Sept 20, 2010
NYC
Elevation: 80m
Kesha had turned me onto Hazel Dooney’s blog, Self vs Self a few months back. Dooney talks about about her endeavor to work outside the traditional gallery system in a recent interview and then subsequent blog post. All of this makes me think of our new enterprise Baang and Burne Contemporary and the new business model that we are working under / creating.
The basic idea of Baang and Burne Contemporary is that we would be a roaming gallery hosting exhibits that are one night only / one week only in any kind of creative spaces available to us. Be it a private home exhibit, as a pop-up gallery in a commercial space and or even a hotel suite for an afternoon. The objective is to be flexible and fluid. If we are not forced to hold up 4 white walls in a specific location then we could afford to be agile, shift and evolve far more rapidly than a traditional gallery could. The business model is based on the idea of relationship building, transparency and community. Baang and Burne views itself more as a match maker in helping artists to build relationships with the collectors than to set itself up as the guard at the gate to your art. I spent a long Saturday afternoon learning how to build a blog for Baang and Burne where it acts as an aggregate to all the blogs our artists currently write and keep so that collectors can go to the Baang and Burne blog as a way of getting to know our roster of artists in depth.
Both Kesha and I agree with Dooney’s observation at the failure of the old traditional gallery system, we applaud her in her effort in creating a new paradigm. Baang and Burne is our effort in creating our own system, our version of the new.
What I would like to propose here is to take this revolution a step further. Instead of setting up the scenario as an either or proposition, either we do business following the traditional gallery model or we break off from them entirely and follow the lead of Hazel Dooney, I suggest that we shift the mindset along with the paradigm.
I love a good fight as much as the next feisty ambitious girl with a temper. However, what I have learned over the years is that you get exactly what you expect. If you expect life to be hard, then hard it shall be. So instead of setting up Baang and Burne in a situation where its David vs Golith and only one of us will walk out alive, I would like to propose that we are an alternative. We are simply the most logical next step in evolution in the art world. Baang and Burne is not playing David to traditional gallery’s Golith. We are not in a death match trapped in a steel cage. We are the synthesis of all the traditions that have come before (we take it with gratitude), add along with new technology and social media platforms and we evolved into something new, something better. A gallery that is about transparency, relationship building, community and the agility to constantly evolve.
