ABOVE: detail from Michael Weyhe’s Blue Raindrops (1986), for sale for $300 at BoundlessGallery.com. Artists without established names or little gallery representation are increasingly turning to online galleries to sell their work, says BusinessWeek.

Ever heard of Brown Dwarfs? It’s the name astronomers give to the big gobs of space gas that start to form a star but never really light up. They get good and big, and they’d still totally kill you if you got near enough, but they don’t light up the sky the way true, honest-to-god stars do. In highly competitive fields like art, movies, music, or sport, there are always a few stars and a lot more brown dwarfs. The big names get all the recognition, but they’ve clawed their way to the top of a very large heap of unknowns.

Then came a thing called The Internet, and all of a sudden the nobodies of the world—the philatelists, the scrabble-hounds, the (dare we say it) bloggers—struck out for the unlimited and infinitely divisible super-niches of individual wonkery and electronic togetherness it offered. Artists, for instance, who couldn’t get ten square inches on a legit gallery wall could post ten dozen photos of their latest piece and sell it to a buyer a thousand miles away without ever meeting face to face. This being the art world, of course, there was someone standing by to offer their selling expertise for a modest slice of the proceeds. BusinessWeek points to websites like BoundlessGallery.com, Guild.com, and MyExposé.com that are providing online gallery space for artists who need web representation. The e-galleries are apparently selling more work for their artists and attracting lower-end buyers who wouldn’t normally be art purchasers at all. Welcome to the future.

LINK: BusinessWeek > Art on the Net: The Second Wave