About
Go and see some art
On View is for the afternoon you want to spend looking at art and don’t know where to go. It shows you every gallery and museum in New York City, San Francisco, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Berlin, London and Milan, and what is on in each of them right now.
Too much, everywhere
There is more art on view than at any time in history. A city has hundreds of galleries, and on any Saturday hundreds of shows are open in it, most of them free, most of them gone in six weeks. And it has never been harder to know about them. Each gallery announces its shows on its own site, its own newsletter and its own Instagram; the pages that once listed them all have mostly gone. What reaches you is whatever an algorithm picked that morning. The rest you hear about the week after it closes.
So everyone sees the same five shows, and misses the one that would have meant something to them, two streets from where they were standing.
One map
On View puts a whole city’s art on one map. The galleries are pins; open one and you see what is on, who made it, what it looks like, when the doors are open and how to get there. Turn the map into a list and the same shows come as pictures, the ones worth your time first. Start with the galleries worth crossing town for, or take in all of them, or the museums alone.
It is for the Saturday you have free and the hour between two meetings. For the city you have just landed in and don’t know. For the gallery you have walked past a hundred times without going in. The point is not to read about art. It is to go and stand in front of it.
Lists
A list is where you keep the shows you mean to see before they close, or the galleries you want to keep an eye on. Make one for a Saturday walk through Chelsea, one for a friend coming to town, one of every place that has ever shown a painter you love. Each list is a map of its own, with only its pins on it.
Make a list public and anyone with the link can open it. That is how a city gets passed on: the shows a newsletter named this week, a critic’s picks for the month, the ten galleries you would send a friend to first. Once you are logged in you can also save a show, mark it as seen, and follow galleries, so the ones you care about come to you. Your lists are here.
Guides, and a weekly letter
The guides are written by hand: the galleries that make each city worth the trip, the best shows on this month, and reports in charts on how the art world is changing. And once a week an email with the week’s openings in your city, so that the good ones stop slipping by.
Who makes it
On View began in San Francisco, with the usual frustration: hearing about a show the week after it closed. It carries no ads. If we have missed a show, or a gallery, or the city you want next, write to us; we answer every message. What the site keeps of its visitors, which is little, is in the privacy policy.