Diane Farris Gallery Moves Online

Diane Farris, central to the city’s commercial art scene for 28 years, shut her gallery at the end of April (just as another gallery staple, Buschlen Mowatt, closed). Her website, which she says was the first to put an entire commercial gallery online, went live in 1996 after she attended a talk in New York about “the information superhighway”—and it will stay up now that the physical gallery has shutterd. Dianefarrisgallery.com had so overtaken the shop, in fact, that it accounted for more than three-quarters of last year’s sales. Farris, whose lease expired at her Seventh Avenue space, says she’s now free to present pop-up galleries in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Vancouver. “The market is very, very bad and now I don’t need to worry about expensive rent. Yesterday I was talking on the phone to a man in Atlanta; we negotiated the sale of an Attila Lukacs painting while looking at our respective computers. I sell all this art to people who have never stood in front of the canvas, and nobody has ever sent one back.”