10-11
The Gallery Annual for the Past Season
The Jag compiles and organizes reviews for the shows in the city. It is updated each week. After doing this for quite a while now, it is possible to start pulling out some interesting data. This Annual summarizes some of this info.
In September 2010, the Jag started to highlight the new reviews for the week in grey. After a full year of this process, (from September 2010 to September 2011), it is possible to easily identify a year’s worth of reviews and tabulate which galleries and museums got the most critical love over a season.*
The information that we’ve culled from this information…
• Summary #1: Tally all 2,114 reviews for the 2010-2011 season by each gallery/museum/space (note: for example, that an essay covering three different shows counts as there reviews here).
• Summary #2: While the data is still geographically organized, add up the reviews for each area of the city. About a third of all reviews land in Chelsea. The second area is the UES, but over half of the reviews are for museums. Combining all midtown areas makes it third, but again half of those are for museums. When looking at just galleries, the LES moves up to second. A screenshot of the results:
• Summary #3: Create a single block of the 463 (!) locations that had reviews during the year, and sort alphabetically. Impressive, as the List database currently has 1162 locations, 626 of which have regular shows.
• Summary #4: Sort the data again, this time by number of reviews. The most reviews, 78, were for the Metropolitan. With this list, it’s possible to use another gauge to see how much critics got around town. The top ten locations, mostly the big name museums, got 18% of the reviews. The top hundred locations got 60%.
• Summary #5: Separate out the galleries. Gagosian on 24th is on top. A screenshot of the top gallery locations:
• Summary #6: Go back to the alphabetical block from #3 above, and combine multiple locations into a single institutional entry. For example, the four Pace locations become one. This crunches the list of 463 locations down to 429 entities.
• Summary #7: Sort this new combined list by number of reviews. With PS1 folded in, team MoMA is now at the top with 101. Note that in terms of reviews, Gagosian and Pace are two of the top five ‘museums’ in the city. Zwirner and Salon 94 are in the top ten.
• Summary #8: Break out the galleries again. Only 561 reviews, or about a quarter of the total, were for museum shows. Notable restraint from the easy write-up. A screenshot of the top galleries:
*We know, we know: “Indicates the best connected, not the best art.” “A different 12 month period would produce completely different results.” “Many of those reviews are negative.” “Misses all the reviews after the show has closed, like most AiA.” “Should use a different group of publications.” “The L and Brooklyn Rail only partly salvage the process – without them, Brooklyn would have a fraction of the results.” “The GJ process has changed over time.” “There are math errors.” True that.