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.