Saatchi Gallery / Aleksandra Mir's Newsroom & Gallery Shop

Aleksandra Mir's Newsroom at Saatchi Gallery 

Key Points:

• The room is full of cartoon style newspaper front pages, what caught my attention was the black Friday ones, the three above relate to sale. 

Further research:

• More artists that work with this type of critique. 

Reflection:

• It's intriguing to see how this critique works within the context of the gallery. 
• However, its not directly related to my own work in terms of context and style of work. 

Saatchi Gallery Shop

• Whenever I go into a gallery, I am always intrigued by the shop within the gallery, sometimes more than the artwork itself, as it shows a very overtly commercial side to art. 

Key Points & Reflections:

• The gallery shop is always full of creative and expensive, almost luxury goods that you can't get anywhere else. It has a 'cool vibe' to it as if you are an insider that has just stumbled across an array of interesting material. 

• The neon lights that are sold individually - pictured above - would be very expensive if I was to create my whole brand name with them for my own gallery, but I was inspired by the classic neon look for my future neon designs. 

• Some items are made by artists and sell for hundreds of pounds, while other items are generally overpriced merchandise. But it's this aspect of sale within the gallery that I am keen to exploit. Artwork is turned into commodity here, and the gallery makes profit out of its context. 

• This is relevant to my research as it enables me to form more of a critique about the gallery shop and context of sale within the gallery, although my work is exploiting commercial artwork at the moment. 

Future Research:

• For future research, I want to exploit this side of art - the merchandise side, like Takishi Murakami does with his array of merchandise, and perhaps I will include some merchandise within my own work in future, to play on this context.