In conversation with Jason Bailey from Artnome
We’re incredibly excited to have an interview with Jason Bailey, the guy behind Artnome! Jason described himself as an art nerd building the world’s largest analytical database of known works across our most important artists. Think Zillow / Moneyball for art and artists.
Jason is mission driven to use technology and data to improve the world’s art historical record and to improve opportunities for artists from historically underserved or marginalized groups.
“I’m a bit of a black sheep, as I’m an artist who grew up in a family of engineers.”
1. To start off, tell us a little bit about yourself! Where do you come from and what is your academic and professional background?
I’m a bit of a black sheep, as I’m an artist who grew up in a family of engineers. Most the conversations in my house were about tech and engineering. This forced me to think about art differently than most people and it planted the seeds for projects like my Artnome analytical database.
I was heavily focused on art from a very young age and had enough paintings at age 16 to have my own art show in the local town gallery. I was not a great high school student, but my portfolio was strong enough to get me into college at Framingham State University where flourished academically, studying studio art and art history.
When I found myself in need of a job upon graduation in 2001, I discovered that technical folks really valued my ability to help them break down complex concepts into simple visuals. I’ve used this to my advantage for the last 20 years working in everything from accident reconstruction to design to marketing.
In 2007 I decided to go back to school for my MFA at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. For my thesis project, I teamed up with my classmate Dennis Ludvino to create software designed for collaborative drawing. It was cool, the software let people from around the globe draw on the same screen at the same time.
After graduate school, I kept up the pace of having long-term passion projects outside of work. This is what eventually led me to build the Artnome database and blog.
2. Explain what the Artnome project is about and why we need an analytical database of known artworks?
Artnome is the largest analytical database of complete works for the world’s most important artists. Availability of quality data on complete works of artists has not existed in a database form until now. As a result, we are researching in virgin territory and discovering data-driven insights into the world’s most essential artworks on a regular basis. We provide analytics-based research from our proprietary database that is built on facts culled from catalogue raisonné and public auction data. We are interested in partnering with forward-looking collectors and institutions interested in building the future of art analytics.
We need this database because the art market is notoriously opaque, and the result is a high percentage artwork on the market (15–20% conservatively) are thought to be forgeries or miss-attributed. By making the complete works more broadly accessible, new context emerges around what is unique about each individual work. More bluntly, counting and inventory are the simplest forms of analysis, and even Google falls short of telling us how many paintings our best-known artists created. This seems wrong considering many databases are telling us how many Beanie Babies there are or how many Pez dispensers exist. Once inventory is established, more sophisticated analytics that measurably point out what makes an artwork special, valuable, or rare can be developed.
3. According to you, what are the most and the least meaningful applications of the blockchain technology to the art market?
I would say there are three key benefits of applying blockchain to art.
First, the traditional art markets are currently not very transparent. This is in part because wealthy individuals are often not interested in sharing the details of their financial transactions. But there are also more nefarious things going on with laundering and forgery being a problem. As a result, the records of how many works our greatest artists have made and where the works reside is depressingly poor. There are even instances of people forging the actual provenance documentation itself. The hope is that having a list of tamperproof transactions on the blockchain will free up information about what art is being created, bought, and sold while protecting the privacy of the collectors. This is controversial because many believe the art market is fine just the way it is, primarily built on trust and relationships. Startups working on this include Codex Protocol, Artory, Verisart, and Art Chain. Whomever is able to blend trust and relationships with tech should be able to do well in this market.
Second, blockchain enables digital scarcity. The same things that allow you to treat Bitcoin as a currency, a system that guarantees a limited number of digital assets are issued, make it possible to buy, sell, and trade digital art as if it were physical art. This is huge for digital artists who have not really had a way to sell their work in the past. Lots of marketplaces are cropping up around this including Dada.nyc, SuperRare, KnownOrigin, Rare Art Labs, Archetype.mx, DigitalObjects, among others. Collecting digital art on the blockchain is still pretty bleeding edge, but I love the potential here, and I am very much a collector.
Third, fractional ownership. In the past, if you wanted to buy a Gerhard Richter painting, you had to put up tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars. That meant most blue-chip fine art was outside the reach of the average person. Several startups are now tokenizing blue-chip artworks for shared ownership. It is almost like treating an artwork like a stock and issuing certificates. Theoretically, this “democratizes” the collecting of the most valuable art, but there are questions around where the actual work resides. For example, Maecenas has a model where thousands of people can own micro shares in the same artwork. But they are still figuring out how to make it so that you can interact with the actual work.
To get around this, another company called Tend Swiss caps the shared ownership of tokenized works to less than 20. They look for investors/collectors that are all from the same region, and by keeping the number low than can actually offer the experience of interacting with the work itself. They do, however, limit how much people interact with the work because it is, first and foremost, an investment in their model.
Blockchain is of course not required for fractional ownership. Feral Horses understands that younger digital natives want to invest in art but feel like the traditional art world is not structured to allow them to participate. They also understand there is a huge need to support contemporary artists who do not currently have the patronage they need/want to focus on making their own work. Using fractional ownership, Feral Horses solves these two problems by reducing the cost of investing in art and expanding the number of people who can afford to support and invest in artists. They genuinely couple this model with an art rental service which means collectors can actually collect royalties from the work they have invested in.
Art is still centre stage in fractional ownership but the need to have the art in your home 24/7 for it to be meaningful is taking a back seat, especially for younger collectors. They are more comfortable with a shared economy and are drawn in more by the experience of collecting and supporting the artists than by worrying about if the art itself is in their possession at all times.
“Fast forward 25 years and I am spending all my free time and energy gathering and cleaning data on artists’ complete works. If that is not nerdy, I do not know what is!”
4. You describe yourself as being “nerdy”, where does your passion for art come from?
Oh, yeah — I am definitely an art nerd. I get my passion for art from my parents. We did not have a lot of money when I was really young, but my dad prioritized art lessons and going to art museums. I actually got in trouble with my parents when I was around 12 years old for cutting out photos of art from library books on M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali and hiding them in my room. That was perhaps an early sign that I would obsess over gathering information on art for analysis. Fast forward 25 years and I am spending all my free time and energy gathering and cleaning data on artists’ complete works. If that is not nerdy, I do not know what is!
I get very excited about strange combinations of interests (art + analytics, blockchain + art) that my friends and family don’t fully understand, but they are all very supportive; especially my wife Erin, who lets me fully pursue my interests even when many others think I’m a bit strange.
“Only a moron would believe that women are less capable of creating great art then men are — yet some studies show art by women sells for 47% less than work by men — Jason Bailey for @feralhorses” (Click to tweet this)
5. We know that it is always tricky to ask someone what their favourite artwork or artist is. But could you tell us about an artist or an artwork that you have recently discovered and that particularly moved you?
I love Bosch, Goya, Ensor, Duchamp, Hoch, Dix, Motherwell, Rothko, Bacon, Hesse — all the weirdos really.
If I had a larger art budget, I would be buying as much work by the great women artists as I could. I went on the record in my “2018 Predictions” saying the gender gap will close faster than many think. Only a moron would believe that women are less capable of creating great art then men are — yet some studies show art by women sells for 47% less than work by men. Given this imbalance, making smart investments in art could not be easier — simply buy art by women and wait for the world to come to its senses. Many people have warned me that the art market is very conservative and slow to react to shifts in social norms but the millennials won’t tolerate this nonsense. So at worst we have twenty years, I think it’s closer to five. Already seeing early signs with the recent popularity of Joan Mitchell at Art Basel.
I’d look at an artist like Ida Appelbroog. Last I checked her top-selling work at auction was less than $16k — that’s insanity. She won the McArthur “Genius Grant” and her work is in The Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and she had a retrospective at The Corcoran Museum of Art. If someone wants to start an art fund based on great works of art by women let me know, I’d love to be involved.
As a collector, my relatively small art budget forces me to be creative and identify artists with great potential that are very early in their careers. I find this a lot more fun than jumping on the bandwagon and trying to collect artists that are already “blessed” by the market. Right now I am excited about Robbie Barrett, a young artist just out of high school. His work is the first really compelling work I have seen done with AI (artificial intelligence). If AI and ML (machine learning) change our lives the way many predict, I think we will look back to Robbie’s work as the first really high-quality work from the genre. Following and collecting his work (on the blockchain of course) this early on in his career has been really fun. I also find him really compelling as an artist, I have faith that he will continue to put out really interesting art for many years to come. When I collect, I like to support artists whom I find compelling as people — it is as important, if not more important to me, than the work itself.
6. What’s the latest/coolest thing that you are working on at the moment?
I have two goals that I refer to collectively as my “true north.” They help keep me grounded and on track. My first goal is to improve the art historical record. I am doing this with the Artnome database. My second goal is to improve opportunities for emerging and underrepresented artists. I’ve tried to do this through collecting and writing about artists, but I’ve always wanted to do more. For that reason, I’m thrilled to be joining Dada.nyc as an official advisor. Dada.nyc has built a social platform where artists from around the globe draw together and extend each others’ drawings. Dada believes everyone can and should draw. I believe Dada has the tools, supportive audience, and marketplace to boost creativity on a global scale. There is a great need to provide a positive creative social platform to offset the toxic social media platforms we are currently saddled with. I also believe we have become unhealthy as supporters/appreciators of art by looking at artists and their work as simply “good” or “bad”. We are too concerned about our reputation as appreciators of art to support artists who are just starting out, but everyone needs to start somewhere. If we nurture artists of all abilities at all stages, I think we can engineer a spike in the number of great artworks and artists and trigger a renaissance. It may sound lofty, but that is exactly how I like my goals.
You can co-own all the artworks you love via Feral Horses.
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