I've wrapped up my internship at Jackson Fine Art. It was a positive experience, though mostly doing data entry, creating/managing/cleaning up their address book, press and contact lists is pretty tedious.

I prefer the mystery of how art gets sold to the nuts and bolts of actually selling it (please disregard if I'm applying for a job at your gallery!). There's so much money involved. It can come off as high end retail, only without name tags. I don't mean that to sound negative, though I suppose it does. I'm not much of a salesman. I had this romantic notion that art just sells itself. You look at pictures and argue about them. They speak to you or they don't. Deposits and payment plans never came up in my fantasy. Art exists, just floating in the air, like music. But, like music, art is a business. And I do like to make money. Especially from something I find fulfilling. So I am pro-gallery, just a bit naive about how it all works.

Since I finished up the address book updates, I've been helping with inventory.

So basically what happens is I look at the numbers written on the back of a photograph, and match them to the corresponding inventory list, while checking the edition and title information to make sure it all corresponds. This was a pretty fun way to look at different work.

Masao Yamamoto puts snapshots into boxes and encourages the viewer to pick through them. I like this method for creating an individual experience and narrative. Mona Kuhn... not so much. If that's a nudist colony, it has the best looking nudists I've ever seen. Everyone is gorgeous and seems to be well under 30. And white. it's like Logan's Run, only everybody's naked and soft focus-y. Or a nudist colony populated by underwear models. Maybe it's because they're French. Everyone knows the French are hot.

What I most enjoyed was meeting everyone who worked there, and having the opportunity to ask them a little about their jobs and how everything works. That was the most rewarding. They even gave me a book (I chose David Hilliard) when I left. And that was pretty cool. One day I hope to be on the artist end of the gallery biz, and this experience will come in handy.

Labels: internship