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Carter, the author, here. Yes I've been on the Internet. In fact, I love and grew up on the Internet, wrote my first lines of code in middle school, and procrastinated my way through high school on sites like Deviant Art. I've been reading Hacker News daily for over 5 years. This essay was written with the WSJ audience (average age over 50) in mind. That audience is more familiar with the established art world and its $66B market. For an audience that grew up on the Internet like me, I would have used more nuanced language and talked more about the importance of merging the existing art market and the established art world with the more organic art communities already online. But here's the tl;dr version of what I would have written for HN: The Internet will grow the art market and broaden it to include artists outside of the existing establishment–the result is that more artists will be able to make a living without having to appeal to the existing system. But achieving this requires working with the established art world, e.g. major galleries and museums, to publish more of their art online for easy and free access–making art and art education accessible to everyone, not just those with the time and money to go visit in person. By moving the existing art world online, you're bringing its market of buyers and sellers with it, and exposing them to a more vibrant, diverse, and organic ecosystem that many readers on Hacker News are already familiar with. In summary, by increasing awareness and education about art history, the Internet will drive greater passion and market demand for art, which ultimately means more artists from all over the world will get discovered organically and be able to pursue their passions more sustainably. Likewise, music has been around forever, but the chances of someone like Lorde, a 16 year old from New Zealand, seeing such success was much less likely before the Internet democratized music for listeners and creators alike. Today, it's still very rare for a visual artist to experience that kind of success if they are not part of the existing establishment. But the Internet is going to change that, and this will be a great thing for all of us. |
However, if one might be tempted to correlate internet-based business with openness and even educational inspirations: that’s not the commercial art world I know of. Because in most of these cases collectors will have had a password to the restricted part of the gallery website.
That entire $60B art market is in a continuous effort to make scarce and unreachable what is at the basis an abundant resource. Hence the passwords handed out to selected collectors. Or, for example, what’s the logic of taking an image with a digital camera, and promising to print it only 5 times? It’s an economic logic of promoting scarcity, and it works really well—contemporary art auctions have gone through the roof this year.
At the same time, as art is moving to digital artefacts, the notion of scarcity on which the art world is built is bound to blow up at some point—like you, I’m confident that the internet will help us come up with new ideas of what it is to be an artist, and what it is to produce art. Yet the gallery circuit is the last place where I’d go looking for answers…