The world gallery opened everywhere at once. It didn’t have any big names or celebrity artists attached to it. No curators. Nor even any buildings. You could call it a soft launch—you might see a intricate little Rubenesque blob in copper, wobbling on the sill of a metro car’s window, which evoked in you the thought of figures wrestling. Or looking up while waiting for your bus, you might see a mobile hanging there, looking like a mashup of Calder and Mondrian, and somehow a little Marvel Cinematic Universe (it’s the colours). Or perhaps you’d be reading an out-of-office email and found it veered a haiku on the limits of patience…
when one is away
the loss is cherished, until
grace finds its limit
Cheers,
Ricard Jansen, PhDc
People Pioneer | BioAgMarTech Leader | Bridging Software and Culture
The fascinating trinkets and snippets became a regular part of everyday life. While no artists or organization claimed credit for the random acts of art, and the artefacts were freely distributed in every public place, some cunning firms found a way to associate themselves with some of the trendy pop-ups – as they came to be called.
Agreements emerged amongst the biggest brands: they arrayed the various pop-ups into a small number of house styles, and eventually a stable taxonomy enrobed the artefacts into a handful of classifications. This happened on a layer ethereal to the artefacts themselves, but the gallery was already placeless, so a details like origin or location hardly seemed relevant.
It wasn’t too long after that that things returned to normal – the world of art, with its newly unmoored galleries resumed their old business of exclusives, swaps, write-ups, and internships, albeit now without the superfluity of artists.