Comparing galleries for MA Professional Practice module

Choosing galleries for this comparative study has been a real trial. The idea to take to galleries and compare them, is simple enough but to have 3000 words to say about the differences seems almost impossible. That they should be similar types of institutions both public or both private and of comparable scale seems initially counter intuitive but after consideration is actually fairly obvious; if the are similar the differences are less obvious and therefore have to be explained. Although actually the public / private distinction could actually be played with, say comparing a privately owned gallery with pretensions to philanthropy to a public gallery which now has to have commercial concerns in the modern world, for example the Saatchi gallery with the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

My eventual choice has been to choose two private galleries, of relatively medium scale not so big that they were amorphous multinational machines but not so small that if I blinked they might go to the wall in the current economic climate. One of the most significant factors in the choice was that as I would like to make some form of living from my art practice, while there might be more to be said about the very large galleries such as White Cube it would be personally advantageous to investigate the workings of galleries in which I could visualise my own work being shown in.