When museums are built these days architects directors and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties eat dinner wine-and-dine donors. Sure these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.
When money and hype recede from the art world one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.
It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations large paintings and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.
Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.
There's something pleasing about large well-lit spaces. I love that dealers are willing to take massive chances in order to give this much room to their artists. Most of all I love that more galleries showing more art gives more artists a shot.
Galleries began growing in both number and size in the late seventies when artists who worked in lofts wanted to exhibit their work in spaces similar to the ones the art was made in.
Space is the breath of art.
Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm trying to liberate them I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
You might say that when you step inside you're entering a honorific space but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.