Artsy Viewing Rooms Guide

Artsy’s viewing rooms are an immersive way to share your best works with Artsy’s top collectors.

This guide will walk you through how to create a viewing room, including our curator’s top five tips for a successful viewing room experience.

Creating a viewing room

With Plus and VIP plans, you can access your Viewing Room Manager by logging in to Artsy CMS and clicking on the Viewing Rooms tab.

Note: If you would like to upgrade to one of these plans, reach out your account executive.

Click “Create viewing room” and enter a title before clicking “Save and continue.” Next, you will proceed to the “Overview” section.

Curator’s tip: To give collectors the best experience, make sure your viewing rooms are each unified around a central concept accompanied by a compelling narrative. This could be specific to a single artist, focusing on a particular body of work or highlighting fresh-from-the-studio inventory, or a group of artists whose work shares formal qualities or a common theme.

Overview

This section contains the following fields:

1. Title: Here, you can edit your viewing room’s title. Note that your viewing room must have a title in order to be saved as a draft.
2. Dates: Next, you’ll set dates for the duration of your viewing room. Your viewing room will not be visible outside of these dates. Note that all times in this field reference UTC.
3. Hero image: The hero image—which is the featured banner image at the top of your viewing room—should be at least 1,000 by 1,000 pixels.

Make sure to click “Save as draft” to save your progress before proceeding to the next step.

Curator’s tip: The content features in Artsy’s viewing rooms provide the perfect area for showcasing high-quality works by the most sought-after artists. When selecting artists to include, consider their current market trends and existing demand on Artsy. Including an artist that already has a large following on Artsy can help drive more traffic to your viewing room. Learn more about emerging and established demand on Artsy in our Artsy Success Guide.

Adding a statement

After completing your viewing room’s “Overview,” proceed to the “Statement” section and begin adding your storytelling content. We highly suggest making the text in this section as short as possible and adding any additional details to the “Content” sections. Below is a brief overview of each component and how to use it:

• Introduction: Just like an exhibition text at a physical gallery space, the viewing room introduction is a summary of the collection of works that provides an informative and welcoming point of entry for the collector. Try to keep your introduction shorter than 500 characters. This is your opportunity to contextualize what the viewer is about to see and guide their experience of the curated works.
• Pull quote: Use this field to share a quote from a featured artist or a relevant critique. This can also be a general statement about the collection of works. We recommend keeping your pull quotes as short as possible (fewer than 60 characters) for the best on-page experience.
• Main text: The main text should contain the bulk of your contextual information about the viewing room and help convey the full story that it’s showcasing. Consider addressing questions you would normally answer in a gallery setting or a press release. Keep this section under 1,000 characters for the best results.

Use the “Content” sections to add additional information about an artist or a specific work. This copy will appear below the main text.

Curator’s tip: Give online buyers a rich and personal experience by incorporating marketplace storytelling into your viewing room. Use installation shots, images of your artists, compelling quotes, and anecdotes to tell collectors why you’re so excited to present this new inventory on Artsy. Consider adding cropped and zoomed images to highlight unique components of the work, such as brushstrokes or areas of exposed canvas. Contextual information, such as an artist’s recent market performance or an artwork’s exhibition history, helps a buyer understand what’s special about the works on offer, while also increasing their trust and confidence online.

There is no limit to the number of content sections you can add. We recommend adding at least three and no more than nine.

Adding artworks

Finally, you will add and sort the artworks that will be included in your online viewing room in the “Artworks” section.

Curator’s tip: Use Artsy’s viewing rooms to showcase your freshest inventory. Works that are new to the market have a higher sell-through rate than those that collectors have already seen, so we recommend uploading your works as they come in to your gallery.

All of the artworks you include in the viewing room must already be published on Artsy. Each work you include should also have an accompanying description to engage collectors. Review how to upload artworks.

Viewing rooms are highly visual experiences. With that in mind, here are our guidelines for artwork images:

• Choose crisp, high-resolution images (aim for 1,800 pixels on at least one side)
• Add zooms or crops of the images to show texture and detail of the artwork
• Ensure lighting and color in the digital images reflect the physical artwork
• Crop out backgrounds and frames

Curator’s tip: Online collectors expect access to prices in viewing rooms, so make sure to add public prices on all the works in your viewing room. In fact, Hiscox’s 2020 Online Art Trade Report found that including visible prices is the most important factor for online collectors when buying art. On Artsy, works listed with “Buy now” or “Make offer” are up to six times more likely to sell than those listed with “Contact gallery.”

The “Add Artworks” box allows you to search within your published works by artist or artwork title. The results of your search will appear below the search bar, where clicking on a work will add it to the viewing room.

After adding works, you have the option to remove or edit them in the “Artworks” section. The works will appear in your viewing room in the same order that you place them in the “Artworks” section.

If you select unpublished works they will not be published when the viewing room goes live. All works must be published in order to appear in the viewing room.

Note: Changes made within CMS can take time to process. Changes to viewing rooms could take 24 hours to appear on Artsy.net.

Scheduling

After you have completed the “Overview,” “Statement,” and “Artworks” sections in the Viewing Room Manager, you can schedule when your viewing room goes live. Click the “Save and schedule” button in the lower right corner of the Viewing Room Manager. You’ll be prompted to confirm your viewing room details. If this information is correct, select “Confirm and schedule.” Otherwise, you may press “Cancel” to continue editing your viewing room. To preview how your viewing room will appear to collectors on web, select the "Preview" button at the bottom of the form above the Save buttons. You can preview your viewing room in draft form, and once it has been scheduled but before is open to collectors. As of now, preview will only display for web and on web. 

Note: If you are missing any of the required fields or assets, a message in the lower right corner of the screen will prompt you to add them before you can schedule the viewing room.

Once the viewing room is live, there is currently a one hour grace period in which start dates can be edited. After that, you cannot edit the start date of your viewing room.  All viewing rooms must be live for at least one day. We highly suggest that you schedule your viewing room to be open for two weeks. This helps preserve a sense of urgency and exclusivity while also giving collectors enough time to experience your viewing room.

You can check the status of your viewing rooms in the Viewing Rooms Manager. Each room will have a tag indicating whether it’s in the “Draft,” “Scheduled,” “Live,” or “Closed” phase.

Promoting your viewing room

Each viewing room has a unique link that can be shared with collectors. Copy this link by pressing the “Share” button that appears next to it in the Viewing Room Manager.

Anyone with this link can visit the viewing room. We recommend sharing your live viewing rooms in your newsletter, on social media, and directly with known collectors. Artsy’s viewing rooms are optimized for mobile devices, so you can also share them via SMS or apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

If the viewing room is closed, the link will direct visitors to the main viewing rooms page on Artsy. Viewing rooms will then appear on your gallery's profile page.

You can also link your Viewing Room to a Show or Fair Booth. Read our Linking a Viewing Room to a Show or Fair Booth