Carter Cleveland Says Art in the Future Will Be for Everyone
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
There is a huge, sprawling market of art online. And I don't mean stuff with the cultural approval of the gallery system. I mean, say, people making a living by drawing mind-control commissions on Deviantart. Paying the bills by cranking out custom art of folk's furry characters on Furaffinity. Selling commissions of weird stuff via Tumblr. Folks doing web comics and selling ads/books/t-shirts. Custom clothes/jewelry/chainmail/whatever on Etsy. Patreon is helping too - lotsa people are starting to say "hey I just wanna draw some COOL STUFF and if you like my themes then help support me doing it" in various ways on that site.
This economy has been booming ever since Paypal made it easy to give someone money online.
None of it is "Fine Art". No small amount of it is pornography. It is not glamorous. It is not pretentious. A hell of a lot of it is amateurs still learning. But there is a lot of it, and some of it is amazing.
Seriously: I have a friend who put his wife through nursing school, and is still helping to support her and their child, by drawing outrageous furry latex bondage commissions.
One thing I have been fascinated with is the impact of China's artists. There are a lot of them. A painter can work for weeks on a high quality reproduction of a large classical painting with a market price in the hundreds of dollars. Unnerving for an artist living in the developed world.
This essay was written with the WSJ audience (average age over 50) in mind. That audience is more familiar with the established art world and its $66B market. For an audience that grew up on the Internet like me, I would have used more nuanced language and talked more about the importance of merging the existing art market and the established art world with the more organic art communities already online.
But here's the tl;dr version of what I would have written for HN:
The Internet will grow the art market and broaden it to include artists outside of the existing establishment–the result is that more artists will be able to make a living without having to appeal to the existing system. But achieving this requires working with the established art world, e.g. major galleries and museums, to publish more of their art online for easy and free access–making art and art education accessible to everyone, not just those with the time and money to go visit in person. By moving the existing art world online, you're bringing its market of buyers and sellers with it, and exposing them to a more vibrant, diverse, and organic ecosystem that many readers on Hacker News are already familiar with. In summary, by increasing awareness and education about art history, the Internet will drive greater passion and market demand for art, which ultimately means more artists from all over the world will get discovered organically and be able to pursue their passions more sustainably.
Likewise, music has been around forever, but the chances of someone like Lorde, a 16 year old from New Zealand, seeing such success was much less likely before the Internet democratized music for listeners and creators alike. Today, it's still very rare for a visual artist to experience that kind of success if they are not part of the existing establishment. But the Internet is going to change that, and this will be a great thing for all of us.
I think art is already mainstream... Roger Ebert, one of our great art critics, said that movies allow you to have empathy -- to see the world through someone else's eyes. IMO, that's what art is for, and I do think that movies do a great job of this -- and are for everybody.
Thanks for the article.
However, if one might be tempted to correlate internet-based business with openness and even educational inspirations: that’s not the commercial art world I know of. Because in most of these cases collectors will have had a password to the restricted part of the gallery website.
That entire $60B art market is in a continuous effort to make scarce and unreachable what is at the basis an abundant resource. Hence the passwords handed out to selected collectors. Or, for example, what’s the logic of taking an image with a digital camera, and promising to print it only 5 times? It’s an economic logic of promoting scarcity, and it works really well—contemporary art auctions have gone through the roof this year.
At the same time, as art is moving to digital artefacts, the notion of scarcity on which the art world is built is bound to blow up at some point—like you, I’m confident that the internet will help us come up with new ideas of what it is to be an artist, and what it is to produce art. Yet the gallery circuit is the last place where I’d go looking for answers…
You know, I see this argument a lot and I'm not buying it. To paraphrase Nate Silver in "The Signal and the Noise": just because the internet provides an exponential amount of information to the public doesn't mean everyone is smarter, because with every increase in total information there is an increase in bad information. The solution is basically better curation. Curation, in today's world, is still run by individuals and people in positions of power. Music, just like information, has seen an explosion in data points since the advent of the internet. All of this becomes democratized until it doesn't. In other words - these markets go from non-democratized (the CD world), to democratized (YouTube), and the back again (Spotify/Rdio). Cheaper access to art creation only means the market is more saturation. The signal to noise ratio (i.e. chance) stays the same, it just means a lot more noise exists.
Artsy seems to be addressing a specific segment of this market: that which you would find in galleries, museums and personal collections. It is an traditional world that is entrenched in old distribution methods. And, trom what I can see, it is ripe for disruption – which Artsy seems to be doing quite well.
Disclaimer: Carter pitched me on the idea at one point. I was sold ;)
Bullshit. There were massive outdoor concerts for public with no charge. Every tiny village had church with some sort of musical instruments. My ancestors (rural farmers) had (and still have) 300 years old music band...
> Pessimists would say that fundamentally there is a finite universe of people interested in art, or that you must experience art in person to acquire a passion for it.
Another bullshit. There is a huge number of street artists, from juggler to spray painters. Every kid wants to go to circus to see acrobats. And finally there is infinitive stream of movies, ads and others forms of art.
I have had days where I don't encounter music. Not encountering art? I pretty much have to go out into the middle of the woods or spend all day at the office off the internet.
Most people don't spend thousands of dollars on music per year. They won't spend that kind of money on art either. But they're already consuming art - tons of it.
First off, it's a nice idea. The world can use more pleasant, hopeful, upbeat thinking in my mind.
Second, on the substantive points, that changes in technology will drive changes in what is considered "art" and who can access it, particularly from a market perspective: that's hard to dispute. This is a continuation of changes that have been evolving for 100 years, from the dadaists, through the invention of lithography, to warhol (or murakami today), and seem likely to continue.
So an easy article to pick apart, but hard to dispute the point that (i think) he's intending to make.
This seems to strike at the fundamental premise of the article; pardon me if I'm wrong.