The Gallerist
A game for 1-4 players by <PERSON>
"While married to <PERSON>, she met <PERSON>,
And soon she was swinging with <PERSON>.
<PERSON> died, and her tear drops were copious.
She cried all the way to the altar.
But he would work late at the Bauhaus,
And only came home now and then.
She said, "What am I running? A chow house?
It's time to change parters again."
- <PERSON>, from his song Alma
Introduction
art 1. a. human creative skill or its application b. work exhibiting this (The Oxford English Reference Dictionary)
<PERSON>, Picnic, 1916For as long as humans have been able to draw, paint, sculpt, sing, talk, write, and create, they have been making art. From prehistoric cave etchings and petroglyphs to today's digital creations, people have created.
In 2003, the company I then worked for sent me on a business trip to New York City. I had the opportunity to check out many of the great sights New York City has to offer, including Central Park and the MoMA, but the highlight for me was visiting the Guggenheim and seeing the From Picasso to Pollock exhibit. It was there that I discovered and fell in love with the art of <PERSON>. In particular, I loved the whimsy in his watercolour painting, Picnic.
<PERSON> is often credited as the father of abstract expressionism, and was also active in the <PERSON> school in 1922-33 where he developed analytical thinking on colour that is still taught in art school today. My love of <PERSON> pursued me into graduate school where I delved into his artistic exchanges with <PERSON>, but that's a story for another day.
Artists in the past frequently had patrons, usually members of the nobility that had the wealth to keep an artist in house (or one of their many estates) and occupied with things the patron wanted to have done. 216
The 17th century saw a rise in the merchant class and a shift on who was consuming art. It was no longer strictly the province of the rich and the church and became more populist with time.
The late 19th century brought us the Impressionists and some of the most famous and favourite art ever. The early 20th saw a lot of change in the world of art as industrialization and war, especially World War One, caused social upheaval.
That is of course a very incomplete history and overview, but it does bring us to the modern day, where the role of private art galleries and dealers have replaced the patrons of old, and art has become a commodity like never before.
Enter The Gallerist, <PERSON> game about buying, selling, displaying, and promoting art. Players take on the role of a gallery owner, trying to discover artists, promote them, and then buy, show, and sell their works for profit.
Components
The Gallerist is a beast. It comes in a huge box (15.50 x 12.50 x 3.50 inches) and weighs in at a whopping 3.6kg (about 8lb).
Photo by the designer
Before talking about anything else, the game is all about the art. And inside the box are 32 tiles with original art from a slew of different artists, and then there are a dozen more tiles from the Kickstarter stretch goals (albeit two of those are blank for a create your own).
One of the stretch goal art tiles was from <PERSON> late mother, which he wrote about .
<PERSON>, who did the graphic design of the board, contributed 14 different alone, including all eight sculptures. It's both remarkable and wonderful that Vital and the publisher were able to get all this original work into the game. It would have been equally splendid to have had some classic and well known pieces into the game as well, such as the old <PERSON> classic .
The game has four broad types of art included for the players to buy and sell - paintings, sculptures, photos, and a nod to modern times, digital. In addition to <PERSON>, the artists featured are: <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, and <PERSON>.
If you also get the Kickstarter tiles, you'll enjoy additional art by some of the aforementioned as well as <PERSON>, <PERSON>, <PERSON>, and <PERSON>.
One disappointment I had with this game was for the artist tiles. 92