Online Exhibition Listings

There are some excellent Arts resources online, but all have different strengths or weaknesses. Here are some of the Exhibitions listings sites I find myself returning to, but I'm always happy to hear if you have any other suggestions:

First up, New Exhibitions is an good resource for simple listings although it is no frills and much more useful in its free regular printed ‘map’ format.

As a more comprehensive resource, ArtRabbit is my current favorite. It holds informative gallery pages and archives, is inclusive and has a great mapping feature identifying other galleries or venues in proximity to your chosen show - so you can easily plan a series of visits around an area.

For a more dynamic experience, you could join Art Calendar. Here, you can maintain a personal calendar, which is updated with listings that you can mark your attendance at. This is attached to the Art Review Magazine Social Network, so to use it you will have to join first. That's not such a bad thing as you have access to many informative and well written reviews and articles - but it is a little over-loaded, difficult to navigate and clunky and slow at times. It is still at the BETA testing stage, so maybe wait until it's fully launched. In the mean time, the less interactive but smoother and equally informative ArtSlant is a better choice.

Finally, Galleries.co.uk is a very basic list of openings and launch events and is extremely useful for those of the 'ligging' persuasion. Most of the above sites have a stated International scope, but have some kind of bias in their submissions. My own use of these sites is more limited to London, UK, so I’m not sure how the perspective of another city or country would change my recommendation.

Of those more general ‘What’s On’ sites that include Exhibitions as a category - Spoonfed is a pretty good general guide and is fairly comprehensive, although difficult to search in any detail beyond ‘Exhibition’. A better bet is Time Out Online, which has a more powerful search engine and a more active feedback community. Time Out’s brand popularity, however, means they are subject to a barrage of submissions and – as a forgivable result – they often limit the scope of their entries to the firmly established venues. They do list fringe exhibitions and events, but their selections are often quite random and erratic. I also quite like View London – it lacks the editorial content of Time Out, but has a very broad scope of entries and a clear streamlined and easy to navigate platform.

Feel free to send me some more suggestions and I’ll happily expand this list. Next time, I’m going to suggest some of the blogs I’ve been enjoying…

Trouble at the ICA

I have mixed feelings over the current financial problems suffered by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, but, over the last few years, the ailing institution has seemingly done everything in its power to erode any goodwill amongst the public and artists alike.

That goodwill was originally quite substantial. The ICA holds a near legendary status as a bridge between the fringe and the establishment, where the most exciting new arts would take their first steps into the spotlight, In the 1940’s, the ICA's founders intended to establish a space where artists, writers and scientists could debate ideas outside of the traditional confines of the Royal Academy. During its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s it was home to an early exhibition of works by Jackson Pollock, the American abstract expressionist, as well as the first British Pop Art show. It held this unique position up to the early 1990s, when it staged shows by Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman and advocated the emergent YBAs.

However, since the middle of that decade, its association with pioneering artworks comes to an abrupt halt and it’s been almost 15 years since the ICA has held an event or exhibition of note. This is fundamentally due to a loss of identity that has seen it increasing positioning itself as a museum of past glories – engaging with the established contemporary ‘commercial’ trends instead of searching out the challenging and ‘dangerous’ of the finges. An institution whose raison d’etre was to take risks on a very prominent and public scale has suddenly limited its scope to a dialogue with the fringe arts of its heyday, a territory already well covered by our generously museume’d capitol.

Ekow Eshun, the current artistic director, has paid much lip service about deliberately eschewing big-name established artists – yet at the same time has restricted programming, limited experimental and community projects and instead foolishly attempted to compete with far larger public arts venues such as Tate Modern, the Barbican and the South Bank centre. The ICA was established because London had commercial and public art spaces, but lacked a prominent enough experimental venue. Ekow should also note that the ICA was NEVER about big-name established artists, its power was the fact it exhibited people before they became big-name established artists. Some of these artists would have had difficulty exhibiting on that profile anywhere else in central London.

This is depressing, because the ICA is quite unique in this role. We still have an art ‘establishment’ as exclusive and difficult to access for the artist as the Academy and Cork Street were in the 40’s. Similarly, we have a fringe arts community still just as marginal to commercial and critical regard. The ICA, as it was intended, has a huge role to play yet. Nevertheless, to maintain relevance as long as it did – almost 50 years – is a huge achievement. Perhaps, its gradual loss of identity – and absorption into the mainstream was inevitable.

About one third of the ICA’s 90 staff are now to lose their jobs and exhibitions are to be scaled back. Perhaps a recent Arts Council Grant may help change direction at the ICA and save further redundancy?

I sincerely hope so.

If not, then perhaps right now we should be looking not for the artists of the future, but instead toward the next generation of pioneering curators and gallerists to help fill that void.