Tart Gallery finally has a home - on Secondlife.com
Last week, an excited Nicole Steen announced that the Tart Gallery finally has a home.
Steen’s alternative pop-art gallery, which she launched with fellow artist Vicki M. in 2000, had been homeless since 2002, when Zulu Records, where it was housed, moved into a new West 4th Avenue space. Since losing its physical site, Steen has continued curating shows across the city under the Tart Gallery name, but it’s taken until now for it to have a single place to call home.
There’s something very different about Steen’s new space, however. Although visitors can drop in, admire the work, and even purchase a painting or two, it doesn’t exist in the tangible world: it’s located in the virtual on-line realm of Second Life, a three-dimensional reality populated by avatars–or characters–created and controlled by real people with high-speed Internet.
What makes Second Life different from virtual-reality games such as The Sims is its fully functioning economy. Avatars in Second Life engage in commerce using Linden dollars (named after Linden Lab, the San Francisco–based software company that created the 3-D realm), a currency that can be exchanged for real money, at a rate of around $265 Linden dollars to one U.S. dollar. “Residents” of Second Life can buy or lease land inside the game world, and sell virtual goods such as clothing and vehicles.
Read more - http://www.straight.com/article-101994/visual-arts-new-avatars
