How do you think Millennials are changing the way we consume and buy art?
I believe (and this belief is supported by the recent Artsy Collector Report) that the new generation’s collectors are more investment-oriented in their purchasing habits. They are the generation that grew up with transparency as one of the key values they have learned to value, a generation that is able to look anything up on Google within seconds, looking for the best deal, a good price or a right answer. So, I believe this attitude is projected onto art buying as well – the young generation of collectors are not relying on a “dealer” or “gallerist” authority, just like they are not relying on brokers to trade in the stock market anymore – with the number of independent retail investors going up tremendously over the past months.
Most artists listed on your platform Artsted.com are not represented by traditional galleries. How do you select your artists?
As per the first recruitment cycles that we have had so far, the artists would send in the application for an Open Call to join the platform, and it would be the platform’s curators to select the most promising ones: taking a variety of factors such as portfolio, CV, Fine Art Education and more. Currently, we have a nice selection of very exciting artists that are students or recent graduates of the Royal College of Art in London: such as Zachary Eastwood-Bloom, Hanne Peeraer and Hengzhi Gong to name a few.
The biggest challenge for newcomers is to gain credibility, reputation, and authority. What is your strategy to establish your brand and penetrate the art market?
Avax NFT for sale, and the strategy is to let a good technology product speak for itself (laughing). Of course, like most startup companies dreaming of exponential growth – we are looking at investing more than half of our budget in advertising and marketing to reach and retain our users. We are also working on some offline events as a main partner of ReA! Art Fair for emerging artists and the collaborations with physical, institutional partners will certainly be many to come.
What is your take on blockchain and its applications to the art world?
That’s a great question. The answer could also take dozens of pages, so I will try to be succinct. Blockchain and its various applications for the art world are a great idea in theory – a lot of investment over the past 5 years went into financing multiple startups in this industry, ranging from “blockchain registration” for artworks or collections to “tokens” or “fractionalized ownership”-focused startups.
Blockchain for the arts, sounds really good on paper, however, we are looking at an industry that apparently doesn’t consider the issues that blockchain companies are trying to resolve an actual pain. It almost feels like they are …forgive me for a lack of a better word, useless? That, in my perspective, is why despite massive institutional and tremendous financial support in some cases, the best kinds of ideas in that space failed to create a noticeable change or build a following/user base.
Despite that, I also believe that the recent NFTs movement may be creating new pathways for us to reconsider Blockchain for the arts – let’s see what the future brings! We are Artsted (www.artsted.com) are currently working on a solution that will connect the traditional and the digital art markets, so do stay tuned with our updates!
But don’t you think that the NFT’s market is just a bubble?
I agree there is a lot of speculation happening in the NFT market, with prices being overly inflated and not supported by any technical or aesthetic metrics. At the same time, the underlying technology and the genuine growing interest of the new generation to consume “digital” goods and services, is evident. In the early 2000s, there was a “dot-com” bubble, which was followed by the stock market crash since the evaluation of the newly invented internet companies was over the moon with nothing to support them. 20 years later, it is safe to say that the underlying technology – and the vision of the Internet becoming a global phenomenon dominating all spheres of human existence has come true. So, for me there is no doubt that no matter if the NFT bubble as we know it today bursts up or not, the online world we live in will continue its expansion, involving digitally created and digitally traded art as a creative commodity.
