.ART

Have you ever dreamed of becoming an art gallerist? In the old starting a gallery was a process full of societal and technical hurdles. Еntering the industry required you to be not only an art lover and an art connoisseur, but also a wealthy man, ideally – an offspring of a rich old family of art dealers.

Today, when the whole world is gone digital, establishing a gallery is much easier and almost free – everyone can become a gallerist in online space. Virtual art galleries are a cutting-edge trend while also becoming more realistic as corresponding digital tools undergo tech evolution. Today you can find full-fledged museums online and enjoy a magic experience of a real gallery with no need to elbow your way through the crowds – directly from your couch.

The .ART community is embracing the digital world because of the significant impact it can have on popularity, global outreach and monetization. In focus today – the experience of You.Art, a virtual gallery launched by the founder and CEO Geeta Nallani on you.art domain. She tells us how she came up with the idea, why it is incredibly important to help artists overcome the limited opportunities to showcase their art and why today we need digital certificates of authenticity more than ever.

Geeta is an interior designer by profession. Over the last ten years of her practice, she found it logical “to not stop at Design and extend it to Art” (but we are confident that design is also art!), because many times her design process got amplified and reached culmination through the choice of objects of art. Geeta believes that art should be integral to designing spaces.

These experiences provoked her to think about the importance of art while she also identified many pain points for a buyer to search, find, understand, and buy art. Geeta explored the art scene and realised that there was a great talent pool out there, with thousands of modern artists that have very limited opportunity for showcasing it to the world. In the fall of 2021 Geeta took this idea further and – along with her co-founder Sudha – created Saga Art Pvt. Ltd., an art consultancy firm which helps corporate companies and individuals invest in art.

The pandemic helped Geeta to understand how everything is eventually becoming virtual, including art. To show her commitment to Indian contemporary art, she has recently launched You.Art – an E-commerce platform promoting promising artists across India.

Our vision is that great works of art shall be accessible to everyone – to know, to explore, to debate, to invest and to own. Currently, we are focusing on paintings, paper works and mixed media art and plan to scale it up to sculptures and installations too. We are yet to explore the digital art arena. Today we are working closely with professional artist groups to interact and understand the modern art practices and we are also working with self-taught artists who have a philosophy behind their practice.

The model of You.Art is to offer a freshly curated selection of 100 artworks every 100 days. The objective behind this model is to keep the website live and have the buyers coming back for new artworks.

You.Art features a virtual gallery experience, which allows the visitor to view their favourite artworks in installation mode. The entire backend process – certifying the originality of the artwork by the artist, its valuation, ease of payment and delivery to buyer’s premises has all been meticulously streamlined.

To emphasise and bring awareness about the significance of authenticity and provenance, You.Art if also providing digital records for their art objects.

Another unique selling proposition of You.Art is that the art on display is curated, and not uploaded directly by the artists. The curatorial team makes sure that artists and their works are rightly represented both in terms of its quality and value.

You.Art plans to host auctions and develop NFT sale possibilities for its platform in the future. “Our vision is to become the most sought-after E-commerce platform for Indian Contemporary Art”, – says Geeta.