A different art world — Why I founded Artupia
This is my first post about this story that I am living, a story about an art project that I am working on together with other people and this will be (or maybe not, I really don’t know) the first post of a long story, at least I hope. Tons of such great people are involved in this story (in the last year I have met really awesome people) and post by post I would like to present them as they deserve to (I think I will not use complete names for privacy and just to be sure they are in the story but only who knows the whole story will know who they are, I think it could be funny).
Enjoy 😄
I am from Italy and I have always loved Silicon Valley, my dad one day told me that he had met some developers in Palo Alto during his ’80 journey and from that day on I decided to become a developer, I always admired my dad a lot and as I wasn’t good at school (I didn’t like so much Italian school) I decided I would demonstrate him that I was good at something, and that something was being one of that person that was doing this magical and so difficult thing called
«coding»
(of course it is not very difficult, anybody could learn it — but it is magical). After then a lot of projects have came in but, even if I wanted to be a developer, I was too young. After being stopped at school in Italy I decided to make a trip in the «heaven» of Technology, Silicon Valley. During the trip I had a great conversation with one of my friend about the art market and about how much artworks evaluation was unfair at that time (2014) so we decided to make an art market where everybody would be able to enjoy art at an absolutely fair price, for artists and users of course. We just decided to evaluate art through machine learning, the concept was simple: the more an user likes an artwork the more the artwork valuation increase or decrease in real time, this was the first concept. The problem was that we didn’t had any developer and being based in Italy was even more difficult because it is very difficult to find good developers in Italy. So I decided to start learning coding and after 3 years of development (troubles solved, more awesome people joining the team and many other things that I will explain maybe in further posts) here we are: Artupia was born 3 months ago (the name Artupia is Art (what the project is about of course) and Utopia (because for me was an Utopia to make it at the very beginning) mixed together).
I am now in Silicon Valley to, fundamentally, change the art world (or at least try to) (Yeah yeah I know this is a big task!). The curios part is that at the very first start I was not an art lover at all (actually I started the project to finally be able to go back to Silicon Valley even just one more time as I loved it so much and I loved the way art and technology were interacting — at the end I am a great tech lover) at all but while working on the project I started to love art because I think it is a great way to inspire people to do better everyday and to remind them exciting memories of their life.
One of these days I had a talk with R. a great person that together with his lovely wife A. is hosting me at their house for this one month trip and he told to me:
«You need to understand the why you are doing this thing, there must be a WHY, you are working 20 hours a day, there should be one, you just need to understand it»
and he made me a great example, he told me:
«So, you think that art is FOR EVERYONE right? What if a person that loves to hang out with his friends every night at the bar asked you why he should collect an artwork from artupia?»
At the very first moment I was a little bit in trouble because I knew I had the answer because I learned to coding and put so much efforts in this project because I wanted that everybody could be able to enjoy a great piece of art.
Then the answer came up:
«Imagine a situation where friends at the bar are viewing a football match together, whether their team is winning or losing it would be a very emotional moment that they are living together. Imagine now that there is an artist (that may have started to make art because of artupia) somewhere in the world that loves to hang out with his friends every night and one day he decides to craft a beautiful artwork that shows the evening when him and his «mates» watching the football match all together. I am sure that the first person would love to collect his artwork to remember that evening with his friends at the bar. I really think that art is for everyone not because everyone should love the great van Gogh artwork but because everyone has some emotions he cares about. Art is not about van Gogh, art is about seeing own experiences that reminds you great emotions in a piece of artwork and art is the only way, because a photo or a video will capture the moment but not the emotions, that is because the artwork is made by somebody that has experienced your very same feelings and you recognize that.»
Artupia is all about this, making possible for everyone to find artworks that reveals emotions in their self, that remind them great events in their life, that remind them loves in their life, parties in their life and the machine learning price is there because it allows a fair price for artworks, the more people that has made the same experiences loves an artist’s style, his artworks or the emotions he manage to craft his artwork the more the artist should be successful!
It’s that simple, it’s not art for everyone, it’s art for you (and for your «mates»)
Hope you enjoyed this first post!
