Knocking back fine wine, fermented potato brioche, and smoked eel in a Michelin-starred restaurant is not a traditional West Country endeavor. Nor is wandering around a mega-gallery. But I was recently at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in Bruton with a bellyful of Osip’s tasting menu, looking at Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely’s joint exhibition, “Myths & Machines.” Tinguely’s scrapyard sculptures were juxtaposed with de Saint Phalle’s bold, colorful visions. In one work from 1988, La Grande Tête, the late couple’s practices fuse into a tangle of iron, wood, an electric motor, bungee cord, lightbulbs, and polyester. Had I been standing there just over a decade ago, I’d likely have been confronted by hay bales instead of high art. The gallery occupies an old farm on the edge of town, and its transformation is emblematic of Somerset’s unlikely metamorphosis into a contemporary art hotspot.

Manuela and Iwan Wirth, the founders of the powerhouse gallery, owned a home in Somerset before branching out commercially there in 2014. In doing so, they drew the eyes of the contemporary art world to Bruton, a historic settlement of just 3,000 people, and catalyzed the area’s gentrification. Aside from a couple of boarding schools, a roofless 16th-century dovecot, and a train station, Bruton was once unremarkable. Its quaint, narrow high street had a pub, a convenience store, a local museum, and little else. Today, there’s a handful of art galleries,...