Why Galleries Make Better Social Clubs

I love art. I love museums, galleries, exhibitions, installations, and the peculiar little worlds artists build and invite the rest of us to enter. I can spend hours moving slowly through a gallery, stopping in front of something I don’t understand, doubling back to something I thought I understood, reading the art copy, studying the materials, and inevitably wandering into the gift shop before I leave. And then, somewhere along the way, I realized that galleries offer me something beyond art.

They’ve become some of my favorite places to socialize.

So much of adult social life is organized around consumption rather than curiosity. We meet for drinks, dinner, or brunch, sit across from one another, and immediately have to generate something to talk about. Inevitably, we fall back on work, relationships, other people, and whatever happened during the week. But a gallery gives us something else entirely: a shared experience before the conversation ever begins.

Go Somewhere That Gives You Something to Talk About

One of the easiest ways to improve your social life is to stop making conversation the entire event and, instead, go somewhere that inspires conversation. You and a friend can stand in front of the same work and see two completely different things. One of you might be fascinated by the technique while the other’s interested in the subject. And, sometimes, the most interesting (and hilarious) response to a work of art is simply, “I don’t get it.”

Instead of asking someone what they’ve been up to, you can ask what they think. By doing that, you’re learning how another person interprets the world, what catches their attention, moves them, irritates them, and what they’re curious enough to investigate further. Now, that’s a very different kind of socializing.

Art Has Changed the Way I Think

Some of my closest friendships are with world-renowned artists, and those relationships have profoundly shaped both my creativity and my understanding of the art industry. Being close to working artists has allowed me to see beyond the finished piece hanging on a gallery wall and understand the discipline, experimentation, commerce, relationships, and years of contemplation that can sit behind something a viewer encounters for mere minutes.

Those friendships have influenced the way I approach my own creative work, too. Writers and visual artists use different materials than I do, but we’re often wrestling with the same questions: What am I trying to say? What should I leave out? When is the work finished? How do you remain commercially viable without allowing the market to dictate the work?

Spend enough time around serious artists, and you begin thinking differently about creativity itself. You learn to look closely, experiment more freely, and become curious about things outside your own discipline.

And that curiosity makes you a more interesting person to know.

Make a Day of It

Back to socializing. Choose a neighborhood with several galleries or start with a museum exhibition you’ve all been wanting to see. Don’t rush. Read the descriptions. Ask questions. Let someone pull you toward a piece you might have walked past. Stay for the artist talk. Visit the gift shop. Buy the catalogue, an art book, a print, or some ridiculous little object you absolutely did not need.

Most importantly, talk to each other. Ask which piece someone would take home if money weren’t an issue, which artist they’d like to have dinner with, or what they could’ve done without seeing that day. Ask whether an installation is merely interesting or if it’s actually culturally relevant.

Galleries can also expand your circle organically. Add yourself to a museum or gallery’s mailing list. Go to openings, museum talks, screenings, exhibition previews, and public programs. When you meet someone interesting, ask what they thought of the exhibition or event and let curiosity create the connection.

Don’t Go Home Yet

After a few hours of looking, walking, learning, and debating with friends or even a pleasant stranger, don’t immediately say goodbye. Lunch after a museum afternoon or dinner after gallery hopping gives all that stimulation somewhere to land.

Talk about the exhibition, the piece everyone keeps thinking about, what makes something collectible, or the relationship between art and commerce. Then let the conversation wander into creativity, culture, books, films, architecture, cities, travel, politics, food, business, or wherever else the afternoon takes you. Still, the objective isn’t to turn dinner into a seminar. The best conversations are funny, meandering, occasionally ridiculous, and impossible to reproduce.

The Intellectual Table

My friends and I have a name for this kind of gathering. I call it The Intellectual Table. It’s often where a day of gallery hopping ends for us: around a table, over lunch or dinner, talking about the art and installations we’ve experienced, the things we learned, the pieces we loved, the ones we didn’t, and, yes, the treasures somebody inevitably bought in the gallery gift shop.

The word intellectual can sound terribly serious, but our table isn’t. There is laughter, gossip, disagreement, tangents, and glasses being refilled. Intellectual doesn’t mean pretentious. It means we’re interested in topics beyond ourselves. We’re curious about the world and about one another, and we enjoy bringing what we’ve seen, read, learned, and experienced back to the people we love.

I’ll tell you more about The Intellectual Table next week. For now, call a friend, pick an exhibition, spend a few hours learning something neither of you knew that morning, and then find a good table nearby and see where the conversation takes you.

You may discover that you don’t need a membership to belong to a great social club. Sometimes you just need somewhere interesting to go and someone interesting to go with.