User:Jonas Lund/gradprop2012

The Paintshop V2

1. General Introduction

I aim to create a sustainable model for collaborative creation, distribution and monetization of online art.

In June 2012 I launched the Paintshop.biz, a collaborative painting tool with an embedded market place. V1 is a simple manifestation of how production and monetization could work, and has the potential to grow in a much bigger and more extensive piece of work. For my graduation project I wish to create a new version of The Paintshop (V2).

The key questions in my research leading up to V2 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 purchase/collect art’, ‘What’s the correlation between economic value and cultural relevance?’ ‘What’s the perceived value of digital art in comparison to traditional art?’

1. Relation to previous practice

The Paintshop.biz version 1.0 (V1) 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 and 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.

The problem of selling art is not a simple one, and in relation to the Paintshop.biz it opens a lot of questions, which in my research I aim to seek answers to.

Next to the Paintshop.biz I’ve also explored the notion of privacy through a constant broadcast of parts of my browsing activities in real time. This exploration started in May 2011 with the work I’m Here And There (2011), which simply put my last visited link in the center of the website – imhereandthere.com.

This piece was followed up with a 24 hour surf performance called ‘Selfsurfing’ in March 2012. ‘Selfsurfing’ cloned my whole browser and synced every interaction with it across all viewers by a Chrome extension, which received all the data through an intermediate server. To view ‘Selfsurfing’ one had to install an extension, which when started, cloned tab positions, urls and scroll position of each website that I had opened in my browser, but it did not handle logged in session, so for example when I was viewing Facebook the viewer saw either a login screen or his own Facebook.

In September 2012 I turned ‘Selfsurfing’ into a browser based piece ‘Public Access Me’, launched together with the New Museum’s online exhibition series ‘First Look’. Public Access Me (PAM) is a live stream of what my browser sees, unlike Selfsurfing, PAM is capturing everything I see and sends that over websockets to public-access.me. When I’m viewing my email or Facebook the viewer see my email and Facebook.

‘I’m Here And There’, ‘Selfsurfing’ and ‘Public Access Me’ are all live and continuous and at the same time a growing archive of my browsing activities, they each have their dedicated database, which is collecting everything and archiving it for the future.

The explorations stem from an interest in sharing and connecting with an audience and a community and recognizing that privacy is slowly turning into a discourse of the past. Using a computer and browsing is a lonely activity, I spend hours and hours every day alone in front of a screen, despite interacting in social networks, the act of using the computer is a lonely one. By opening up my browsing I want to extend that, so I can be in multiple places and feel connected to larger community and audience. This relation to the community and the audience plays a pivotal role in my practice.

1. 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 within the net art field 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.

1. Relation to Eyebeam Residency Research and Current Status of Project

At Eyebeam I’ve been researching different ways of monetizing net art through the history of net art sales, its place within art collections and the current situation today.

It has become evident to me that the problematics in relation to net art monetization is not of a technical nature nor the lack of ‘uniqueness’, which is often accredited as a cause for net art’s low sales performance. Rather, the lack of institutional and art world recognition is the bigger part of the problem.

The goal of the research is to figure out a way for net art to gain a larger cultural and art world recognition and will culminate into a piece, which will critically examine the problematics with selling net art and possibly open up a potential solution for furthering the spread of net art.

Early on in my research a statement came up in relation to selling art by Steve Fletcher (Carroll/Fletcher London based Gallery); “We can sell whatever, as long as its packaged correctly”.

This statement stuck in my mind, and of course it’s clear, you can sell whatever, as long as all the components make sense and if you have a buyer. In relation to net art the package would include everything from how the work itself is packaged, how the collector receives the work, how its authenticity is guaranteed, what type of certificate is connected to the work, who the artist is and how the piece is ‘signed’.

From this a further conclusion can be drawn; to sell (net)art to a collector, the only thing that matters is who made it. To sell art to a “non-collector” in a more commercial manner, the package is the most important.

I think the separation between collector and non-collector is an important one as it separates different types of monetizing as well different packages. For example, a non-collector would buy a poster of the Starry Nights by Van Gogh and a collector would only be interested in the original painting, regardless both aspects have significant commercial values.

Having considered many different options for how to package and (re)sell/re-represent net art I have, based on my new findings, decided to return back to the Paintshop.biz and develop it further. The aim of the Paintshop.biz V2 is to increase production and sales and refine the price setting/ranking algorithm and turn the gallery into a more lively place, in closer relation to the producers and the community.

Next to the new version of the Paintshop.biz I will make a series of exhibitions at the Van Abbe Museum starting in the beginning of December, from works produced in the Paintshop.biz. I’ve selected the thousand best paintings according to the ranks and complexity and printed them on 40x50cm laser prints. From this I will make daily selections and curate them into temporary shows at the Van Abbe Museum, the process will be well documented on thepaintshop.biz and all the prints will be for sale for a rather low price.

The goal of the exhibition series is three fold, to increase sales, to target a larger audience and to give the works more cultural relevance.

To increase sales the prices of each painting will be drastically lowered to between 3–5 Euros, and the paintings will already be represented in ‘real’ so the incentive to buy what you see should be stronger.

The location of the exhibition place, the Van Abbe Museum studio, already has a quite specific audience, so that’s the primary target group for the exhibition space. Next to this, each exhibition will be documented online, with a title and an attached curatorial statement.

By placing the works from the Paintshop.biz in the Van Abbe Museum the relevance of each painting is automatically upgraded from a painting to a painting that has been shown in a contemporary art museum. Further, if the painting is sold the artist has now been upgraded from a non-selling artist to a selling artist.

As I will continue to redefine what the new version of the Paintshop.biz will be, so the product develop further into a graduation piece. There’s so many options for how it can be shown in a exhibition space, how it can grow online, turned in to workshops, discussions, talks that I don’t foresee any problems with it extending into a graduation work.

1. Practical Steps
  1. What Needs To Be Done

Through my research I will evaluate V1 and isolate what can be extended and moved into different areas. My wish is to create a microcosms version of the art world at large and in order to do so I need to add a set of components to V2.

1. 1. 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

1. 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)

1. Works in reference

1. some quotes

Pricing fine art might seem like a preoccupation of the wealthy few, but it’s of interest to economists, who see it as a way to test fundamental questions about value. As Mugrabi points out, the market behaves in unusual ways: Demand for an artist’s work tends to rise as prices do, because the more expensive it becomes, the more status it confers. And while value is usually a function of scarcity, the opposite can be true for artists—some great ones, like Warhol and Picasso, left behind a prolific body of work. The most unpredictable thing about art’s valuation, though, is that it’s entirely in the eye of the beholder.

an artwork is only worth what the next guy is going to pay for it.

“It’s from the marketplace that you want approval,” Dunphy says. “That’s always what you’re looking for in the end: Are people buying the work?”

By the calculations of Moses, the retired NYU professor, contemporary art has returned 12.6 percent a year on average during the 2000s