The rise of NFTs has incited conversations around ownership structures of the artwork, but what about ownership of the other power players such as galleries and platforms? Ultimately these conversations are driving at the same perennial question, how is art financially enabled and supported?

The problem of how art is funded and what impact that has is not new. Early patrons of art were institutional religions and the resulting artwork reflected both the values of the church and the values artists willing to please the purse strings. Nationally funded artwork is no different.

Leo Tolstoy saw the professionalisation of art as hampering the creation of good works. He essentially argues in his 1897 What is Art? that artists should not be funded or encouraged to do their work full-time.

In this column’s December 2020 article on Microsoft’s funding of a Sol LeWitt app we spoke about how the relatively limited engagement of the tech world with the art world tends to manifest itself with support for artwork and artists that comfortably reflect the tech industry’s values back to itself.

Venture capital: darling of Silicon Valley

Acknowledging that every funding structure has its conscious and unconscious strings we turn to venture capital (VC), the form of funding popularised by Silicon Valley start-ups, where companies receive funding in exchange for an equity ownership stake in the company.

In one such example, fxhash, the generative art platform that toured with the Tezos Foundation at Art Basel events throughout 2022, has just announced it has raised $5 million in seed funding from a mixture of venture capital, DAOs, and the Tezos Foundation. The funding was led by 1kx, an early-stage investment firm that specialises in ecosystem growth and is based in Berlin. Along with betting on the economic potential of generative art by funding fxhash, 1kx has also invested in a decentralised cloud storage company and Pudgy Penguins, which produces content, merchandise, toys, and digital collectables.

Referencing fxhash’s tools for creating, collecting, and sharing generative art along with its impressive 2 million unique transactions, Valérie Whitacre, Head of Art at Trilitech, the London hub of the Tezos ecosystem, sees the platform’s potential growth both inside and outside the traditional art world.

More than about the money

As with any tech start-up, venture backing in the art world should be understood to be more than about the money. Start-ups often take on venture funding from those they hope can help them get connected to the right communities and leaders. For example, the generative artist Casey Reas also invested in fxhash as an angel investor, a term applied to wealthy private investors focused on financing small business ventures in exchange for equity.

Reas and venture capital funding have also been foundational in another important art/tech platform, Feral File. Reas and the tech entrepreneur Sean Moss-Pultz first met at the MIT Media Lab in 2005. By this time Reas was famous in the Net Art world, which is a way of saying deeply under-appreciated. Net Art, with luminaries like Olia Lialina, had experienced incredible creativity and community but virtually no market.

At the time, Moss-Pultz was in the process of starting a company called Openmoko, a now discontinued project to create a family of open-source mobile phones whose production was crowd-funded. By 2014 Moss-Pultz had started a company called bitmark which had originally looked to serve the traditionally unbanked population through validation of digital ownership of non-financial assets, or what we now have come to think of as crypto currency.

Moss-Pultz took on Reas as an adviser and raised a “friends and family” seed round in 2016. Moss-Pultz had identified decentralised validation and digital ownership as the technology of his generation and his search for the killer app, the right application of this technology, would eventually bring his company through health data (2018), the music industry (KKBOX, 2019) and personal data, all with Reas as an active adviser.

They were also working on Spring, described by Moss-Pultz as an “escape hatch” for Facebook users who are frustrated by Facebook’s abuse of their personal data and want to reclaim control. Throughout these other explorations, the bitmark team constantly experimented with applications of blockchain technology for art. In 2017 bitmark funded A to P, a now famous exhibition and experiment that allowed artists to trade digital art with each other in a system of verified ownership.

The emergence of Feral File

Reas had stumbled upon an obscure 1971 legal contract known as the “Siegelaub-Projansky Agreement” which both Reas and Moss-Pultz felt was the missing piece for selling digital art. The artist Seth Siegelaub worked with the lawyer Robert Projansky to specify rights, royalties and responsibilities. Their goal was to address the unequal power dynamics between artists, collectors, and galleries. They wanted to “decentralise the art market and the institution.” This was so aligned with the bitmark company values and so the company continued to support the development financially. The resulting platform and smart contract became known as Feral File, a name that still adorns the monthly exhibitions curated by Reas.

Feral File has grown out of the core of that a2p exhibition. It is still a place artists collaborate and collect with each other, only now open to the public. By 2019 bitmark had applied the smart contract functionality learned via their experimentation in the music industry to royalty splits and also bridged the bitmark blockchain onto the more popular Ethereum and Tezos blockchains.

Feral File is now known as one of the premier platforms for the exhibition of digital artwork. It has a reputation for discovering and supporting artists early in their emergence into public awareness and the market. Unlike fxhash, Feral File is not directly funded by venture capital. It is a product or experiment funded by a start-up that is funded by venture capital.

While VC funding in art is becoming increasingly common, other investment structures exist:

• Arcual—a platform that uses blockchain to host a digitised version of the established interaction between artists, dealers and collectors, in buying and selling new physical works of art—has as shareholders MCH Group, the LUMA Foundation and BCG X. A publicly listed company, MCH is the majority shareholder, owning a 67.5 % share.
• LACMA’s Art and Tech Lab applies grant funding from Silicon Valley companies to artists experimenting with new technologies.
• The art marketplace and VR platform Artland was recently acquired by the Copenhagen-based investment firm Velocity Capital ApS.

Each model results in different pressures and advantages but one thing is clear, there is more variety than ever in how and why art is funded and the tech industry models have arrived.

The public will soon be able to buy a piece of a Banksy mural which was first discovered on the side of a house in shares of £120 each.

Valentine’s Day Mascara appeared on the side of a house in Margate on 14 February, this year, and was soon confirmed to be genuine on the elusive artist’s Instagram account.

It depicts a 1950s housewife with a swollen eye and missing tooth, wearing an apron and yellow washing-up gloves, and throwing a man into a freezer.

It incorporated a real-life chest freezer, a broken garden chair, a blue crate and an empty beer bottle, which were all removed by Thanet Council hours after it appeared, but later returned.

From Tuesday 27,000 shares in it will be available for the public to buy at £120 each on the art marketplace, Showpiece.com, which claims on its website to “make it possible for every collector to buy into the most extraordinary items in the world”.

The piece has been valued at £6m.

The owner of the building, who removed the anonymous graffiti artist’s piece earlier this year to help preserve it, has been bombarded with offers to buy it ever since it appeared – but has been determined that it should stay in Kent.

Selling off shares in it means it can stay in its temporary home, at Dreamland Margate, an amusement park already housing a collection of artworks.

A spokesperson for Dreamland said they were “delighted” to be able to continue to give the artwork a home where members of the public could see it for free when the theme park was open.

Julian Usher, chief executive of Red Eight Gallery, which has represented the original owner, said: “The fact that it will be accessible for people to actually own a share in is wonderful, and it also means the mural can now make Margate its official home.”

Read more:
Group try to steal Banksy mural from wall
Welsh councillor resigns after repeated allegations that he is Banksy

Showpiece bosses will also be raising funds for the national domestic abuse charity Refuge.

Managing director of Showpiece, Aaron Carter, said: “Like many of Banksy’s works, Valentine’s Day Mascara highlights a serious subject matter.

“We hope that by working with our charity partners, we can continue to promote the work they accomplish and support the causes Banksy is concerned with.”

The true identity of the Bristol-born artist, whose works can sell for millions of pounds on the art market, remains a mystery.

Banksy previously confirmed he had spent time in Ukraine after posting a video of an artist spray-painting designs in the war-torn country and speaking to locals.

One of his biggest projects was Dismaland, a dystopian theme park in Weston-super-Mare back in 2015.

A solo show, titled Cut & Run – 25 Years Card Labour, is currently on display in Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), featuring many of the stencils used to create his most iconic artworks spanning from 1998 to the present day.

GDA is a new initiative of four Brazilian artists (Bruno Baptistelli, Carolina Cordeiro, Frederico Filippi and Maíra Dietrich), an artist-run gallery aimed at self-representing their art production in a growing art scene where competition for visibility and space is always a challenge. The following interview was held in online exchanges between July and August 2023.

What is the general idea of the GDA project, in terms of lines of operation and objectives?

GDA is an artist-run gallery focused on experimental and conceptual practices by Brazilian artists, whose careers would be defined as not emerging, but not yet established. The project opened in October 2021 and since then we have had eight exhibitions and two participations in art fairs. Our practice in general consists of inviting an artist to present a solo exhibition for which we offer a temporary commercial representation with basic production support, critical text, professional photographic record and dissemination. The main objective is to strengthen the symbolic and financial recognition of artists who have a solid and coherent trajectory. Other objectives are: to create visibility and interest around artists and practices that we believe in; to try to make the artistic activity profitable through the commercialization of works of art; to incorporate healthier market practices, etc.

GDA Coletiva/Photo: Ana Pigosso

What led you to the idea of setting up a gallery managed by artists, the GDA? What are the challenges of this undertaking?

GDA began to be designed at the beginning of 2021 based on the suggestion of Baptistelli, with the support of Cordeiro, Filippi and Dietrich, and the guidelines have always been to create a financially sustainable project that we could use as an exhibition and commercialization platform of our work, as well as that of artists that we believe deserve more visibility. Two systemic observations served as a guide to the creation of the project: understanding the structures of visibility, both in the market and in institutional attention; and, we realized that, beyond what is considered hype, or trend of the moment, eyes are generally turned to young promising artists or established artists, leaving aside artists with more than a ten-year career who are not linked to any commercial gallery. Which is, or was, not only our case, but also the case of many artists we admire and follow. In the sense of financial sustainability, there was also the acknowledgment that in Brazil today there is a lack of public funding for the promotion and formation of experimental artistic practices such as ours, from which we realized that it was necessary not only to create our own initiative, but create an initiative with a commercial focus in order to guarantee the financial health of the project. The difficulties have been the usual ones for Brazilian artistic initiatives: scarcity of resources for more experimental projects; the conservatism of the art consumer market; and the rooting of unhealthy marketing practices that perpetuate the current power structures.

Maíra Dietrich “Cena—Sintaxe” at GDA/Photo: Julia Thompson

Who is connected to GDA today? How do you share responsibilities and tasks?

Currently we are four artists responsible for the project: Bruno Baptistelli, Carolina Cordeiro, Frederico Filippi and Maíra Dietrich. Decisions are made as a group and we do not have a specific division of tasks, each one contributes with their expertise and available time. As we are all artists, we divide the time dedicated to the project with the time for our own authorial practice, and other practices that bring us direct financial return. For this reason, many times some part of the group is absent due to travel or exhibitions and the rest of the group assumes the responsibilities.

Is there any model or project (current or even historical) that influenced the creation of GDA? What are the references if you have them?

Our training and early career took place at a time when there was a greater number of independent spaces and/or managed by artists in the Brazilian artistic circuit. This model, incredible as it was, when stripped of state support, had many shortcomings of long-term sustainability. For this reason, and especially when we decided to create the gallery, we looked for project models that have commercialization as a path to financial health. We look at the model of A Gentil Carioca, a Brazilian gallery founded by artists; Bombon projects, a project in Barcelona that also thinks about marketing support; and the Argentinian gallery Piedras, which was also founded by artists who, to this day, remain in the management and group of represented artists.

Carolina Cordeiro “America do Sal,” 2021 at GDA/Photo: Ana Pigosso

Do you operate from your own headquarters or “itinerantly”? Is it a question of choice, spatial management?

Until the beginning of 2023, we operated on an itinerant basis, temporarily renting spaces for our exhibitions. Which was to some extent interesting, as we always ended up looking for a specific dialogue between the space and the artist to be shown. This nomadic form was very laborious and gave the project a less permanent “on and off” character, which is why we ended up deciding to settle permanently in Barra Funda, in the same building where three of us have our studios. It’s been great to be able to stay in the same place, it gives us the perspective of consistent improvements in space and gives us greater programming freedom for more complex installations or specific events.

Do you have a defined program profile? How do the decisions for choosing the projects to be exhibited take place?

With the structure we have today, we managed to organize a program of four exhibitions per year. This schedule is drawn up at the end of each year and adjusted over the months according to the calendar of artistic events in the city. Our profile, as stated above, in addition to age, group or subject, are artists/projects/initiatives that we respect, admire and believe are relevant, and that we feel are not being seen and recognized enough. This ends up being our main motto. Decisions are made collectively in what is affectionately called “long meetings.”

What challenges arose at the beginning of the project in both organizational and physical terms? And what will you do about those for the near future (if you have already identified them)?

Our project is structured in a very lean way, without unnecessary expenses and with a lot of voluntary dedication on our part. And even so, we have been working without much financial margin for invitations and ideas that escape the yearly plan. In this sense, the biggest challenge for the gallery is to manage to have and maintain enough cash to carry out long-term planning for the gallery, which allows us to improve and expand our exhibitions and recording materials, to be able to carry out projects and exchanges with other projects and artists that are from outside the city of São Paulo, as well as remunerating ourselves for our time and dedication to the work.

Raphael Escobar “Porte,” 2023 at GDA/image courtesy GDA

We know that the art market is a very particular field, sometimes deregulated and personalized, very closed and based on very specific principles that are not clearly defined… ? Would you like to talk about any support you want to mention or any ideas of public, institutional, private support that you have had or would like to have?

The long-term sustainability and financial health of the project is our constant challenge. For the first year of the project we had the support of a Brazilian collector, who, in addition to helping publicize the project, pre-arranged the gallery’s recurring acquisitions, which gave us impetus for the first exhibitions. In this sense, like this collector, we can say that we have a small but very faithful group of collectors who believe in and support the project. We would like to be able to expand this network of buyers/patrons, so that with this support, we can make our project more structured, which would give us not only financial stability but also more voice to establish healthier art marketing practices.

Today some of you have works represented by commercial galleries already established in the art circuit, how are you reconciling this issue?

We believe that many improvements in the arts system, especially for the artists, come through a more cooperative way of working. Since we started the project, we have always believed and will support that the artists involved in it can find ways to make their practices grow and mature. Precisely for this reason, we are very happy today to be working with two galleries in a co-representation model. With Galeria Luisa Strina we co-represent Bruno Baptistelli, and with Galatea we co-represent Carolina Cordeiro. For us, this is an indication of the health of the market and of artistic thinking, not losing sight of the fact that the gallery is a structure for promoting and evolving the artist and, in order to achieve this, it must be open to loosening its structures and evolving as a model, giving up old paradigms of competitiveness.

Galeria de Artistas