With a potentially limitless and worldwide audience, it is little wonder why businesses and professionals are wanting to make their presence known on the World Wide Web.

Intent on evolving and moving with the times, many art galleries are increasing their online activity and presence. Alongside a surge in activity of art galleries on the internet, gallery owners are also concerting efforts into creating a wider presence at art fairs.

According to Cinoa’s latest report, the physical location is not as important as it once was, with more and more galleries are turning to the web and fairs to do business. “We do much more business at the fairs than at the gallery,” said Dominique Levy of L&M gallery.

But does an increase of advertising and selling art online and at fairs diminish traditional aspects of selling and buying art, such as expert advice from dealers and the relationship between professionals and clients.

The Cinoa report concluded that major pieces of extremely expensive art are generally not sold online and that there are certain features and qualities of art galleries that websites and fairs cannot replace, namely the contact between artists, dealers and buyers.

This said, as we are now firmly entrenched in the digital era, gallery owners and artists alike are wise to be reaping the unique benefits an online presence creates.

We are seeing a growing number of online art galleries and arts communities emerging, designed to help artists showcase and sell their work.

Earlier this year, Artist Become was launched, an online community created and developed by the popular internet art gallery overstockArt.com. Both enterprises provide various resources and tools to help established and emerging artists increase their presence and hopefully sell more work. David Sasson, overstockArt.com’s president spoke of the essence behind Artist Become.

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In July this year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a decision to extend Executive Park, a 70-acre office park built in the 1970s into San Francisco’s newest residential neighbourhood.

Located between Candlestick Park and Highway 101, Executive Park is to be a compound for creating a new domestic community on the southern side of the city. The site of the project is both owned and developed by the Yerby Company.

Heller Manus Architects is responsible for five of Yerby’s midrise buildings, including one high-rise tower that will accommodate 500 residential units designed to cater for a wide spectrum of family sizes and their incomes.

Talking about how the design project will transform the community, Clark Manus, FAIA, CEO of Heller Manus Architects, said:

“Executive Park is a gateway project that will be a catalyst in creating a new residential community at the southern entry to San Francisco that will unite the Bayview and recently approved Hunter’s Point to the east and the Little Hollywood and Visitation Valleys to the west.”

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In the same way you will always remember where you were when John Lennon was shot, you will always remember where you where and what you were doing when you found out about 9/11.

Ten years after the most shocking and horrific terrorist attacks ever to occur on American soil, MoMA PS1 is to hold an exhibition to provide a subjective framework to consider the attacks in New York and their aftermath.

The prolific 9/11 has been somewhat underrepresented within the realms of contemporary art and the “September 11” exhibition aims to explore how the impact of 9/11 has altered culture and society.

This unique exhibition will feature more than 70 different works by a total of 41 artists from a broad spectrum of artistic mediums. The works all focus on New York prior to the 9/11 attacks.

For example, the installation includes a photograph taken by Diana Arbus in the 1950s of a newspaper blowing across a street in New York, denoting a haunting context within the location of 9/11.

Similar melancholic feelings are conjured up by photographs of John Pilson, who took images in the World Financial Center in the late 1990s showing intimate scenes of office life in the neighbouring World Trade Center towers.

September 11 has been curated by Peter Eleey, who has worked as a curator for Creative Time, and, since 2007, at the Walker Art Center, before being appointed as curator of MoMA PS1.

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It used to be a cold, uninspiring and characterless pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. Now the 212,000 square foot plant in Yale, Connecticut, is the home of a newly established Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, whose aim is to unite the University of Connecticut’s resources and the collections of the state’s three main museums, to “advance conservation science and its practice around the world.”

In creating and developing state-of-the-art techniques and tools that will result in the world of conservation advance and expand, the new institute has been described by Robin Hogen, a spokesperson for Connecticut University, as “the first of its kind”.

This unique and highly innovative institute is being funded by Lisbet Rausing, the heiress to the Swedish food processing and packaging company, Tetra Pak, and whose husband, Peter Baldwin is a professor and author of several books related to comparative history of modern Europe and the United States, who received his B.A from Yale in 1978.

The digitisation of works of art and artefacts of conservation is at the heart of the institute’s activities. So far, the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage has digitised a quarter of a million works from its various collections, these images are available to view online free of charge.

In continuing the area’s development of nanotechnology, the new institute will continue researching and developing the manipulation of atomic matter in order to advance conservation techniques and to slow down the process of degradation of works of art.

The state-of-the-art institute will develop computer-based techniques to preserve ancient mosaics, including a Byzantine example from northern Jordan.

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