Gallery is moving briefly from online to on the wall

For underground art aficionados, the website deviant ART.com may be the ultimate in eye candy. Home to 12 million works by the site’s 1.5 million members, it bills itself as the world’s largest online art community -- and one of the best opportunities for fans of painting, photography, graphic arts and other genres to view and buy art on the cheap.

Now the site is testing the waters of reality. Beginning Friday, deviantART will temporarily transform its virtual format into a brick-and-mortar, two-day summit at the Hollywood Palladium.

“Five years into this massive society of artists, it was inevitable we would bring it to a physical space just to illustrate for everybody what takes place online every day,” said Angelo Sotira, the L.A. entrepreneur who founded deviantART in August 2000.

Formulated to “replicate in a physical realm as much of what we do at deviantART as we can,” the summit will feature 200-plus booths of member artists’ work -- most of which has been seen before only digitally.

The Creation Station, for example, is a sort of real-world nod to the site’s opening page, where member artists (or “deviants,” as they are known) spontaneously create digital images, make printouts and use the results to form the sides of a massive tent.

The Live Forum mimics online, topic-oriented chat rooms, allowing artists to sign up and host their own discussions with fellow deviants and fans alike.

Then there are the panels led by artists who found fame through the usual channels (Marvel Comics’ Mark Brooks, for example) and those discovered via deviantART (Seattle-based painter Aaron Jasinski).

“The world of art today is anything but democratic,” said Sotira, 24. “It’s limited by how much space exists on gallery walls. It’s limited by how much the people who run the galleries want you in the gallery. We’ve brought more eyeballs to more artists in the world on deviantART than any gallery can claim. We’re the MTV of art.”

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deviantART Summit

Where: Hollywood Palladium, 6215 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday; 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday

Cost: Day pass, $20 (excludes classes and panels); two-day pass, $55 (includes classes and panels).

Info: www.deviantartsummit.com