The Pyramid of Power
In preparation for the official public release of the Infinite Industries, I decided to put together a few short essays that can speak to the contemporary art context. My hope is that the text below will both, introduce the new audiences to the contemporary art world and speak to the key issues of concern for the insider contingent.
The current economics of the contemporary art world lead to the creation of a pyramid that an artist has to climb over a period of his/her career. Currently, the most efficient path is from a top MFA program to a mega gallery — a commercial enterprise that leverages amazing amounts of prime urban showroom real estate and sets of connections within a close network of relationships with art buyers, into economic success. There are very few buyers who can afford artwork produced by the artists at the top of this pyramid because galleries have to limit access to the work and bring up prices, in order to make back the money they invested in real estate and social connection building.
Consequently, there are fewer and fewer people whose opinion of the artist’s work matters as the pyramid is being ascended. What is being said and heard is increasingly tighter managed in increasingly smaller circles. There are no economic incentives to popularize the ideas behind the artworks.
On the one hand, this is great because artists don’t need to win mass popularity contests, on the other, this breaks the interface with the larger cultural concerns and decreases the vitality of contemporary art output as a whole.
It is also important to note that galleries in the middle of this pyramid are under unrelenting financial pressure. They have to balance primary and, what we can call secondary i.e. art fair, real estate concerns with careful growth of artists’ reputation and corresponding prices.
Massive shift in commercial activity to online models (the word “disruption” gets tossed around a lot in this context) has already begun. A number of services have already sprung up with the mission of pushing the art world into the brave digital tomorrow. Most of them follow the tried-and-true startup recipe of taking an existing pattern and making it more efficient and scalable in an online context. I think this is not taking things far enough. At this point we can’t just put a digital costume on the old practices and call it a day. We need to create a new marketplace that reflects contemporary patterns of expanded art audience engagement.
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section. Check us out at Infinite Industries.
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