Digital innovation at the Art Business Conference
The Art Business Conference was held in New York last month. The annual one-day event brought together art market professionals to discuss key issues and recent developments facing the global industry, from collecting and exhibiting to art law, insurance and cybersecurity.
Art, business and tech
I’m always interested to see how much — and in what light — digital innovation features at such events, as a rough indicator of the current direction and opinions of the art market.
At the Art Business Conference, touchpoints with new technology could be found throughout the sessions. For example, Devang Thakkar, VP of Consumer Marketplace at Artsy, and Magnus Resch, creator of the eponymous art identification app Magnus, offered a next-gen perspective to ‘The Future of Collecting’, as did Vastari’s CEO Bernadine Bröcker Wieder in a talk about opportunities for travelling exhibitions.
Significantly, the event’s end-of-day keynote speech was on machine learning and taste recognition. Jennifer Deason, Sotheby’s Head of Strategy & Corporate Development, drew on the success stories from other sectors (e.g. Spotify for music, Netflix for films, Amazon for consumer goods) and discussed how the technology can apply to the art market. While clearly a bit of a PR exercise (highlighting Sotheby’s recent acquisition of Thread Genius, an AI startup, and investment in a data science team), the visibility and profile of the platform is a sure statement of intent for the industry as a whole.
On transparency and democratisation
Themes of transparency and the ‘democratisation’ of buying, selling and collecting art are never far from discussions about innovating the art market, and the Art Business Conference was no different in this respect.
It’s difficult not to frame these topics in terms of two extreme positions: at one end, as the righteous toppling of out-dated and elitist institutions in art, and at the other, as a reckless erosion of what makes it all so premium and attractive to invest in the first place. Most helpful of course is a discussion somewhere in the middle, and to the credit of the conference, I think inviting speakers from organisations at different points along the spectrum signalled an aim for balance.
Take Artsy and Magnus in ‘The Future of Collecting’. While both companies can certainly be said to be innovating, they differ in market perception and support. Artsy is still very much an industry darling, so well-known for its $50m funding and strengthening partnerships with Sotheby’s, Christie’s and other prominent auction houses. In this light, I think those in the industry view it more readily as an example of ‘good’ innovation.
On the other hand, Magnus — described as the ‘Shazam of art’, offering not only the background of a work but also current and historical prices — apparently used questionable techniques in gathering data from individual galleries and sites like ArtFacts and Artsy to achieve its goals of transparency. It’s unsurprising then that many believe it holds the industry’s existing interests in lower regard, and so is approached more warily.
Looking ahead (sort of)
Overall, I think it’s very positive that so much conference time was given to digital innovation. It’s important to note though that even if the companies and presenters on display are largely embracing future change, the generally older demographics of the audience might have softened the wider impact (see Artnet reporter Tim Schneider’s observations on this here).
We’ll have another opportunity to assess the industry’s shifting landscape when the Art Business Conference comes to London on September 4th. You can find more details about the event here.
