Why We Left Our Successful Art Career to Start an Online Community
As professional artists, we’ve exhibited in some of the world’s most prominent museums and biennials. Here’s why we quit the art world for the internet.
More people than ever want to be artists. A whole genre of articles, self-help books and Medium publications peddle advice on how to make it as an artist or make a living off your creative talent.
Well, this post will do the opposite.
For fifteen years, my artist partner Sixten and I have exhibited at world-famous museums and art biennials. This post will explain why we called it quits. Why I to my own great surprise left the much-desired art career I always thought I wanted.
It’s the story of a long personal journey that took me from my small provincial hometown of Elsinore, Denmark, to the artist mecca of Berlin — and from there to museums, galleries and biennials in New York, Moscow, Venice, and beyond.
And it’s the story of learning how to impact people’s real lives. And why — if you want to change things for the better — the art world is not the best place to work from these days.
How I became an artist
I co-founded my first start-up — an online art community — with three friends during our first years at college. This was 2002, years before Facebook (before even Myspace), and it turned out we had started the world’s first social network for professional artists out of our Copenhagen apartment.
None of us had gone to art school. None of knew much about visual art. Only one of us knew anything at all about programming.
But we were young, eager, excited. We were driven by a desire to change what we saw as a stale, elitist society. We wanted to bring people together through the internet — create an online community of artists and creators; and then use that community to foster new and rich relationships offline. We were ambitious and hungry. And we had no business plan or any idea of how the art world actually functioned.
One thing we did know, was that New York City was the center of everything arts. So shortly after getting Wooloo.org online, we moved there to launch our community.
In New York, we stood on street corners and signed up users for Wooloo.org. We went to galleries who were not into that “internet thing”. We even tried getting sponsorship by walking unannounced into the Deutsche Bank headquarters in Manhattan, BS’ing our way to the VP’S office. Who called security on us.
Eventually, we understood that we should stop calling our project a “website” and instead refer to it as a “social sculpture”. Finally — just three days before our visa ran out and we had to leave the U.S. — we were invited to do a project in the prestigious exhibition space in Soho known as Artist Space.
Lesson One: Learning to speak Art
Life in the art world was a radical contrast to life in Denmark where both I and my co-founder, Sixten, had grown up.
In our hometown, most people went to school, got comfortable jobs, and settled into family life by their late 20s. Very few of the people we knew from childhood were pursuing creative careers, taking risks, or had ever thought about sculpting social situations as artworks.
Upon learning that I now worked as an artist, most old friends used to reply in all earnestness: “Oh, I didn’t know you could paint?”
I tried to explain that I used people as my paint and the reality as my canvas. But even writing it here, I can hear how pretentious that sounds.
The art world was the opposite of everything we knew. The whole point of making art was to create something new. Anything that had been done before was unoriginal.
Suddenly, we were surrounded by wild ideas, cutting edge technology, and found ourselves immersed in a community where rethinking the world and breaking down boundaries were part of the job description.
The culture shock couldn’t have been bigger or better. We were enthralled by the creative, open-minded people we met. We were in love with the art world.
The next two years of exploring the visual arts had a life-altering impact on us. We learned that if you were willing to give up the comforts of the 9-to-5, work hard, learn from other artists, and take a few risks, there was a thriving art community who was deeply interested in experimenting with human communities — online and offline.
As we prepared our first solo show, it felt like we had found a home for both our Wooloo art collective and for ourselves. We thought the art world was where we belonged.
Lesson Two: Community Experiments in Berlin
In 2004, we moved to Berlin to be a part of the German capital’s burgeoning art scene. For four years, we ran Wooloo.org from a storefront in Mitte that still bore the bullet holes from World War II. This storefront would become our laboratory. This was where we would experiment with both online community building and offline social sculpture.
When we were not busy building Wooloo.org, we were experimenting with social matchmaking. We wanted to discover the best ways of bringing people together. How could we maximize meaningful meetings between strangers? How could we make people plunge into transformative relationships — take chances, share, live more adventurously?
We worked like mad professors: We experimented on live human beings. And we exhibited our results in art institutions all across the world.
Home in our storefront lab, we opened a shop where people could request a new life (it took months before someone finally did!). We also ran an Avantgarde Dating service matching artists as couples based solely on their work.
In our probably most controversial performance, we locked a group of foreign-born artists inside the White Box Gallery in New York. And whoever made the best art piece over five days won an artist visa to the US. One rule: the artists couldn’t leave the gallery. And had to rely on strangers to get them materials. The press swarmed over us. One art critic called it “a game show, something like “Survivor: Chelsea”. And thousands of people visited.
Back in Berlin, we organized a festival that matched artists, creative projects and experimental architects with unused spaces. Berlin was still full of cheap spaces back then. And filling the empty buildings with lots of new life was one of the most meaningful things we had ever done.
Our festival favorite was Fictive Days, a project that invited people to live as their preferred fictional character for 2 weeks — and stay in character the whole time. Amazingly, two of the participants ended up getting married. And they are still married to this day. For real.
Lesson Three: The COP15 Climate Change Summit
During these years of discovery and experimentation, we worked with the pioneers of social sculpture like Martha Wilson, Liam Gillick and Superflex. We met hundreds of incredible community organizers, activists and entrepreneurs straddling the worlds of art and business. We discussed their ideas on how to create communities, saw their challenges and their strengths. And we learned from the common mistakes that often lead to failures.
By trial and error, we learned how to bring strangers together. How to break down social boundaries. And how to built rich, vibrant communities online.
In 2009, we got the idea that would take our lives in a new direction.
The COP15 UN Climate Summit was coming to our hometown of Copenhagen. There were high hopes that world leaders would sign a binding agreement to combat climate change. And thousands of activists were coming to the Danish capital to fight for a deal that would save our planet from climate disaster.
Many visitors were activists from the Global South who could not afford to pay the hefty hotels prices of Copenhagen. This was the days before Airbnb and there was no easy way to rent rooms from locals. And camping or tenting was out of the question — it was a freezing Scandinavian December.
We suggested to the City of Copenhagen that we could match visiting activists with local Copenhageners.
The project became our proof of concept. While the politicians failed to find a solution at the Climate Summit, we helped 3,000 activists find free housing. The kindness and generosity of thousands of hosts was overwhelming. Thousands of new friendships were formed. Unexpected collaborations were launched.
After years of experimenting, we had learned how to bring people together on a massive scale. We had gotten really good at it.
So good that it became increasingly hard to get excited about museums and long exhibition texts full of academic formulations.
Lesson Four: The Venice Biennale
It was only when we reached the top echelons of the art world that my feelings about life in the visual arts started to change.
After our big success in Copenhagen, things were moving fast for our art careers. Over the next few years, we were invited to exhibit our work and give talks in Belgium, Germany, Senegal, Sweden, the Netherlands, Latvia, Austria, China, Iceland, Greece, Norway, the US, and several other places. We were meeting innovative entrepreneurs, scientists, community organizers, and city governments from all across the world. And we were beginning to see that the art world was not the only place where groundbreaking, innovative social experiments were happening.
In 2013, an invitation came to represent the Maldives at the 55th Venice Biennial, the most important art show in the world.
We discussed various ideas with the curator and representatives for the Maldives government. In the end, our contribution was a poetic gesture. We imported coconuts from the Maldives — the official symbol of Maldivian life — and let them float down the Venetian canals. The catalogue read:
“A small, out-of-place element inserted into one sinking civilization from another, the coconuts serve as a reminder of both the resilience and fragility of nature.”
We had made it to the Venice Biennial, the pinnacle of the art world.
At the opening, critics and curators congratulated us for our work. We were sipping Bellinis in Renaissance palazzos with the world’s most famous artists and critics, the museum directors, the art dealers. But amidst all the ritzy festivities, I couldn’t get rid of a nagging feeling. What did floating coconuts have to do with touching people? What did champagne cocktails have to do with creating community and transformative encounters?
As we were congratulating our artists' friends, I couldn’t help noticing the people surrounding us. They wore designer clothes. Carried luxury bags and talked on the newest phones. Who were these people? An art writer helped me point them out. Over there was a tax-dodging financier with a big collection of paintings. Here was a famous contemporary art collector, rich from arms dealing. And over there, a money-laundering oligarch.
Let’s be honest: The art world has always been a place for the very rich and the very poor. I thought I knew that, but when I left the party, I stopped on the Venice quay. In front of me was a yacht so gigantic that it took up the view of the entire bay. I felt nauseous. Was this really how real positive change was being made?
For more than a decade, we had worked hard to reach the top of the art world to spread our ideas. Now that we were getting near the top, we were realizing it was time to move on. We thought we were spreading our ideas — but we were actually preaching to the choir. We thought we were making an impact on the real world — but we were actually playing around in the tiny out-of-touch ball pit of the art world.
Lesson Five: The Art World Echo Chamber
The art world claims to “call attention to” the most important issues of our time. Structural racism. Climate change. Baffling inequality. Extinction crisis. Tech-fuelled alienation. Gender-based oppression. But let’s be honest: what does the art world actually do to solve these problems?
Don’t get me wrong. There are thousands of artists, curators, art writers, collectors and art patrons who truly care about the issues plaguing our society. There are amazing art institutions that truly aspire to change society through art. But taken as a whole, the art world is an inward-looking place with little or no real interest in engaging with the outer world.
Why? Not because art professionals are elitist, arrogant snobs (although some certainly are). Rather, it’s a structural issue. The elitism, hypocrisy, and aloofness of the art world is an effect of how value is created in the arts.
Let’s back up a bit to understand the mechanics. How does a piece of art become valuable? If there is a high demand for it.
How do you create demand for your work as an artist? By exhibiting in important museums. By having writers and curators write and talk about your work. And, consequently, by having museums and important art collectors buy your work.
Unlike music, books, film or design, mass popularity is not important for visual artists. There is no Goodreads or IMDB for the visual arts. Very few people can afford to buy art. And even fewer sit on museum boards or write reviews for influential art publications. This means that the art world cares little about public opinion. What matters is the opinions of a few hundred writers, curators, museum board members, and collectors worldwide who are the tastemakers of the art world.
It is the opinions of this tiny group of people — and only their opinions — that will decide the value of an artist. Consequently, the art world cares little about engaging with society at large. And a lot about engaging with a few very wealthy or very influential people.
This deep-rooted disregard for non-tastemakers tends to rub off on people who spend prolonged time in the art world. The lives, problems, and world-views of people outside the art bubble — so-called normies — tend to blur, become something like a distant memory. And it doesn’t help that many people in the art world have attended the same few dozen elite colleges and share the same few dozens opinions.
Artists have to pay the rent too. And the structure of the visual arts means that many of the world’s most creative, versatile and groundbreaking minds get stuck inside an elitist closed-circuit. And end up spending their lives imagining what rich people want on their walls rather than how to upend the world.
It’s a sad little paradox. The art world is a conformist place founded on the premise of being avant-garde and revolutionary.
Lesson Six: Return to Start-up land
Ezra Pound said: “It takes six or eight years to get educated in one’s art, and another ten to get rid of that education.”
It didn’t take us a full decade, but it did take us a few years to realize that if we want to make a difference out in the real world, we had to quit our art careers and focus 100% of our energy on creating communities.
Finally, in 2017, we decided to dedicate all of our time to our homesharing community, Human Hotel. We had gone full-circle: we were back where we had started with Wooloo.org, launching a new start-up.
The transition back to start-up land was a wild ride. We were growing and learning at a break-neck pace. Technology was more powerful than ever. And this time around we even had a business plan!
We felt liberated, empowered. No longer were we dependent on the opinions of a few hundred tastemakers. The only opinions that mattered were those of the activists and creators who made up our community. Turned out that when we matched guests and hosts using the tricks and techniques we had learned over the past ten years — they loved it.
We’ve spent the past two years building a curated community from scratch.
It’s time to experiment with the real world
Looking back on our long and winding path, I see a journey full of adventures, detours, and lessons learned. But I also see a clear roadmap that any young creator, artist, or entrepreneur could successfully pursue. If I could do it all over again, I would still follow this plan:
1. Figure out what it is you want to change.
2. Experiment, innovate. Figure out how to “make it new”.
3. Use your skills and the results of your experiments to have a positive impact on people’s lives.
The art world has been kind and generous to us. We feel blessed for the wonderful people we have met. For the zany experiments, wild adventures and the lessons learned.
But if we want to get anywhere close to reaching some of the ambitious and idealistic goals we set out on as young kids — to maximize meaningful meetings among humans, to help to transform people's lives — we have to say goodbye to the art world. And focus our energy fully on the communities that make change happen in the real world.
W. H. Auden famously said: “Poetry makes nothing happen”. The same goes for visual art. It makes nothing happen — and that’s the beauty of it.
I’ll always be grateful for having had the chance to experiment in the art world. Now it’s time for us to experiment with the real world.
— Martin, co-founder Unio.social
