The Art World and the World Wide Web

As the Web has become accepted by the art world, the speed of that migration has accelerated. The most profound shift is happening on your very own computer. All those applications you installed—the ones you brought home in the big boxes with the thick manuals—are finding a new home on the Web. Word processing, spreadsheets, even photo editing and manipulation—all of these applications are being adapted and transformed into “Web applications.” Dramatically less expensive than the regular programs (in some cases free), easy to use, and instantly updated, Web applications are causing people to rethink the way they use their computers.

Now these changes are impacting art galleries in the most important place: the gallery-management software that sits at the heart of a gallery’s operations. And as anyone who has worked with the existing management programs knows, this upgrade could not have come a moment too soon.

While galleries have become significantly more wired over the last few years—email and websites are a given now—the management software is still lagging behind the times. Difficult to learn, complicated to use, prohibitively expensive, and completely immobile, these types of programs have been practically demanding to be revamped and simplified. For a gallery that would like to make things easier on itself from a computer and technical standpoint, transforming the gallery-management software to a Web application would have an immediate impact on productivity. exhibit-E’s galleryManager is one of the first software solutions to look at gallery management exclusively from a Web perspective. This is not a Web add-on to some landlocked PC program; this is pure online gallery management, accessed 104