The Paintshop Version 2

General Introduction

My wish is to create a microcosms version of the art world at large by building a new version of the Paintshop.biz. The new version will build on the previous one and include, next to a tool for artistic production, an artist/artwork ranking system, a market place/auction house and a gallery system.

The art world works by rather opaque mechanisms, how can one work of art be more relevant or worth compared to a seemingly very similar work. Clearly it’s a combination of many factors that determines an artist worth and thus his body of work, including the amount of shows, the artistic research, how well the work performs at auctions, how ‘collectible’ the work is and how socially capable the artist is. That’s all and well, but how does it actually work? I’m deeply interested in all different parameters which are used to evaluate an artist and want to explore this by making my own ranking system within my own system.

With the Paintshop I want to make a version of the art world, which is transparent in its production and evaluation processes to determine wether there’s a possibility to make a better system and put focus on the different aspects how we look and judge art. Similar to what Google did with their ‘PageRank’ for determining the usefulness of search results to a query, I want to build a system, which can automatically evaluate and independently distribute art produced within the Paintshop to give artists an alternative to the art world at large and to build a system, in which there’s a real possibility of earning a buck.

Relation to previous practice

The Paintshop.biz version 1.0 is a real time collaborative painting tool offering possibilities to sell artworks and buy great pieces of art for very competitive prices. All the painters share the same canvas. The painting can at any time be signed by one of the painters, who then becomes the owner of the piece. When the painting is signed, the canvas is cleared for all the other painters, and another painting can be produced.

The signed painting is for sale in the gallery in an edition of one. When the painting is sold, it's shipped to the buyer printed on high quality canvas (40x50cm) and the money, minus production costs and gallery commission (50%), is transferred to the owner.

The price of each painting is calculated using the Paintshop Rank™ algorithm which analyzes a combination of the Artfacts ranking of the author, the popularity of the artwork itself, Facebook Likes, Retweets, Google PageRank, how old the painting is, if it’s sold, has it been in a show, and is updated daily.

The Paintshop.biz is successful in the collaborative creational process, which since launched has produced well over 3,000 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.biz 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.biz 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

Building my own microcosm version of the art world relates to a larger context by a set of different aspects. Primarily it can be collected into three categories, Production, Evaluation and Distribution.

Notable examples within the net art field in relation to distribution are the Art Micro Patronage initiative, which started with a series of online 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 an 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 the viewing and consumption of 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?

In 2008, Academy Of Art And Design published a collection of essays in the book ‘Owning Online Art, Selling And Collecting netbased artworks’, which explores problematics with selling, distributing and moneizting net art as well as the current collections of net art and active galleries dealing/selling net art.

In terms of evaluation the most important service is Artfacts.net, which is the leading artist ranking service. They are ranking artist from high to low, starting with Andy Warhol on position number 1, and they keep track of up to 300,000 artist. They’re using a combination of exhibitions and auction performance in their ranking system. The more shows at respectable institutions and galleries, the higher ranked you will become.

Algorithmic based evaluation and recommendation engines are incredibly interesting in terms how to evaluate data, especially how Google ranks their search queries, how Art.sy recommends works of art based on your taste-profile, how Netflix can know what you want to watch next based on what you just saw and rated. They’re all using similar techniques for quantifying a taste profile and evaluating what you want next.

Next to the technical algorithmic side of things, there’s plenty of art evaluation services, who will on demand give you an estimate price for any piece art. What kind of aspects are they evaluating when giving a you a price. A notable example is Mutual Art (http://mutualart.com).

Timeline

Sep–Nov, Research
Nov–Dec, Building the new version.
Dec, Create a Paintshop Exhibition at the Van Abbe Museum to engage with bigger and more diverse audience.
Dec, Prepare a presentation with the background, research and conclusions at the time, to engage and get feedback.
Mid Jan, Launch V2 Beta at Eyebeam Annual Showcase with an accompanying exhibition showcasing some of the works produced.
Mid Jan, organize a panel discussion – ‘How To Make Money Online’
Feb, Evaluate, Iterate, Update, Improve.
March, present V2 together with Baltan Labs at Van Abbe Museum, with a drawing workshops.
March–May, Write Thesis
May–June, Prepare different forms of how the Painthshop V2 can be presented within the graduation exhibition

References

Digital Divide, Art Forum

http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=31944&pagenum=0

Owning Online Art, Selling And Collecting netbased artworks. UAS NorthWestern Switzerland, Academy Of Art And Design edited by Markus Schwander and Reinhard StOrz

Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market

Noah Horowitz

Discussing the Ethics and Economics of Art

http://www.wdw.nl/event/everyone-for-themselves-nl-2/

Growth, Paul Graham, http://paulgraham.com/growth.html

‘For a Bit of Colored Ribbon’, Jeff Atwood, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/for-a-bit-of-colored-ribbon.html

Damien Hirst: Jumping the Shark – http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-21/damien-hirst-jumping-the-shark

Revealed: Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/27/google_raters_manual/

(DIGART - creators project)

(others)

Works in reference

Update

The Paintshop V2 is an ironic build of the art world as a game. It will function as a game model of the art world, syndicating a similar systematic setup, while at the same time be disconnected from it.

The Paintshop V2 is a way to explore how the art world system works, by building the different parts of the art world into the Paintshop V2 and engage the community to become the players of this art world game. Compared to the first version of the Paintshop, which was largely illustrating that the idea of collaborative painting as a model for production, the new version will include more ways for the users to engage with the system and a stronger focus on gamification.

A central piece to Paintshop V2 is its evaluation algorithm, the Paintrank, and by being transparent in how the algorithm is ranking the art produced in the Paintshop, the consequences of the evaluation becomes clear and open for manipulation. With the new version, the users has to sign in through Facebook to access the painting tool, so their identity can be more or less guaranteed, thus taking the ranking to a new level with the possibility of using their ‘real’ person’s qualities and achievements as factors in the ranking.

The Paintshop V2 is an economic and artistic end game, where the ranking of the artists and the works produces becomes the backdrop for monetization and the better your perform, the more money you will make. A self-contained microcosms with real life economic consequences.

User:Jonas Lund/gradprop2012

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