy things -- and that when we try to sell something more ephemeral like more electronic pieces, they still have to spin-off a certain amount of things that can be acquired. Even most "conceptual art" depend on spin-offs from the artist's primary idea in order to give the audience something to take home. Spin-off is probably the best word for it because they can be looked at as minor things, prints for example. Certainly you have the more expected thing, for example, somebody working on a computer and making a painting, but that's an object also. I think that in the early stages we will be dealing primarily in spin-off if we're talking about keeping some kind of economic stability to the gallery's life -- I mean, we do pay rent!

I think a good comparison takes place with music. Do you acquire, for example, a CD of a musician in the same way you acquire a painting? You acquire [the CD] only to play it [although] you may like the cover or the jacket, but you're not acquiring it so much for the sake of ownership as you are to have it conveniently there when you want to hear it. You pay for use.

But what you seem to saying is that since the gallery is a physical place, any financial products which come out of it must also exist in a physical domain for them to be possessed.

At least at this stage of the game, probably yes. But even if you had someone who said let's sell all this stuff on the web, what is it that you're selling? Yes, I am watching a wonderful animation I'm not paying for, but it is the product which is still selling, a t-shirt or a print. It still has to do with the habit of acquisition in the human condition. And I have to recognize and work with that. Can we sell art without or in addition to the physical space? I think so, but for a few years at least it will have to be in addition to it. There is a certain social and cultural activity that exists around the purchase of an expensive piece of original art, like going to a concert versus buying a CD. But what about the less expensive spin-offs of this original art? No reason one has to acquire those in a physical space, an electronic catalogue can do as well, not just on the web. Personally I think these transactions can -- I should say will -- happen on the web in spite of all the doubt that we keep hearing, based on recognition that we want or need to acquire and find ways of making that easier.

For centuries we have been hanging rectangles on walls. The artist made the rectangles and the gallery dealer hoped there would be enough walls to last a lifetime. It was a simpler, "You do this and I do that" relationship. Now, at least for us, we are seeing far more occasions for collaboration. CODE was like this in a sense, I set up a premise and the artists made things for CODE, we had a lot of artists [for that show], not just one. It raised questions like, what's going to make this work, and can we sell spin-offs from it? The gallery must become a store of ideas, not only of the precious objects. I think if we keep on remembering that, we at least stand a chance of having an audience.

I think that there's also a real good opportunity for permanent installation in airports or museums, as much as gigantic sculptures were put out in landscapes. I think there you will find the next level of commissions. The gallery, I believe, will become much more of a manager of an artist's diverse projects and products and a facilitator of the collaborations that will be the means by which art will be conceived, made, seen and perhaps sold in the future.