Toolbox | 01 Take Off | 01 Create Your Manifesto
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Create your Manifesto
Print this template and invite your team. This is the first important step in creating your Gallery. Your manifesto, also known as vision and mission, is the core of your company and will be the basis and reference for how your company will develop and what goals it wants to achieve.
1. Why?
Take a moment and identify why you want to start. Whether it should be an artist-led gallery, event space and/or artist’s studio? What are your aims and ambitions? This/these will most lightly change over time, but they will help you to build your business in a direction. Always have a “northern star” or an end goal to work towards.
eg. To create a symbiosis of commercial and creative
2. What?
Consider what you want to create. Is it a big place with room
for multiple shows at the same time? Will you have a certain
focus? Emerging artists? Local artists? International art
scene? Digital art? Or something entirely different. There are
no rights or wrongs, just pick one or actively decide NOT to
pick a certain niche. Helpful here is to decide on something
you are passionate about. The likelihood that others may enjoy
something similar is quite big. Or try to think of what you
definitely do not want to be or create. Do you feel like there
is something missing when it comes to gallery spaces in your
local area?
3. Who?
This question is twofold. Who are your team? What will each
person bring? Why is each individual important? How many hours
a week will you work?
Secondly, who is your audience? Who do you want to come to
visit your space? Artists? Other gallerists? Clients
/collectors? Curators? Art critics? What age group are you
looking to target?
4. How?
(This does not have to be part of your manifesto,
but it is good to consider in this phase)
When do you want to open your business? How should you get the
funding? How will you convince your selected audience to come?
How will you source artworks to present?
The Laws of Sculptors, Gilbert & George, 1967
Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore met at art school in 1967 and formed a partnership that has lasted for over 40 years. In work that tackles a myriad of social issues – including sex, religion, race, addiction and death – the artists often appear themselves as “living sculptures”, typically dressed in smart grey suits. Their overriding mantra is “Art for all”, a reaction against the intellectual and economical elitism of contemporary art. This wry
extract is taken from the pair’s first manifesto of 1969, The Laws of Sculptors.
- Always be smartly dressed, well groomed, relaxed, friendly,
polite and in complete control. - Make the world believe in you and to pay heavily for this
privilege. - Never worry, assess, discuss or criticize but remain quiet
respectful and calm. - The Lord chisels still, so don’t leave your bench for long.
Manifesto – Moderna Museet
Manifest
Under the leadership of its director, Gitte Ørskou, Moderna
Museet devised a new vision in 2020 to promote the development
of its activities. This resulted in a joint manifesto that can
be seen as a compass, with seven policies for Moderna Museet’s
future.
Moderna Museet will engage people
Our passion is to mediate art for people. We want to embrace,
challenge, and inspire people and we are driven by an ambition
to speak with many. We want to be inclusive and to celebrate
diversity by recognizing that people arrive from different
starting points. We will engage a broader audience through
sharing the wonder of art.
Moderna Museet will be an agent of change in society
We are not outside society; we are an active part of the
world. As a museum, we must reflect and revise our community’s
view of history, as well as engage in the present, by being a
platform for dialogue, debate, and interaction. We will
increase our impact on society by creating space for public
discourse that facilitates critical thinking and mobilizes
change.
Moderna Museet will champion the arts
The extraordinary power of art is our lifeblood. Art arises in
and reflects its own time. It enables questions that generate
new perspectives; artists are an enormous force and stimulate
broader creativity. We will champion art because it forges new
paths and enables a reflective view of both history and the
present. We will celebrate art broadly and our view of art is
global.
Moderna Museet will be a stimulating platform for people and art
We want to be a vibrant, open, and dynamic museum that exists
as a spirit, one that offers our audiences elevant, engaging,
and direct ways of encountering art on equal terms. We will
inspire, and create space for new ideas by being a stimulating
platform that makes world-class art accessible to a broad
audience. We will set new standards for art museums worldwide.
The solidity of Moderna Museet will give us the authority to develop
As a state institution, it is our task to collect, preserve,
display, and mediate modern and contemporary art. We will
manage our cultural heritage based on the highest standards of
excellence and generate research that leads to high-quality
international collaborations and recognition. We will be a
leading institution within our field and we believe in sharing
our knowledge.
Moderna Museet wants a holistic perspective on its work
Our collection, research, exhibitions, mediation, and
communication must complement and fertilize each other; these
activities cannot stand alone. We will define ourselves on the
basis of the contexts in which we are involved. Our aim to
make the greatest art available to as many people as possible
must rest on sustainable practices that take into account
environmental and social impacts.
Moderna Museet must be driven by the courage to experiment
We must dare to push boundaries and take new paths in the way
we manage our tasks. Proceeding from our fundamental
stability, we want to challenge ourselves and to not be afraid
for experiments to fail. We will encourage our colleagues to
venture new experiments, to seek collaboration, and to find
new perspectives and the playful joy of gaining new ground –
and by doing so, to honour our courageous history.
Manifesto
Bridge
To bridge the divide between academia and industry
Closing the Gap
Today the gap between art school and the professional world is
closing, subsidised opportunities and professional development
are becoming necessary to help emerging talent survive
unemployment. These vehicles create bridges vital to balance
the expenses of life vs. studio practices — life as an
independent artist.
Platform
To provide a platform for emerging and established talent
under one roof
Artist Lead
The Muse is an artist led studio and gallery, established as a
stepping stone between academia and the professional arena. We
continue to support four graduates with subsidised studio
space, professional development and show opportunities.
Community
To explore the synergies of arts and community.
Gallery
Alongside our residency, we operate as a gallery showing
emerging and established talent throughout the year. Our
calendar combines all mediums of contemporary art with
exceptional artists from around the world, rubbing shoulders
to build experience, sales, exposure and project
collaborations — getting together and sharing the love.
Development
To further professional development, by building experience
and connections in the art environment.
Togetherness
Our community remit extends into the Notting Dale area with
Portobello Road providing opportunities and outreach, working
together with contemporaries and professionals found in one of
the most vibrant melt-pot on planet earth.
Manifest
We are more than human. We know where we are.
Our actions have caused disastrous imbalances. The Earth’s
climate system is in peril: animal populations destroyed, soil
degraded. People alive today will witness the extinction of
thousands, if not millions, of species.
But this isn’t just an abstract tragedy happening to other
lifeforms. Our fates, it turns out, are more interwoven than
our predecessors knew. Without our kin – butterflies, birds,
bees, lichen – humanity can not survive on earth.
That’s why we’re calling time on human exceptionalism. It’s
not working for the planet. It’s not working for humanity. We
believe that humankind needs to think beyond itself.
We need to remember that we are not just on this Earth: we are
of this Earth.
The interdependence is real: humanity as ecology, ecology as
humanity. Both the head and the heart demand this mental leap,
this act of surrender.
We need to remember that we are not just on this Earth: we are
of this Earth
The awe of small things helps: the morning bird song; the
smell of rain; the winter sunset. We need to cultivate a
reverence for the beauty and embodied intelligence of our
ecosystem. We need to feel that its intelligence may be
greater than ours.
No more treating nature as a resource for extraction,
exploitation and consumption. There is no nourishment here.
Instead, we must foster mutual admiration and respect.
This more-than-human spirit will encourage us to forge new
relationships with the species we share our planet with.
Stripping an ecosystem for our “needs” must become as aberrant
to us as cutting a piece of your flesh off to feed yourself.
Real change – more-than-human change – is possible.
For those schooled in a dichotomy between “humanity” and
“nature”, we will need to change how we think. This will be
hard. We will need a renewal of our beliefs, of what we value
or think of as “good”. New taboos, too. We will rediscover old
stories, stories that, though muted by the norms of an
extractive capitalism, have never gone away.
But where there is life, hope remains. We can pair incredible
power with humility and care, foresight with stewardship. Real
change – more-than-human change – is possible.
We need to move. Here’s how:
Move from fixing to caring
Let’s move away from the techno-deterministic pull of the
language around “fixing”. When we foreground the idea of care,
it inherently embodies ideas of fixing, building, making and
everything necessary to take care of that particular thing,
person, tree, insect, bird, animal, us, them, everyone.
Move from planning to gardening
Modernism’s most spectacular failures have happened when a
belief in top-down planning crashes into the messy
complexities of life. We should swap set squares for gardening
gloves: we need to nurture and grow, adapt to rather than
impose on.
Move from systems to assemblages, from knots to nodes
Acknowledging the entanglements without the desire to have the
“full overview”, keeps us open to surprising possibilities.
And it reflects the deeply entangled co-evolution of humans
and non-humans – think wolves, men and dogs, or the soil as a
living organism.
Move from innovation to resurgence
After a forest fire, seedlings sprout in the ashes, and, with
time, another forest may grow up in the burn. The regrowing
forest is an example of what we are calling resurgence.
Whereas “innovation” fixates on the new and the different,
resurgence forges assemblages of multispecies livability in
the midst of disturbance.
Move from independence to interdependence
We value and celebrate independence, from the first steps a
baby takes to the geopolitical decisions we make. What if,
instead of independence, instead of constantly valuing
individual success, we celebrate our interdependence with each
other and all species?
Move from extinction to precarity
Rather than retreat from the anxiety of a singular,
apocalyptic endpoint such as extinction, could we instead
consider the possibility of precarious flourishing?
