Medici is the Crowd | Art, democracy and crowd-funding

Molly Crabapple in Rhizome:

Galleries sell one-off objects at prices the majority of people can't afford. A fanbase means nil, if your fans can't spend thousands of dollars on something that isn't a computer or a car. Nothing of mine had even netted the price of a beat-up old Nissan.

Shell Game by Molly Crabapple

It's a problematic business model. While there's nothing wrong with a liquor store selling a thousand buck bottle of scotch, a prestigious gallery doesn't just position itself as a luxury vendor. They define what art is good, what gets reviewed, and what gets into museums.

If big, elaborate paintings (and reproductions thereof) are something that everyone can enjoy, why should the only people funding them be the rich collectors who can buy them outright? If the tastes of rich collectors dictate what sort of art gets made and acknowledged, isn't that pretty limiting for everyone?

Continuing...

We're living in a time where the structures around artistic endeavor are, for better or worse, mutating. Record labels, newspapers, publishing houses, and movie studios are collapsing like flan left in the heat. Yet in many ways, the art world has remained the same. This is because only a relatively small amount of people can afford to buy original art, and only a select few galleries have access to these people.

Banksy, the British street artist, says it best: "The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires."

What I wanted to figure out was a way to create work that was funded neither by rich collectors, nor by grant committees, nor by someone's supportive sugar daddy. I wanted to make giant, fancy, glittering art, paid for by small donors, all of whom, even if they couldn't afford the pieces I was making, got something of value in exchange. I wanted to make and fund art with the democracy and speed of the internet.

I decided to turn to the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, where I had done three other successful projects.

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