Thesis

Is Social media networks driving artist to become more aware and strategic concerning economy and branding in their practice?

Introduction

Every time we see a sponsored story in our Facebook feeds or a text based advertisement next to our email in the Gmail interface we are reminded that the service we are using is not free, in fact it’s paid for by us surrendering a certain amount of our personal data to the company who’s providing the service. Not only do we realize that the “free” services operate within a very rigid corporate structure, but we’re constantly faced with looking at advertisements promoting brands, which might be relevant to our lives or completely off target. The sheer amount of brand advertisement in our surrounding, both offline and online, is seeping into our lives. Every service we use online is a business in one way or another and its users are increasingly aware that they are being monetized. This thesis aims to question if the business driven social media networks have influenced artists to become more aware of their own branding and the economical and business like strategies employed in their practices. By looking at a selection of recent art works in the last three years by emerging artists working online and how these artists are using entrepreneurial and business minded tactics in their practices, I argue that it’s a necessity to be self managed and that it’s no longer possible to live in the dream of “artist genius” but rather every decision ought to be strategically planned to reach the biggest possible return of investment and that that move has been partly motivated by the social media networks.

Further, by exploring different ways emerging artists have created business models as art works in the last three years I want to see if there’s actual viable business models emerging and if it is enabling artist to sustain their practice and everyday life financially or if it’s rather functioning as a resource and material for critiquing economical and financial structures? When looking at the example art works, let’s ask three question to determine the potential of both the artworks economical profit possibility and its artistic context.

1) Is it a viable business model, i.e., is it making money or has the potential of making money?

2) Is it critically engaging with its own economical context?

3) What motivated the creation of the business model?

Art as a vehicle for business

Artists that attempt to create working business models have been increasingly popular over the last couple of years. The ambition to produce works that functions within a traditional white cube gallery in the contemporary art world and as well generates an actual revenue is a very attractive concept and no wonder artists are exploring this field in numerous ways. Imagine if you can produce a piece of art that’s also self sustaining and generates money, that’s quite a feat. Let’s see if it’s possible to create an actual working business as art by looking at some examples of works, but before going there, let’s define some ground rules for what an art work is and what a successful business is.

An Art Work

The definition of an art work I will use throughout this thesis is following the institutional theory of art, initiated by Arthur Danto’s essay “The Artworld” in 1964 and rephrased very specifically by George Dickie in his article "Defining Art” – “A work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.”. While the theory has been criticized for being circular, an art work has to be defined as such by an art world, it’s still the most accurate definition of art and will help us throughout this thesis. It’s important to note that the institutional theory of art isn’t discussing the quality of art works, wether it’s good or bad art but rather just defines an work as art as defined by its context within the art world. When we start looking at different business models, it can at times be challenging to discern wether the work is indeed a business or an art work or both and as we shall see it will largely depend on its context and the ambitions of the author.

A successful business

A business is a company or organization working with trade of goods or services. Its operations are determined by the business model, which describes the strategies and plans for how the business operates and how the “organization creates, delivers and captures value”. The main goal of a for-profit business is to earn a profit, in other words the annual return of investment should be zero or positive. There’s many different types of businesses, from sole proprietorship to large international corporations. Looking at the Internet start up scene, it’s particularly interesting to notice that in most cases the businesses are not generating a positive return of investment, but rather live on the prospect of either being bought up by one of the major players in the field or to find a sustainable and profitable business model, and that can happen after many years of successful operations in terms of gaining users and investment capital. It is, for example, only recently that Twitter has started to become profitable, with over two hundred million active users and a huge market saturation, it’s amazing to note that they’re only now starting to make a profit, seven years after it’s debut. So it’s important to keep in mind that sometimes the prospect of finding a business model is a viable business plan, if you can back it up with an investment capital and the potential of a large amount of users.

Dulltech

DullTech is a company started by Constant Dullaart in 2013. Its first product is a universal media player branded as a “media player for art”, which the artist states will support almost every playable media and will auto play the first found file on a connected usb stick. The media player is set to launch in the early summer of 2013 and will sell for 200 US Dollars. Dullaart points out in the specifications that it’s not only a working media player, but also a piece of art, a relatively cheap piece of art at that. (http://dulltech.com/features/) The company and device was conceived during a residency in She zen in China, the area where the majority of products by the major players in the market are produced, from the iPhone by Apple at Foxconn to the Samsung television sets. Dullaart is appropriating the business strategy of a typical chinese tech company, re-branding a no-name product and selling it under the wing of his newly founded company. Wether the work will be a success is yet to be determined as pre-orders are in the moment being accepted. What’s especially interesting about this piece is that the success of the art work and the success of the business goes hand in hand, if Dullaart manages the sell preorders and raise capital for the minimum required order of 200 devices the product will be launched and sold to institutions and early supporters around the world, if he on the other hand fails in reaching the amount of investments the product will never see the light of day and the media player would live on only as a concept. It’s quite plausible that the business DullTech will succeed, given the reach of the artists network, the relatively cheap investment cost and the utilitarian aspect of the product itself, it might sell fairly well. Determining the seriousness of the business model will always be at stake when exploring artworks as business, and in the case of DullTech there’s certainly a dose of irony in the conceptualization of the piece but never the less a serious investment. The gesture of producing what to many is a very mundane piece of technology, under the slightly ironic name DullTech is in many ways symptomatic of a whole generation of artist working online, relying heavily on irony, Internet references and a fundamental understanding of all the different aspects of the motivations to fully be able to appreciate the work.

LoopHole4All

LoopHole4All is the latest project by Italian born and New York based artist Paolo Cirio. The artist hijacked the identities of 200000 shell companies registered in the Cayman Islands through a simple scraping script. On the website loophole4all.com you can purchase a certificate of one of these companies for 99 cents and start using it to send invoices and ultimately use similar tactics to evade taxes as employed by most of the major corporations in the world, “83 of the Fortune 100 companies in the US currently rely on them”. For 49 dollars Cirio is selling a mailbox with a mail rerouting service to redirect all the incoming mail to your own address. Cirio describes the work as a political protest and aims to democratize the possibility to evade taxes and enable corporate tax fraud for the every day man. The nature of the work is of a “hack”, meaning that the actual possibility of using it to evade taxes are slim at best, and functions rather as a way of pointing out the global strategies of finding loopholes in the Internal Revenue Service tax laws and aims to highlight that a change is needed in the economic corporate landscape. The viability of the business model here is on the same level as the actual function of the work itself, meaning that it’s highly unlikely that Cirio will sell a significant amount of certificates intended for it’s original purpose, given the very obvious reason that’s pointed out in one of the comments in The Verge article discussing the piece – “If a company earns revenue in the United States, they must pay USA taxes regardless of where they are domiciled. Cayman entities only are for revenues earned overseas.” So to see the work as anything but a commentary would be a big stretch, and the work then becomes a good example of an artist started business that’s not intended to be a viable business at all but rather aims to critique a certain aspect of society through sensationalism. This motivation can be read early on through the press release of the work, claiming that the piece is based on a hack or corporate identity theft, where it’s in reality just a re-collection of publicly available data as confirmed by a press statement from the Cayman Islands Registry’s Senior Assistant Registrar Donnell Dixon. The strategy employed by Cirio with Loophole4all is similar to a virally driven marketing campaign, by relying on the uncritically of the tech news, using a vocabulary in the in line with the hacking group Anonymous and branding the piece as a hack, Cirio manages to raise a lot of awareness about the piece and consequently the global tax evasion schemes. Cirio summarizes the protest, “[…] the truth doesn't produce any change. People tend to adapt to injustice and absurdity. However, when concrete reality arrives, it is tough and it hurts”.

Brad Troemel’s Etsy Store

Branded as the “Internet’s Weirdest Etsy Store” by Gawker in 2012, Brad Troemel’s Etsy store is a mix of common every day objects combined and remixed in atypical ways, posted on the group Tumblr “The Jogging” and then added to the Etsy store as unique piece of art that’s for sale. The items ranges from “vacuum sealed MTV RIFF RAFF dazed and confused cover issue with Celebratory Lemons and Limes (Annies Organic Mac n Cheese w/ Fish Oil Pills)”, “DORITOSLOCOS taco MASTER LOCKED shut (Key Sold Separately) Highly Significant (Consider The Consequences of Tardiness)” – 55 US Dollars, to vacuum sealed Organic Petunia SHAMPOO in blooper sock with Whole Foods FLOWERS (Exquisite Formalism for creative minding) for 35 US Dollars. At the moment, the store has sold 81 items and the prices typically range from 20 to 60 dollars.

Troemel argues that “[…] art is a conceptual way of making something that already exists more valuable and culturally relevant. I take pride in providing some of the most significantly organic, inscrutably rare, and immeasurably valuable products on Etsy.” The store is selling a combination of highly stylized items that’s as much about the movement and group belonging as it is about art. The notion of using an already existing online market place to distribute and sell your experimental art works instead of relying on the gallery system is a strategic decision by Troemel who says: “Etsy is an effective means to an end. My primary goal is to Sell Sell Sell, and what better place than through my generation's largest art market? Things practically never sell in galleries, one thing here, another thing here. Gallery people get happy when they sell ONE painting in a month. I've sold, like, five things in a week on Etsy.” By circumventing the gallery system, not only does Troemel increase the amount of sales, he’s also tailoring to a very different audience, bridging the gap between the typical Etsy buyer and the contemporary art gallery visitor. The store is an art work first and more of a commentary on the gallery system and the presentation and description of art rather than a long term business plan, the money earned from the 81 sales is more of a positive side effect next to the larger scheme of things. The items typically have encouraging superlatives describing the inherent value of the piece, from “Exquisite Formalism” to “Highly Controversial and Insensitive”, the descriptions aims to add artistic merit and position the pieces as contemporary art within a trades and craft oriented market place. The double context of the work is particularly interesting, where it exists both as a piece of contemporary online art on Thejogging Tumblr and as a commodity for sale in the Etsy.

DIS Images

DIS Images (disimages.com) launched in February 2013 and is a fully functioning stock image library initiated by Dis Magazine (dismagazine.com). They received the first round of funding by being awarded one of the Rhizome commissions in 2011. Dis Magazine is a best described as a collective run life style magazine from a group of friends based in New York, in their own words, a “Post-Internet lifestyle publication about art, fashion and commerce. Creating images, text and video for an online platform, DIS seeks to expand creative economies, and depict a world in which there is no “alternative.”. DIS Images, as pointed out by Brian Droitcour in a Rhizome article, “marks a significant shift in the way artists approach stock photography”, meaning that traditionally stock images are meant to be void of implicit meaning but rather be able to fit anywhere, whereas DIS Images is quite on the contrary. By taking cliche stock image motives as a starting point and juxtaposing them with unpredictable items they aim to “explore the overproduction of images in the commercial photography market and the oversaturation of imagery in search engines and user-generated sites”. DIS Images have invited artists to produce fresh stock images for the collections and so far notable appearances include Timur Si-qin, Katja Novitskova and Bea Fremderman. Next to the images, DIS Images also use a tagging system, for example ‘Future Growth Approximation’ by Novitskova, depicting a zebra in a white cube space with a green upwards pointing arrow added on to the picture next to the zebra, is tagged with Success, Art Gallery Future Post-Human, Radicant, Stock Economics, Evolution, Cute Growth Prosperity, Art Market, Animals and so on, arguing that it’s not the how the tags infuses the image additional meaning, but rather how each image has the potential of many different uses, given the contradictory nature of the tags. Droitcour points out that “DIS Images fits with DIS magazine’s circular treatment of art as a lifestyle brand and fashion photography as a form of conceptual art” and that DIS Images hopes that the images are spread across newspapers, magazine around the world but that it’s primarily a new exploration into distributing and licensing art works. Ultimately DIS Images is positioned as an experimental economic model in the intersection between art and commerce, which has been a reoccurring theme appearing in the magazine.

Absolute Vitality Inc.

Absolute Vitality Inc. by the berlin based artist duo Aids3D is a legal company registered by the tax evading shell company Wyoming Corporate Services in 2010. The duo bought the company in 2012 to “function as a special purpose vehicle for their projects”, meaning that they for example can use it to offer collectors a possibility to evade taxes through acquiring stocks in Absolute Vitality Inc.

Gifmarket

Gifmarket (gifmarket.net) launched in 2011 and it is a collaboration between the two german artists Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach. It’s a website showing a series of 1024 different gif images, the first one being the most expensive and the 1024th being the cheapest. Asendorf explains “The GIFs show a black line which marks the centre for the 1px large particles rotating around it. #1 is the most unique, it has only 1 pixel flying around, and therefore the most expensive. Down to the end there are so many particles that you can’t see the difference between #950 and #1000.”. Each time a gif is sold the price of every gif on the website is increased, using this formula Price(€) = Total Sales / Number(#) * 16. Up until this point they’ve sold 181 gifs in total for 1,223.68€ with the estimated value of 21,986.87€. Each gif that is sold has the name of the owner underneath as well as a link of choice, so the buyer is not only purchasing a gif but also the opportunity to promote himself on the website, albeit the incoming traffic ought to be very low.

Conclusion

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References

http://frieze.com/issue/article/net-gains/

http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/features/warenwahn/?lang=en young artists embracing the online strategies

http://hyperallergic.com/66039/selling-out-the-impact-of-corporate-social-media-space-on-art/ Our experience of the internet is an inherently monetary exchange, with web-based businesses profiting directly or indirectly from our accessing of information that others have chosen to make public.

http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/institutional-theory-artworld.html

art and labour: http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.nl/2007/02/marx-labor-and-artist.html

warhol: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36328/the-business-artist-how-andy-warhol-turned-a-love-of-money-into-a-228-million-art-career

Dali: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EycMdz4fC0w

DIS: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/mar/5/businesslike-dis/ http://rhizome.org/commissions/proposal/2292/ http://disimages.com/photos/view/276

http://books.google.nl/books/about/Should_the_artist_become_a_man_of_the_wo.html?id=xbPyZwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-brand/308933/

http://www.economist.com/node/499033

Twitter profits http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/11/business/la-fi-tn-did-vc-fred-wilson-just-tell-us-twitter-is-profitable-20130111

Loophole4all http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/26/4031516/wanna-buy-a-loophole-paolo-cirio-makes-corporate-identity-theft-into

http://www.fastcompany.com/3005965/200000-caymans-corporations-hacked-art-project

http://www.cayman27.com.ky/2013/02/18/hacker-claims-cayman-breach