‘How To Make Money’

General Introduction

I aim to research new sustainable models for collaborative creation, distribution and monetization of online content with a focus on net art. The key questions in my research are ‘What are the historical and current examples of monetization of net art and how can they be improved’, “What kind of incentives triggers someone to invest into (net)art’, ‘What’s the perceived value of digital art in comparison to traditional art?’

Relation to previous practice

The Paintshop (2012) is an online collaborative platform for producing digital paintings, which when signed are for sale in the online gallery. The Paintshop.biz is a combination of many of my interests, looking into collaborative work, the performance of producing the paintings in real time, profit sharing, as well as a critical look at the production of art, distribution and its market. The Paintshop is successful in the collaborative creational process, which since launched has produced well over 2,500 paintings but performs rather poorly in regards of sales, at the time of writing only 3 paintings have been sold. The result of The Paintshop offered up new problems in relation to my and many others artistic practices, how to find a sustainable financial model that can support further cultural production. In the Paintshop the main incentive for production was a possibility to get rewarded by a potential sale in the market, but as the realization that the sale was rather unlikely to happen the production rate went down.

Relation to a larger context

How to create a sustainable model for artistic production and monetization relates to larger context in almost an infectious way, there’s numerous works and exhibitions dealing with the financing of the arts and in one way or another every artistic practice needs to deal with the question of ‘How can I sustain my lifestyle through my artistic practice’. Notable examples are the Art Micro Patronage initiative, which started with a series of exhibitions exploring micro payments as a way of supporting artist and their works. Notably the C.R.E.A.M exhibition, curated by Lindsay Howard with the attached essay, explores some of the problematics with monetizing net-art. The exhibition raised over 200 US dollars through micro payments by the community, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but should be considered as at least a successful attempt at monetizing net art. In May this year creatorsproject explored the digital art market through a series of essays and interviews, isolating different problems. Does the digital art market need to relate to the larger established art market?

Practical steps

Initially by working with a release often release early strategy I aim to create a set of different prototypes each touching on one specific problem in relation to the monetization and distribution of online art. Each prototype will then be evaluated by means of testing in regards to the goal of the piece to see if it’s successful or not and what’s the cause. Given that there’s so many different approaches to my leading questions I believe that this is the correct strategy, especially since the success of the general research and project development is so closely related to the community, the online audience and potential buyers that it would be very difficult to gage the potential success rate of a project without an underlying testing strategy. The conclusion of the prototyping research will guide me into developing more refined pieces, which can combine parts of wholes of the prototypes. Next to this I will also arrange a series of talks with the leading topic of ‘How To Make Money Online’, where I will invite people to come and talk about their experiences, problematics and potential solutions. I will compile a reading list, which will focus on more traditional market structures and distribution models.

References

http://paulgraham.com/growth.html
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age – http://isbn.nu/9781594202537
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/buying-happiness.html

'#DIGART'

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Works in reference

User:Jonas Lund/projectoutline2012

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