Project Proposal: Art Subscription Service

The aim of my project is to connect young art collectors and enthusiasts on a budget with the promising emerging artists whose work will most likely appreciate in value over time and who can benefit the most from a relatively small monthly fee. This service could be administered via several media, many of which might work in tandem, including: a monthly newsletter (whether electronic or print, or both); operating from a gallery space (perhaps beginning in a small unit in a well-known art district in New York and eventually expanding to other cities); from an office with little or no public display space with communication carried out by telephone, internet and/or newsletter; a monthly event where artists and subscribers meet in a new locale every time to interact and pick up the month’s artworks. In as much as this service works to connect art creators to art consumers, the client and audience are young and new artists, as well as art lovers on a limited budget, young collectors interested in starting a collection, curators hoping to connect these audiences, eventually even interior designers who’d like to connect their clients with young artists.

In the beginning, the project will be very New York-centric, providing subscribers with relatively inexpensive original artworks by local artists selected by local curators and gallerists, all of whom will be compensated for their work, with a percentage of the fee going to fund the subscription service’s operating costs. Eventually the project can expand to cover other urban areas by creating a network of participating galleries and curators finding artists in cities throughout the country and further. Further down the road, still, the project could offer specific genres of subscription services to cater to collectors’ tastes (ie. photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, figurative, abstract, video, etc.). The appeal of this art subscription service is that for young art enthusiasts and curators starting out, the fee is much more affordable than buying directly from galleries and a rotating set of guest curators ensures the caliber of participating artists remains high. For artists joining the program it offers exposure to collectors just starting out, who may very well continue to purchase the artists’ work as their career evolves. Finally, the simplicity of the system offers a clear and approachable way into the art market for artists and collectors who may be unsure where to begin.

The Design Process: Week 3 (contextual review)

Tentatively, my project involves designing a subscription service for young and budget art enthusiasts to pay one annual sum and receive a new artwork at regular intervals.

Relevant comparisons and contexts:

1. More commercial and established galleries provide a less structured, less accessible, but perhaps more financially secure system whereby patrons can buy art by approved artists at high prices and be assured of its value by the current art market.
2. With the middle levels of the art market increasingly disappearing as the dwindling middle-class loses its financial ability to purchase art, more and more the only options are very expensive commercial galleries or small, eclectic and unpredictable venues.
3. How can people without thousands of dollars of disposable income participate in a luxury-driven art market and still be sure of the viability of their investments and happy with their choices and purchases?

Similar projects:

1. Galleries, even some more high-end ones, increasingly offer high-quality prints and limited edition replicas of works by their artists at a fraction the price of original pieces.
2. Invisible-Exports, a gallery on the Lower East Side, created the Artist of the Month Club subscription service whereby aspiring collectors pay a flat rate at the beginning of the year and receive an original artwork every month.
3. Threadless, a store where designers post and sell their T-shirt designs, offers a 12 Month Tee Club, through which subscribers receive one new designer T-shirt every month.

Competition:

1. Art fairs where expensive and more affordable artworks are often on display as special promotions and to generate visibility.
2. Art magazines and bogs that increasingly cover even the most obscure section of the contemporary art scene, making it less necessary to be an active collector and participant in the community to know what's happening.
3. Galleries and websites that sell bad art at low prices without making any attempt to develop the tastes of their clients.

Approaches:

1. Due to the nature of such programs, it could operate without connection to a gallery or display space, although an office where works are stored and sales, curation are coordinated would quickly become essential.
2. Most business and information would take place and exist online, so a clear, attractive, dynamic and secure website would be essential, one in which subscribers could have some input or even a discussion forum.
   
3. Printed materials such as a pamphlet or a catalog of the previous year's works would become important for archiving purposes and could help with sales in person and when approaching curators and artists.
4. An electronic newsletter to keep subscribers up to date with artists, related exhibitions and relevant news.
   

The Design Process: Week 2

Things that inspire me: beautiful black and white films (like early Bergman, Jarmusch, Polanski), great mainstream cinema (like early Spielberg, Ridley Scott and Brian Synger, Howard Hawks, any and every Hitchcock movie), visual art (especially modern and contemporary), music (especially rap), riding my bike (basically everywhere), furniture design (again, mostly modern and contemporary).

10 pleasures, values and skills (in no particular order): bright and saturated colors, elegant or gritty black and white, figuration, postmodernism, photography, collages, architecture, Photoshop, urban design, cultural criticism.

Media experience: Mostly writing cultural journalism (both online and in print, currently as an editor at The L Magazine) especially to do with art, film, music and theater, some fairly rudimentary graphic design and Photoshop work, lots of blogging (at The L and for a side-project Listicles).