88 Studios

When will the internet touch the art world?

Great article in the WSJ on Sat about how the auction houses are encroaching on art dealers' territory (Oct 27, 2007, secW "Painted into a Corner"). What's most compelling to me about the piece doesn't have much to do with this particular conflict, but to do with the truly cloistered and non-market functions of the art market. Dealers and auction houses are useful to consumers in the same way that travel agents were useful - by providing information to consumers who have difficulty getting it themselves. And at the same time they operate like DeBeers by controlling the ebb and flow of art supply, driving up prices, and secreting information. It seems almost inconceivable that such a business could survive in today's business climate - but i suppose art is in a special category that so tightly controlled that a few entities can maintain, like DeBeers, its strangle hold.

The article is talking about how the market is changing - but only so much as auction houses are replacing dealers. That's not real change. That's a shift in control.

Some examples from the article:
* one dealer is "protecting his business" by blacklisting clients who resell at auction art they have bought from him. one buyer who resold at auction can "forget about buying a work from us ever again" and that these tactics have "succeeded in keeping many of his key collectors in line."

* collectors put their trust in dealers to give them a good price (b'c pricing information is so difficult to find)

* galleries have long served as the gateway to artists - arranging studio tours, repping the artist

The internet hasn't touched this system yet. Christies sold $4.6 billion last year. Wonder if it will. What will it take?

Results in from Saatchi Gallery

Some good figures from a WSJ article about Saatchi Gallery. Seems that artists are doing pretty well selling their work on the site. Some quick stats:
* 65K artists signed up
* 41% have sales of 30K a week. How can this be? They say "combined weekly sales" is that per artist or the aggregation of all artists?
* they report 50 million "hits" a day  - which tells me that they're incredibly un-web savvy if they're still thinking in terms of hits. The WSJ reporter looked up their Media Metrix rankings which showed 894K unique visitors in august.

Everything is not enough

There's an article in the WSJ today about Ebay trying to lure back lapsed buyers (B1. Oct 12 2007). It seems that people are turning away from the online merchant because it's cluttered, confusing, hard to find quality merchandise, and not a trusted environment.

Ebay has one thing: everything. That's not enough.

They should take some lessons from Facebook. It's simple, clean, easy to use, and most importantly, cultures an environment of trusted individuals. If Ebay had this kind of community surrounding its products, they'd be better positioned to retain customers - and would probably need to spend a lot less time developing policies and technology to combat scams. In fact, they are adding some social features already - can they do enough to meet the needs of the art buyer? Doubtful.

Art is an emotional product. It has everything to do with the personality of the seller (or creator) - in an environment where there's little trust, it's not going to sell well.

virtual place widget

Just had an idea to make a virtual world widget. The widget is a window to the world - but it's more than a trompe l'oeil - it's actually showing the world in real time. When someone visits the world, they appear in the widget - in all of the widgets that show this world. It's like deconstructing Second Life into thousands of unique places and then putting these places all over the web.

This method has the advantage of making virtual worlds much easier to access and experience. At present, it seems that people are making Quicktimes to show activity in Second Life - but they're necessarily windows into the past - instead of the present.

For online art studios, this concept could be really exciting. Imagine putting your virtual world art studio on your blog or social networking site - and convincing your friends to do the same. To succeed, 88artstudios needs this kind of integration into the regular flow of daily online life.