Artspace and Museum Fund Raising

Kelly Crow had an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal the other day about how a new website, called Artspace has approached museums and persuaded them to sell contemporary works on paper and sculptures which were produced in limited editions to promote and support museum exhibits.  This sales approach is a very interesting and novel method to raising funds for museum operations. I am sure many museum gift shops and storage areas have many of these interesting exhibition related items taking up space.  Artspace plans on converting them to cash, and keeps 30%-40% as a sales commission.

To visit Artspace, click HERE.

The WSJ reports

A new digital art venture called Artspace has persuaded more than 35 museums to search their storage spaces and gift-shop inventories for contemporary works on paper or small sculptures to sell through the company's Web site. In many cases, these works were produced in limited editions to promote earlier exhibits but were later boxed up and forgotten.

The Brooklyn Museum recently went digging through its storage boxes and found five examples of sculptor Louise Bourgeois's $6,000 print from 1996, "Eyes." The museum also found 41 rainbow-striped prints by minimalist master Sol LeWitt, priced at $2,500 apiece, and 100 self-portrait prints by Gilbert & George that the museum had hoped to sell for $4,000 apiece during its show of the British duo's work three years ago.

The library in the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris turned up 400 examples of an untitled 2009 print by Peter Doig, depicting a white canoe in an eggplant-colored sea. The print, priced at $750, was originally published in an edition of 500.

California's Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive uncovered Richard Tuttle's 1993 "Folded Space," a $1,500 geometric cardboard cutout that the artist made in an edition of 200 to coincide with the museum's exhibit of his work. Chief curator Lucinda Barnes said the museum's major donors bought cutouts at the time, but the 50 remaining pieces "weren't so marketable" afterwards.

To read the full WSJ article, click HERE.

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