As we're discussing blogs and artists online, here's some recent stuff
from my blog, http://blog.ivanpope.com
In reverse order --
A Long Tail ecology
January 20, 2005 The Long Tail of Art
<http://blog.ivanpope.com/awol/the_long_tail_of_art/index.html>
Following my post on creating a Long Tail Web Ring (LTWR), I've had some
interesting, useful and enthusiastic feedback. I'm looking looking for
the first few members and then I'll go live.
But it seems important to look at more than a basic Long Tail. If I
understand the concept properly, there needs to be a complete ecology to
surround the Long Tail. An ecology for art in the 'real' world would
include artists, galleries, curators, magazines, writers, collectors,
art enthusiasts, art colleges, competitions, festivals. An ecology for
art online, an ecology that can sustain the Long Tail of art, must
contain these elements, even if they are not immediately recognisable.
To start with, the artists can generally be assumed to be present. The
enthusiasts are almost certainly present. The collectors are probably as
scarce as they are in the outside world - but that's something that
we're trying to solve. The glue that will pull this activity together
are the information parts, the magazines and writers who can cover the
art world. And in the ecology of online, there will be many variants on
magazines and many opportunities for writers. Blogs are an obvious
source of written information and anyone can blog. We can see artists
blogging and curators blogging and collectors blogging already. We
should see a lot more of the surrounding ecology blogging. For example,
where are the art education blogs, the gallery owner blogs, the bloggers
who have day jobs writing for art magazines? They may already exist, but
if they don't, they can't be far behind.
There is an exciting fundamental shift here, and it applies hugely to
the art world. Like any professional system, the art world polices
itself by a form of discourse control. That is, the language of the art
world is not designed for outsiders to engage with. It's not the hardest
or the stupidest thing going, but it can be very offputting. And art is
basically something that should not be offputting. When did you last
pick up an art magazine with joyful anticipation (unless you're in it,
of course). The cabal of the professional art world is happy for its
language to be obscure and difficult, because it creates barriers to
entry and keeps the profession well lubricated.
But at the end of the day, art exists because we want to make art. We
want to make it and consume it. We want to live in an ecology of art
that doesn't hold out the potential of huge wealth for the very few and
keep the masses in extreme poverty. At the same time, we want to keep
standards up. We accept that art is not an easy thing to do well, but we
think it should be easy to get access to. And anything that encourages
that access should be encouraged.
So, back to the Long Tail of art. The Long Tail of art should exist in
an ecology of art where everyone plays their part, where barriers are
not created to exclude, but are broken down to include. In my Long Tail
of art, the art is rigorous and exciting, and the people who are drawn
to that art are the ecology who surround and sustain it.
Long Tail Web Ring
January 19, 2005 The Long Tail of Art
<http://blog.ivanpope.com/awol/the_long_tail_of_art/index.html>
This Long Tail of Art thing has three parts:
1. Serious artists who are making some form of relatively inexpensive
work available over the Web
2. A loose network of these artists
3. A casual agreement to cross promote the network, and a desire to
create a value-space so that others can point people to the loose network.
The idea is that we will build up our sMedia Capital over the long term
and we will end up with a rollling income from selling work. sMedia
Capital is the traffic that accrues over time to an interesting site -
it takes a while for promotional work to embed itself within the
networks of interest, but once that promotion is embedded, it tends to
have a slow decay time.
The loose network is a casual arrangement to create valuable
destination(s) that are worth other building links to. So, anyone within
this loose network must offer something above and beyond the sale of
art. For this initial (experimental) project, I am creating a Web Ring
that I will control access to.
The Web Ring is called the Long Tail Web Ring (LTWR). It has some simple
rules that are in flux, i.e. they will evolve by discussion:
1. Members of the LTWR are active art producers who are selling some
form of work via the Web
2. Member sites of the LTWR offer some online value beyond the selling
of work, e.g. an art blog, personal art site, archive etc, whatever
3. Members of the LTWR agree to cross promote the LTWR to others. This
is informal, i.e. mention it, link to it, point to it, put it in your
email sig
4. Members agree to place the LTWR webring buttons ABOVE THE FOLD on the
front page of their web site. This means it is visible on when someone
arrives at the site. Members are encouraged to put the links on every
page, but hey, no pressure.
That's it for now. The LTWR is an experiment. I'm interested in what
sort of work people will offer within LTWR. I don't expect it to be huge
oil paintings, but I've got no real view of what will work and what
won't. I'm doing digital prints and signing them, but anything from
drawings to sound files to conceptual work should be fine. Try me.
As my contribution to my research into the Long Tail of Art (here,
passim), I decided to sell prints from my work at a flat rate $50 per
print (plus postage). I didn't want to do anything complicated, but I
thought I had an obligation to start my ball rolling. I'm using
Flickr.com to show all my images and I've made a group called $50
<http://flickr.com/photos/ivan/sets/87912/> prints where I'm putting all
the available work More about how this will work soon.
I'm going to put up a page about the LTWR and make some link buttons
etc. As soon as I've got two more members I'll open up the ring and we
can take it from there.
Long Tail Artists experiment
January 11, 2005 What Envelops Me
<http://blog.ivanpope.com/awol/what_envelops_me/index.html>
After writing about the potential for looking at the Long Tail of art, I
did some more thinking about whether in fact anyone was working on that
LT already. It seemed fairly obvious that, the LT phrase apart, it had
long ago occured to people that the web and the internet made good
partners for artists.
Actually, when I was an art student and I discovered the networks back
in 1988, the first thing I thougt was that the networks would
revolutionise the relationships artists had with the world. I went on to
run a project called UK ArtNet in 1991. This was before anyone really
had internat access, so it was a bulletin board project, but the basic
idea was that the networking, sharing and discovery aspects of
networking would benefit artists hugely.
Of course, I was soon disabused of this notion in the real world.
Artists turned out to be largely self serving and uninterested in
computer technology. I did a lot of other network, business and art
projects over the years, but gave up on any idea of getting artists to
network to their own advantage.
Even when I started this blog well over a year ago, there were hardly
any serious artists blogging - or if they were they were so isolated
that it was impossible to find them. However, alongside the massive
growth of blogging has come a huge increase in the number of serious
artists blogging, for all manner of reasons. So now a proto-community of
interest, a starting Very Large Conversation (VLC), is getting underway.
The ground has been prepared.
There are of course a lot of other artists and art resources on the
internet now. There are many mailing lists that appeal to artists,
though there seem to be very few that address visual artists just making
art and getting on with their art lives. I always assumed that artists
would want to network, but they seem very resistant to it. Maybe artists
like to talk about wha they do and think, but they don't want to get
into a two way conversation about it. At the same time, a lot of artist
resource web sites and mailing lists do exist - this seems to reinforce
my impression that artists are keen for support and resources, but not
keen on two way conversations.
So, I thought I'd take these observations and make an experiment. I'm
going to create a webring of artists who are a)fairly committed to
blogging and b)who are prepared to sell some form of art via the web.
I'm going to be very selective about who gets into the ring. I don't
want to be democratic or open for this experiment. What I'm going to try
to do is create a resource that is high quality, persistent and that can
acquire a huge amount of what I will call Social Media Capital or
'sMedia Capital'.
It's clear that the longer an interesting resource stays online and
updated, the more people will come to know about it, tell others about
it, link to it and visit it. This can be a slow process to start, but it
is the basis of new marketing. As more people link, more people know
about the resource, and the virtuous circle is reinforced. The resource
becomes part of a Very Large Conversation. That's part one of the process.
The second part concerns the Long Tail. If the resource is that of a set
of artists who all have an accumulated backlog of work that is available
for sale, then the Long Tail effect will ensure that a market develops
for this work. So the artists who are persistent, part of the VLC, who
have a Long Tail and who accumulate sMedia Capital, will benefit. They
may even make it into the ranks of the new Pro-Ams, the professional
amateurs who earn decently from their work.
Now, I know a lot of this may be contentious (or even meaningless) to a
lot of artists. But, as I said, it's an experiment. It's as much an
experiment in sMedia and associated concepts as in art and artists. I
know that a lot of this will be anathema to artists, but I have a whole
book on this subject called 'Why Artists are Poor'. And I think it's
time to cast some of the modernist cant out of our systems, stop
dreaming of existence in the white cubes of the artworld and build an
alternative system that benefits the creators as much as the patrons.
More on this experiment here later.
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The 'Long Tail' of Contemporary Art
January 10, 2005 What Envelops Me
<http://blog.ivanpope.com/awol/what_envelops_me/index.html>
The concept of the 'Long Tail' (LT) has suddenly become commonplace
across the networks. The Long Tail can be simplistically described as
the mass of product that is suddenly available to the mass of consumers
due to the effect of computer power and computer networks. For example,
in music it used to be almost impossible for musicians and bands who
didn't have contracts with major record labels to get their albums made
and distributed. Now, the combination of access to cheap reproduction
technology (including no-cost download systems), distribution via
networks, online payment systems and, crucially, an efficient word of
mouth recommendation structure, more and more 'unknown' music is selling
to more and more consumers. Record companies shriek that they are being
ripped off, when it is more likely that consumers have gone elsewhere to
find music that really appeals to them.
As we become more and more confident with the networks and we learn to
use tools, such as blogs and their associated management systems, that
give us constant interaction, the Long Tail of almost any area becomes
evident and valuable. There is also an element of trust and belief. The
first wave of recommendation sites were almost universally distrusted.
Why would you believe someone who had a vested interest in recommending
things?
Now we've all moved on. We have gotten to know how networks of sites
work, and to recognise authority, even without using tools such as
Technorati <http://www.technorati.com/>. Chris Anderson at The Long Tail
<http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/recommendations.html>
on how Blogs are becoming key players in the LT recommendation game.
/Blogs are shaping up to be an equally powerful source of influential
recommendations. There are independent enthusiast sites such as PVRblog
and Horticultural (an organic gardening blog), commercial blogs such as
Gizmodo and Joystiq, and then the random recommendations of whichever
blogger you happen to read for any reason (there does seem to be a
natural connection between mavens, who know a lot and like to share
their knowledge, and blogging). What they may lack in polish and scope,
they more than make up in credibility: their readers know that there is
a real person there that they can trust./
So the Long Tail is when massive inventory can be made available to the
mass of consumers at minimal additional cost or effort. It's about
routing around bottlenecks and opening up supply to meet the demand.
Most industries have some form of artificial bottleneck, created over
time by the industry itself, the better to manage and assure profit. The
art world is notorious for this, from the creation and support of a
'superstar' system, to management of access to magazines, galleries, art
schools, agents, curators, museums, public venues and auction houses.
The glamorous world of contemporary art, with its round of international
festivals, prizes, exhibitions, collectors and top galleries, carries a
huge Long Tail. For every artist who makes a living through the gallery
system, there are hundreds or even thousands who carry on making art
alongside other ways of making a living.
Historically this Long Tail of art either suffered in silence or
attempted to make some return on their investment by selling through
local galleries. However, local galleries, by their very nature, will
never reach a sizable potential customer base. And a global customer
base which must by definition be fairly huge, can never find the artists
that move them and in whose work they may want to invest. Thus, a
classic Long Tail exists, swinging behind the small body that is
contemorary art.
It's not really that all the artists who currently struggle with a day
job or a teaching job and who make art on the side, who still dream of
'making it', will suddenly be able to quit their jobs and move full time
into the studio. It's that there exists a huge Long Tail of art and
artists, and there are countless opportunities to start to convert this
tail into sales, into collectors. A support system for the contemporary
art Long Tail is building by the week.
Since I have been blogging my art regularly I have noticed a lot more
artist blogs arriving on a regular basis. The more artists that blog,
the more regular reading there is for the non-artist public. The more
popular blogs are, the more likely people are to read artists blogs. The
more artists and curators and gallery workers and museum staff and
writers and teachers blog, the more power the movement will have against
the usual art press. No Artforum can cover more than a tiny subset of
the global exhibition scene. This have historically given them vast
power, a power that is guarded and welcomed by the equally bottlenecked
gallery system.
A global system of public writing about local art scenes, multiple
reports of high end art events, individual artists, collectors and
general public all blogging away, will create an alternative ecosystem
to the established art industry. This has obviously been happening for
years to some degree, with online galleries, individual sales sites and
collective endeavours springing up. But the critical underpinnings of
these endeavours has not been there - and it is hard for consumers to
find, let alone believe in, these outlets without a thriving media that
is intimately related to and interested in these projects.
Now we can see that the combination of blogging and online galleries may
give rise to a new ecosystem of art. The Long Tail of art may be about
to be exposed.
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