Inversion Art is trying to become the YC of the arts world
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
But that is all fashion.
If you want to buy some art, see some new stuff, or ask questions, find your nearest art college and go to the end of year show. The only problem if you will have to decide yourself what you like!
This. I just want to add: If you want to see more interesting things, if you have a choice, go to the less prestigious school. I have seen my fair bit of end of year shows, and the prestige of the institution is directly correlated with how orthodox everything is.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RfgjHoVCZwU&pp=ygUUYmFyYWJhc2k...
"The hidden networks of everything" (7-8mins)
If you mean earning a lot of money by selling art, then yes, it's all about playing the game, and who you know.
The vast majority of artists don't do this, many make a living through more regular jobs like teaching for example, and the art is a passion project.
For many, having to make a living from their work would spoil their reason for doing it in the first place even!
The "here, you can use our lawyers" "service" is just flashing red flags.
If you look at our board of advisors, you'll see that we have top artists, top business people, respected gallerists, curators, and studio directors, all of whom know plenty about what artists need. Every single one of them has an incredible reputation and supports Inversion because they believe in both the mission and that we founders have integrity about our approach to achieving it.
If not as a career, then mostly mentorship, access to a studio space, financial support for supplies, and free time.
I know a lot of artists. None of them make 50K off their art. 10K is amazing.
So hmm.
There are a tons of these throughout the US, depending on weather and time of year.
Some examples: https://www.artfaircalendar.com/art_fair/west-coast-art-fair...
Top-of-line, you can make quite of bit from these + commissions that come from them. Though turning a significant profit is a lot harder.
> I suspect you are advocating that artists become performers, entertainers or sales people in addition to the 'making art' bit.
Yes on the sales part. Making art without selling it won't get you much revenue.
Yes, there are galleries or co-ops that in theory can do your distribution...but in practice that's very fickle.
It would be like applying to YC on the basis that you’re good at computers and a lot of people call you up to fix their Windows installations. That can be a profitable skill, but it’s not what YC is looking for.
We don't want artists who don't need us much. Artists always have needs that they can't, or shouldn't, be handling for themselves. Even the top 1% of artists get services and support from their galleries or their own full time staff. But bridging the gap between starting to earn good money and being able to afford a qualified staff is very difficult, and it's the pivotal point in an artist's career where they may find themselves stalled because, with every new project, there are logistical needs that distract them from finding the next opportunity, or creating new, ambitious work.
We are working with artists who have achieved great traction but are not yet at the point where they can hire a full time studio director, etc.
Artists don't need studio management services. They need a profile in NYT. If you actually gave them a gallerist and a dedicated pro agent, then yeah that could launch some careers. But that would need to be non public information, because that type of manufacture goes against authenticity.
Art is nothing more than branding and social connections. Absolutely nothing more.
But looking at their website, they’re mainly trying to add some much needed standardization in how to deal with artists
and its totally fine for them to burn their own capital to do that
the friction they are trying to solve is how to close a deal better
artists frequently aspire to make money, and are wholly unprepared on how to. these are the people running around worried that venmo is going to snitch on them for taxes, a concept that requires complete segregation from being a merchant with any semblance of organization
this trickles down into other things, is this commission work for hire, does the commissioner or buyer own it? for existing pieces, what? and many other issues that can completely wreck a deal just by presenting a contract to an artist at all
so they want to incorporate all the artists and give them legal counsel and CPAs, and then their network
this is logical, it might not work out for this firm. one way to make it more likely to work out is getting a Techcrunch article and people discussing it. the artists will reach out themselves.
Do you mean, in the context of pursuing art as a profession? Or just generally? Curious to learn more.
That's why you see the crazy antics of ie a urinal as an artwork, taping a banana to the wall, and the insane art writing that come with an artwork.
A piece of art is not bought for its craftsmanship or what it looks like. It is bought because of the story of the artist, the fact that other people know the artists story, so hanging it on your wall means something. It is part of culture. A Picasso is worth a lot because of its part of art history.
You're right that you cannot apply the tech VC model - without significant modifications that honor the differences between artists and entrepreneurs. But you're wrong about them not needing studio management services. We work with artists who are earning, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars. They deal with contracts, invoicing, exhibition logistics, insurance claims, hiring service providers like photographers, and much more. All of those things require management that distracts them from creating artwork. If an artist can spend 20 hours making a work of art that would sell for $20,000 (aka, they earn $1k per hour), it is an absolute waste of time for them to spend 4 hours per week on these tasks. That's over 200 hours a year, and a theoretical $200k loss in creative output.
60% of the artists we work with already have gallery representation, and 40% have already been in the NY Times.
The usual trajectory is something like:
1. Get a studio assistant. 2. Get a couple more studio assistants. 3. Get a studio manager. 4. Get an accountant. 5. Get team of assistants. 6. Oops now we need HR.
Yes, this is spot on. And it is so hard to navigate doing this well, as part-time studio assistants require training, often leave when a new semester starts or they get their own solo exhibition offered to them, requiring replacing them and retraining that replacement. You're also only getting the skill set of those individuals, whereas with our company you're getting a team with a deep network and highly diverse experience. When our Artist Liaison doesn't know how to deal with something, they don't go back to the artist and make them handle it. They come to our management team and we help them do it well. We scale up and down with their income and operational needs, and our goal is to prepare them to take over our systems when they outgrow us and can afford a full time staff of their own, which we would even help them hire.
It’s a bit of a mixture between an art residency program and an art gallery.
Residencies usually provide a place to live/work for a given period of time, as well as some social circle (fellow artists, curators, collectors) for the artists to meet, and sometimes some money. They usually are charities and artists don’t give them anything.
Galleries usually provide upfront money to produce work as well as connections to collectors and a place to show their work and take a cut in futures sales.
The main issue is that the art world is allergic to the language these guys use, so they’ll likely attract not-so-good artists and may not be able to connect artists with the people who actually matter in the art world.
Also giving artists 30% of what they earned the year before is a really bad idea:
1. Because artists’ income is very unstable, so people won’t apply if they had a bad previous year.
2. And because it’s not life changing. An artist who earns 50k will be happy to get 15k, But it’s not going to allow him to invest heavily in his art. An artist who earns 300k is already well established and doesn’t need those funds really to produce whatever they want.
Also 3 months is very short.
My guess is that these guys will attract early-retired-tech-millionaires-turned artists, who aren’t turned down by the language, and who sell stuff to early-retired-tech-millionaire-turned-art-collectors. Expect a lot of AI-based work!
Most galleries do not provide production capital, and when they do, there become arguments about who owns the work produced. It's a very bad idea and the savviest artists we've worked with don't let their galleries pay for production.
We already have 7 artists we work with. They joined us because the language we use on our website is totally transparent about our plans and incentives. One of them is a Guggenheim Fellow who has had two institutional solo exhibitions just in the 6 months we have been working with them. One of them invented the NFT and has work in the Whitney collection. Another has works in the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim, LACMA, MoMA, and nearly every other major art museum.
Regarding 3 months being very short. We work with each artist for 5 years. It's only the residency that lasts 3 months.
It is great for you that you work with famous artists. I don’t why you’re being secret about who they are. I have a feeling that these famous artists did not enlist in your program but are advisors in your program. My guess is one of them is Dmitri Cherniak who’s really good and also the nicest guy on the planet, and he happens to have been through YC twice before becoming a generative art guy. So of course he’s going to try to help other fellow artists.
My general point is that with that kind of language, you will be appealing to tech-oriented SV-friendly artists, which is somewhat niche. If that’s what you guys want, then it’s all good.
Also: you’re wrong about galleries upfronting the production money, it is very common for pricey projects.
I like Dmitri's work and agree he's incredibly nice, but most "SV-friendly artists" are not going to see their work appreciate over time. Dmitri may be a rare exception but he's not one of our clients.
We work with traditional fine artists. Five out of seven are painters. One does conceptual work. Only one of them has anything to do with the tech world, and that's Kevin & Jenn McCoy, who minted the first NFT back in 2014. They, too, make mostly physical work. Our website shares two case studies.
I understand where you're coming from about the language. It has been a balancing act speaking transparently about the business and appealing to the sensibilities of traditional artists. But the program and the way we speak about it appeal to them because we're transparent, which is refreshing, and because our terms are very fair, thoughtful and equitable. We guarantee we'll hold work for five years, we pay royalties on profits, we promise not to take their work to auction unless their work is already auctioned regularly, and so on. These terms were all designed based on conversations with fine artists and a deep understanding of what's important to them. It's true that they are not used to seeing people talk so openly about the art market and financial incentives of art investing, but they are also not used to people taking such great lengths to design something that works for them. They appreciate our candor and it builds trust. Some artists are turned off by it, there's no question, but many find it a refreshing change. You have to consider that most are tired of the way the art world functions currently, and artists today have very different ideas about how it should work than artists even 10 years ago.
As for galleries funding projects, it happens, but most galleries except for the Gagosians and Paces of the world cannot afford that at all. Either way, it's rife with conflicts of interest and most savvy artists avoid taking gallery funding for production.
Exactly. No proper fine artist will be part of this because it would be embarrassing.
Most art is about reflecting aspects of people's lives, the artists mostly. Often this view is an extreme close up, so to an observer or viewer it looks like something else entirely.
Most artists aren't rich, so their art isn't really about being rich.
Getting paid for by the rich, well, it has been this way looooong time before modern art, see the Medici Family for example.
In Australia we have David Walsh who made a lot of money in somewhat ...dubious means, but has invested what he has made back into "MONA" – Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania and made it available for everyone to enjoy.
this is not necessarily to say it's a bad idea or that modernization is unwarranted but it's not quite as revolutionary as they think
amazing that the rest of the culture doesn't think tech people are skeevy
They do
Nice to see some interest in what we're doing. Given the TC paywall and other misconceptions about how the art world and Inversion work, I thought I'd clear a few things up.
There are many different types of artists and many routes to success and monetization. We are initially focused on fine art because you cannot start out in other artistic fields and then be taken seriously by the fine art world. Also, the appreciating potential of fine art creates a VC-like opportunity, where a small handful out of 1,000 works will achieve unicorn multiples and return the whole fund many times over. We added an income sharing component to reduce our risk, but also to finance the offering of services that artists desperately need.
As artists achieve some success, the burdens of the studio become increasingly more difficult to manage. Things like invoicing, contract review, exhibition logistics, shipping, insurance, hiring assistants, managing payroll, etc., are all a distraction from their creative work, and most artists are not good at managing their business affairs. There are many, many companies that try to help brand new artists achieve sales, etc., but there are no scalable companies which help artists who are already making sales bridge the gap between earning a living and making enough money to hire a full time, competent studio director - to say nothing of hiring accountants, tax professionals, lawyers, etc.
Our goal when starting out was to invest in artists under a YC-inspired model. Right now, their only options for funding are mostly grants, which are time consuming and often provide very small amounts. The most equitable way to invest in contemporary fine artists is to simply buy a significant amount of work and hold onto it. Taking an equity stake in their studio would not be of interest to them, and there would be no liquidity events. So, we buy work and that is our "equity". On that work, we pay them a 10% resale royalty, donate 10% of our profits to charity, and other guarantees that are far more generous than 99% of collectors.
After many conversations with artists, it was clear that they are hamstrung by operations as much as they are by funding. Investing in them and letting them make terrible business decisions, or waste hours each week managing their own invoicing, would be a bad investment strategy. So, we added the studio management services as part of the value we bring. In the VC world, that's called Platform, and most great VCs provide some services to their portfolio in this way. We also needed to have an income sharing component to reduce risk, and offering services during the income sharing period ensures that artists are still seeing value as they pay back our investment.
Eventually, we hope to offer programs for commercial artists and other types of artists, but for now the unique dynamic of fine art appreciation and the branding requirements to enter the fine art market make that our beachhead market. We focus on artists whose work is likely to appreciate, which is a narrow group and requites solid traction to identify. We already have 7 artists we're working with. Their works are in most of the prestigious US art museums (The Met, the Whitney, LACMA, MoMA, SFMOMA, The Smithsonian, the Guggenheim, and others). Some of them earn our $50k minimum, or less in cases where we made an exception, and others earn very solid six-figure incomes. We have been providing all kinds of services to them - exhibition logistics including communication, creating 3d models of exhibition spaces to ensure proper installation, arranging shipping, and contracting with past collectors to borrow works, filing insurance claims for work damaged in transit, responding to inbound sales inquiries with marketing materials and invoices, monthly accounting reconciliation, and tax consultations, securing coverage by critics and publications, contract management, editorial direction for high profile grant applications, and contract enforcement.
These artists have joined us because we are super transparent about our model and our goals, and because our advisory board is highly regarded. They also join us only after 3+ conversations with our founding team, and sometimes after we have provided value to them before they even joined. We supported some of our artists for many months for free before we asked them to sign any agreement.
It seems most people in this thread don't really understand how the fine art world or our company operates, or how artists' careers tend to progress, but that's okay. I am happy to answer questions.
Who Is Eligible?
artists who consistently earn at least $50,000 in income from their practice but on average $100,000 or more
promising early-career artists who are gaining institutional recognition and commercial traction
mid-career artists who are looking to make changes in their practice or professional situations
artists who want to scale their studio (or post-studio) operation but don't yet have the capital or know-how to do so
artists who understand the importance of defining goals and planning to achieve them
artists of ambition, generosity, and intelligence
artists who want to define their own success and have leverage over their own careers