Genetic Drift: Artsy and the Future Of

João Enxuto and Erica Love Changing the world has long been a Silicon Valley directive, repeated by countless venture capitalists, CTOs, and developers, with usage roots pos- sibly reaching back to some 1970s Mountain View garage-cum-laboratory Genetic Drift: littered with circuit boards and dog-eared copies of Atlas Shrugged. The mantra appeared again in the closing passage of “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” Artsy and the Future of Art a free-verse poem at the center of a 1997 advertising campaign that mar- shaled Apple’s comeback:

Pandora 1 meets Amazon 2 for the artworld. That’s the entire elevator pitch Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemak- for Artsy, which leaves us with plenty of time to spare. When the elevator ers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things doors finally open onto the twenty-fifth floor of the Artsy headquarters, it differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect is clear that the pitch was a success. A black ping-pong table, scattered for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glo- mid-century couches, and a long, gleaming communal table lead to an open rify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. floor plan. The rare standing wall is glass and frames offices that convey Because they change things. … Because the people who are crazy transparency. The largest area is dedicated to a few dozen staffers who sit enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. across multiple rows—each young face glowing from the LEDs of Apple flat panel displays. They are the labor force behind the startup that aims to Changing the world also requires outpacing the competition. For Artsy this centralize art collecting and education under a single taxonomy called the will mean claiming status as the primary Internet portal between a collec- Art Genome Project. tor and art. Recent history has proven that the network effects and power laws that rule the Internet can foster diversity, but ultimately the tendency The Artsy offices are perched in a pre-war tower on Broadway in Low- has been toward the creation of monopolies. The “old inequities that we er Manhattan over mostly low-slung tenements and cast-iron buildings. hoped the Internet would overthrow are often intensified,” explains film- There are commanding views from windows that frame a panorama of the maker and writer Astra Taylor in her recent book, The People’s Platform: Metropolis. This vista seems extravagant for a company that operates as Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. 5 As Taylor points out, we a data-driven Internet platform, where eyeballs are locked on computer have “one leading search engine (Google), one major bookstore (Amazon), screens at all times. On its website, Artsy is described as “an online plat- one predominant market (eBay).”6 Could a single player also emerge to form for discovering, learning about, and collecting art.”3 We visited in dominate the online market for fine art? early August, for a Friday evening happy hour dedicated to recent college graduates. It was a party to facilitate networking among Millennials Artsy was launched in October 2012, and has since cataloged nearly 200,000 interested in art, technology, free beer, and job prospects. In many of its artworks by 25,000 artists represented by galleries, museums, auctions, and job postings, the company proclaims that it wants “to change the world.”4 art fairs.7 That’s an impressive haul for a startup working in a crowded By the end of that Friday evening, chances are that a few idealistic candi- market to solve how to most effectively monetize art on the Internet. In dates were swept up in the exuberance. April 2014, investors poured $18.5 million in capital to help distinguish Artsy from Google Art Project, Artstor, Artnet, Artspace, Artstar, Paddle8, Contemporary Art Daily, Mutual Art, Christie’s LIVE, and Sotheby’s.8 Each of these platforms (which include for- and not-for-profits) provides one or more service that overlaps with what is currently available through Artsy.

1. Artsy “aims to do for is-succeeding-in-putting-the- 5. Astra Taylor, The People’s of Artsy and .art,” Rhizome 8. A partnership between visual art what Pandora did for art-world-online. The article Platform: Taking Back Power (June 11, 2013), accessed July Sotheby’s and eBay was music.” Melina Ryzik, “Online, begins with a quote by Carter and Culture in the Digital Age 10, 2014, http://rhizome.org/ recently announced. This will a Genome Project for the World Cleveland: “Eventually we’re (New York: Metropolitan Books, editorial/2013/jun/11/internet- connect eBay’s 145 million of Art,” The New York Times, going to become Amazon for 2014), 122. real-estate-art-and-power- customers with instant bidding October 8, 2012, accessed July the art world.” 6. Ibid. cases-artsy-and/; and George access to Sotheby’s auctions. 22, 2014, http://www.nytimes. 3. “About Artsy,” Art.sy, Inc., 7. Artsy launched as Art.sy to Pendle, “What’s in a Name? See Carol Vogel and Mike com/2012/10/09/arts/design/ accessed August 16, 2014, the public on October 8, 2012. Art.sy, the much-hyped online Isaac, “A Warhol with Your artsy-is-mapping-the-world-of- https://artsy.net/about. They had registered the Syrian startup, has a Syrian domain Moose Head? Sotheby’s Teams art-on-the-web. 4. “Jobs at Artsy,” Art.sy, Inc., country-code domain (.sy) as name. Could it be violating U.S. with eBay,” New York Times, 2. Natalie Robehmed, “Why accessed May 12, 2014, https:// a means of creative branding sanctions?” Slate (August 13, July 14, 2014, accessed July Artsy Is Succeeding in Putting artsy.net/job/product-designer, in 2009. They migrated to 2012), accessed July 9, 2014, 14, 2014, http://www.nytimes. the Art World Online,” Forbes https://artsy.net/job/developer, Artsy.net in January 2013 due http://www.slate.com/articles/ com/2014/07/14/arts/design/ (September 6, 2013), accessed https://artsy.net/job/mobile- to the Syrian civil war. This technology/foreigners/2012/08/ with-ebay-partnership-sothe- July 22, 2014, http://www. engineer, https://artsy.net/job/ is discussed in detail by both art_sy_s_syrian_domain_ bys-extends-potential-reach-by- forbes.com/sites/natalierobe- devops-engineer. Orit Gat, “Internet Real Estate, name_could_the_company_be_ 145-million. hmed/2013/09/06/why-artsy- Art and Power: The Cases violating_u_s_sanctions_.html.

42 43 45 Above: Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Self-portrait from the Shelton Hotel Looking East, New York, 2005. Gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 inches. Edition of 25. Courtesy of Robert Klein Gallery. Screenshot, Artsy.net, August 8, 2014. Previous spread: João Enxuto and Erica Love, Artsy Office, New York, NY (8/13/14, 6:18:20 PM), 2014, photograph. Courtesy of the artists. The Artsy headquarters in New York is a hub for art specialists and In the matter of a few years, Evgeny Morozov has emerged as the most gallery liaisons in Los Angeles, London, Munich, Berlin, and Hong Kong, a prolific and acerbic critic of Silicon Valley utopianism, which he argues total of seventy employees worldwide. From its roost high above Broadway, corrupts notions of democracy with an “endless glorification of disrup- it is possible to survey the local datascape of confreres and competitors. tion and efficiency.”13 Morozov contends that the new technocrats apply Paddle8 is a mile to the north on Cooper Square. A few blocks east from what he calls “solutionism,” the use of algorithmic regulation to address there is Artnet. A pit stop at NEW INC, the New Museum’s technology the effects of political problems, such as income inequality and national incubator, is a minor detour on a stroll that concludes at Artspace, situated security, without an understanding of underlying causes. on the southern tip of the island. In fact, it is possible to walk the art world’s own “Silicon Alley” without ever venturing north of 14th Street. In keeping with Morozov’s analysis, a significant margin of error and some degree of skepticism should be brought to any forecast of art market trends From the Artsy office windows one can register a broad expanse of ur- linked to the Internet. The art business is the largest unregulated mar- ban topography marked over time by a sequence of industries, not least ket in the world. Wealth distribution is very unbalanced, even among its of which was the visual art sector that drove the repurposing of the post- stakeholders. There are a small number of dominant galleries, collectors, industrial city and prepared it for gentrification.9 The east-facing view is of and auction houses, then there is everyone else. The art market is less a the disorderly patchwork of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Further monopoly than an oligarchy. And a significant part of that inner circle has still, beyond the bridges and rising waterfront condominiums, are the for- put its faith in Artsy. Additionally, a link from Artsy to Silicon Valley has mer and current artist enclaves of Williamsburg and Bushwick. The view been engineered through the financing of PayPal co-founder and venture encompasses the homes, studios, and home/studios of thousands of artists capitalist Peter Thiel, Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy, Twitter co-founder Jack (including us) who are the base for art production in the metropolis10—the Dorsey, and Google Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt, first step in a supply chain. among others.14

A Google web search of “Internet art sales” produces dozens of results that seem to confirm the increasing success of online art commerce. For Origins instance, a Reuters article from April 2014 claims that the fine art market online was expected to more than double to $3.76 billion in the next five Hatched in the Ivy League dorm room of its future CEO Carter Cleveland, years.11 These projections were sourced from a British company that sells the origin story for Artsy echoes that of many technology startups. The insurance for luxury commodities. A few weeks later The New York Times then-Princeton computer science student recounted his “Aha!” moment for had similar news to report with “Art Makes a Move Online.” This time Forbes magazine: “I assumed there would be a website with all the world’s the data came from the European Fine Art Foundation, which runs an art, art on it,” he admitted.15 Cleveland searched for a picture to decorate his antiques, and design fair in the Netherlands and recently launched a dorm room, but an “everything store” for art didn’t yet exist. This struggle mobile app. They reported that online sales of art in 2013 represented only exposed a problem to be solved. In this etiology, the art poster was a pre- 5 percent of the $65.9 billion in global sales, but projected an increase of cursor to the Internet, in its potential to democratize the world’s art. The roughly 25 percent each year for the next few years.12 In both cases, the art poster also carries symbolic currency in the coming-of-age story of art Internet foreshadowed its success with young people and first-time art dealer Larry Gagosian, who became an Artsy investor in 2010. It is often buyers willing to part with thousands of dollars on the promise of a JPEG. repeated that Gagosian got his start in the art business by selling posters on a sidewalk near the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles.16 The rise of the Internet and screen as the apparatus of image circulation has undoubtedly produced qualitative shifts in the art object as it moves Cleveland’s father David is a novelist and art historian credited with a re- through emerging networks. Changes in the reception and distribution of cent history of American Tonalism. His mother works in finance. In total, visual art has and will continue to offer rich material for contemporary art Cleveland’s biography reads like the expression of an algorithm, a perfect historians. What is most pressing are the political stakes in this moment of set of traits that result in a CEO archetype for a company that synthesizes technological rupture and realignment of power. technology, art, and commerce. Besides Gagosian and the elder Cleveland, the company is advised by Marc Glimcher, president of The Pace Gallery, and the esteemed John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.17 9. Martha Rosler, “Culture 17, 2014, http://censusreport. 12. Scott Reyburn, “Art Makes Class: Art, Creativity, Urban- bfamfaphd.com/rentburden. a Move Online,” The New York ism, Part I,” e-flux Journal 21 11. Michael Roddy, “Online Times, May 18, 2014, accessed 13. Evgeny Morozov, “The 15. Susan Adams and 16. Negar Azimi, “Larry 17. “Artsy Team,” Art.sy, Inc., (December 2010), accessed Art Sales to Grow Fast, Global July 12, 2014, http://www. Rise of Data and the Death of Hannah Elliott, “30 under 30: Gagosian with Negar Azimi,” accessed August 16, 2014, August 14 2014, http://www.e- Study Finds,” Reuters (April 28, nytimes.com/2014/05/19/arts/ Politics,” The Observer, July Art & Style,” Forbes (January Bidoun 28 (Spring 2013), ac- https://artsy.net/about/team. flux.com/journal/culture-class- 2014), accessed August 9, 2014, international/Art-Makes-a- 19, 2014. 6, 2014), accessed August cessed August 10, 2014, http:// art-creativity-urbanism-part-i. http://www.reuters.com/arti- Move-Online. 14. “Artsy Team,” Art.sy, Inc., 12, 2014, http://www.forbes. www.bidoun.org/magazine/28- 10. “Exploring Rent Burden,” cle/2014/04/28/us-art-internet- accessed August 16, 2014, com/special-report/2014/30- interviews/larry-gagosian-with- BFAMFAPhD, accessed August idUSKBN0DE0RC20140428. https://artsy.net/about/team. under-30/art-and-style.html. negar-azimi.

48 49 Mechanisms

When Artsy was launched it sought revenues from galleries through a com- mission model. Ranging between one and six percent of total sales, galleries were trusted to pay Artsy under an honor system for each sale made to a collector who had first encountered work on the Artsy website. A year later this format was abandoned and Artsy transitioned to a subscription-based payment model. Galleries that are accepted to the Artsy platform now pay a monthly subscription fee, which can range from around $400 to $1,400 a month.18 Included in a subscription is a set of marketing and sales features such as a gallery profile page, unlimited artwork listings, and the promo- tion of exhibitions and art fair participation. Artsy will do “targeted email campaigns to users who ‘Follow’ the gallery’s artists,” and, notably, “Artsy also broadens the potential audience for its gallery partners through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).”19 Unlimited artwork listings and SEO mean that subscribing galleries will have more of their artwork at the top of every search.

This all adds up to a fairly straightforward business model, but it produces incommensurable search results, caught between established art historical criteria and subscription fee levels. These impartial results favor an uneven taxonomy of artworks valorized by select “real world” institutions. And since Artsy only partners with art institutions, an unaffiliated artist can only gain visibility through established channels. As a result, there is little chance to discover an unrecognized, emerging artist.

On its website, Artsy highlights its “Education” section as a set of tools for educators and students.20 For instance, if we follow advice posted for teach- ers and browse tendencies in contemporary photography, the delivered thumbnails are arranged from top to bottom with the likes of Robert Paul Kothe, Bernhard Handick, and Michael Dweck. It isn’t until six or seven rows down that the survey course staples begin to emerge, with a couple of Sally Manns, three Thomas Ruff typological portraits, and some tasteful Mapplethorpes, before the listings begin to degrade again. A photography survey can be filtered out of this muddle, but not without some effort. The vertical scroll of images is in service to more than one demand: A sale al- ways goes down better with a dash of edifying content.

The centerpiece of Artsy’s taxonomy is the ambitiously titled Art Genome Project. It is a database of contemporary and historical work presented as an array of thumbnail images searchable through a web browser. On the back end, the labor of the Genome Project is carried out by a team of full- time and freelance art historians and artists. They are hired to add assigned terms (an average of twenty-five) for each artist and artwork.

18. Museums and other non- 20. According to the Artsy for High School and College,” profit institutions do not pay website, “With high-res, down- Art.sy, Inc., accessed August anything to be on the platform. loadable images of iconic 24, 2014, https://artsy.net/post/ 19. “Partnering with Artsy,” works of art, as well as rich artsyed-classroom-tools-for- Art.sy, Inc., accessed August editorial content, Artsy is your high-school-and-college. 16, 2014, https://artsy.net/ educational gateway to the João Enxuto and Erica Love, Artsy Office, New York, NY (8/13/14, 7:03:19 PM), 2014, photograph. about/partnering-with-artsy. world of art.” “Classroom Tools Courtesy of the artists.

50 João Enxuto and Erica Love, Artsy Office, New York, NY (8/13/14, 6:49:55 PM), 2014, photograph. João Enxuto and Erica Love, Artsy Office, New York, NY (8/13/14, 6:56:30 PM), 2014, photograph. Courtesy of the artists. Courtesy of the artists. In a rhetorical twist, Artsy mutated genome into the verb genoming. While science has mapped and sequenced the DNA of living organisms, Artsy has inverted this process by overlaying dominant traits on a palimpsest of JPEG files collected from art history. How might artworks be distilled to a set of recognizable traits without being conceived as anything other than essentialized? According to the Artsy website, the Genome provides com- plexity beyond conventional, non-hierarchical metadata tags. There are over 1,000 genes in fourteen different categories, such as “art-historical move- ments,” “art mediums,” and “contemporary tendencies.”21 Unlike tagging, these terms are weighted according to relevance on a scale of 1 to 100.22 For example, a picture such as Alfredo Jaar’s Gold in the Morning (1985), which features a rocky landscape with many figures, might be assigned a value of 50 for portrait and 50 for landscape. These numbers saturate each image with metadata. With over 1,000 genes to choose from, how might the sum of the terms “Violence,” “Political,” “Architecture,” “Focus on the So- cial Margins,” “Installation,” “Art of the 1990s,” “Globalization,” “War and Military,” and “Film/Video” come to represent the work of an artist like Alfredo Jaar? And how is it that “Photography” is conspicuously absent from this lexicon? 23 It is a missing gene that might call the entire Genome into question. The Art Genome Project is a process of reinscription that, like all social distinctions, relies on historically constructed traits. In his linguistic study of the origins of the word data, Daniel Rosenberg found that “today, when we speak of data, we make no assumptions at all about veracity. Elec- tronic data, like the data of the early modern period, is given.” Rosenberg proposes, “The data we collect and transmit has no relation to truth and reality whatsoever beyond the reality that data helps us to construct.”24

Natural Selection

Just as there are districts of artists fighting for daylight in the Hunger Games of art-market validation, there are also legions of underemployed art historians and academics seeking gainful employment. Currently, nine genomers are working at Artsy to attach metadata to art and artists. All have a background in art history and/or library science. Many have advanced degrees. The most recent hires are freelancers who are required to work remotely on three-month contracts, with the potential for renewal. Training consists of a one-and-a-half-day genoming intensive at Artsy Headquarters. If hired, genomers are asked to work a minimum of eight hours a week.25

The Genome is described on the Artsy website as “the product of a dia- logue, the process of a very large collaboration, the collecting of information which is already out there, rather than a vocabulary we just ‘invented.’”26 If the Art Genome consists of “what’s already out there” in an art historical canon, then it stands to reason that it can be completed, to be occasionally

21. Matthew Israel, “What Is Art.sy, Inc., accessed August 24. Daniel Rosenberg, https://artsy.net/job/genome- the Art Genome Project?” 16, 2014, https://artsy.net/ “Data Before the Fact,” in “Raw contributor. Art.sy, Inc., accessed August theartgenomeproject. Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa 26. Isreal, “What Is the Art 16, 2014, https://artsy.net/post/ 23. “Alfredo Jaar,” Art.sy, Gitelman (Cambridge: MIT Genome Project?” theartgenomeproject-what-is- Inc., accessed August 16, Press, 2013), 37. the-art-genome-project-1. 2014, https://artsy.net/artist/ 25. “Jobs at Artsy,” Art.sy, Courtesy Artsy.net. 22. “The Art Genome Project,” alfredo-jaar. Inc., accessed May 12, 2014,

55 31 updated as new data emerges. Once entire art historical periods are cataloged, Genetic Drift this form of human labor will be de-valorized. When art historians submit to the wage labor of search engine optimization, they are participating in the The exponential growth of data and information technologies has shaped process of their own obsolescence. Eventually, with enough data, the entire our current moment. Like most relational databases, Artsy’s Art Genome Genome might become automated through cloud-based computation. provides seemingly infinite possibilities for the reconfiguration of data. A database also conveys a sense of mastery, and as the user navigates it she In a similar vein, Jaron Lanier describes how the translation of a passage can imagine herself as central to its view. Yet when searching the Art Ge- by Google does not magically emerge out of a cloud but rather is correlated nome, the user has only a partial view of art history. “Database and narra- from previous translations across the Internet. Importantly, Lanier points tive are natural enemies,” asserts Lev Manovich. “Competing for the same out that “the human translators are anonymous and off the books. The act territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make mean- of cloud-based translation shrinks the economy by pretending the transla- ing out of the world.”32 The parts of history that are by nature messy and tors who provided the examples don’t exist. With each so-called automatic contingent cannot be represented in databases. How does this square with translation, the humans who were the sources of the data are inched away Artsy’s stated intent to have the database educate? Matthew Israel, an art from the world of compensation and employment.”27 As Internet technolo- historian, became the head of the Art Genome division shortly after earn- gies have dismantled and distributed power, they have also extended power ing a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.33 During a by obscuring it. conversation via Skype, he compared the applicability of Artsy’s Genome Project to that of an art history survey course. “You need to give people a Artsy also pays freelance writers for reports that often translate the deter- road map,” he said. He continued with a version of Art Genome orthodoxy: ritorialized and fragmented structure of the larger global art market into “It lowers entry barriers by providing greater opportunities to catalyze an narrative form. Artsy’s editorial content identifies global art market trends art experience.”34 However, the idea that databases are in the service of his- from sites like art fairs and biennials. These dispatches can sometimes tory is a prevalent misconception. Rather, databases consist of algorithms carry the incongruity that comes with corralling heterogenous artworks that produce the most efficiently ordered dataset based on the tagging and in a single space. One example is a report by Stanislava Chyzhykova, weighting of the user’s query. As the writer Mike Pepi explains, “Informa- a sales associate at Artsy, on the Miart art fair in Milan. “Gold in the tion stored in a database is not designed to conjure, remind, or look back Morning (09) by Alfredo Jaar has a very abstract and tactile quality,” she in retrospect. On the contrary, these data exist to power an application.” writes. “Although figurative, visually it pairs well with the predominantly Databases are designed for “optimal end-user performance, not, as it were, abstract landscape of the fair.”28 Jaar’s photograph of the Serra Pelada mine, some higher calling to organize information as an abstract service of his- which was hand-dug by self-employed Brazilian miners, makes backbreak- torical memory.”35 ing labor visible. This is in stark contrast to digital labor, which ventures such as Artsy render invisible. Perhaps this is why Chyzhykova articulates the display of labor power as a formal property, mirroring the unrecognized Heredity and unremunerated labor that drives the digital economy.29 In one of many impious asides in Capital, Karl Marx relates the common perception of Ultimately, Artsy follows traditional models of the art market by repli- primitive accumulation as playing approximately the same role in politi- cating its existing hierarchies, performing the function of an art advisor cal economics as original sin does in theology. The industrial potentates who connects collectors with galleries. The high valuation and interest in of Marx’s time were the direct beneficiaries of epoch-making revolutions, Artsy can lead one to speculate that the value of the site may not lie in its leveraging those moments “when great masses of men are suddenly and gallery subscriptions. The Art Genome Project is at the core of Artsy’s forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour business and its primary asset. Its algorithm could exist separately from market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”30 This was the case the Artsy platform, justifying the significant resources, both financial for the feudal serf, and it parallels the upheavals faced by the creative class and human, that have been allocated to its development. As is often cited, in this most recent digital “revolution.” Pandora’s Music Genome was the inspiration and precursor to the Art Genome. Recently, Pandora was hired by Universal Pictures to advertise its upcom- ing film,Get On Up, the new James Brown biopic. Pandora inverted its

27. Jaron Lanier, Who Owns collection of essays edited by the Future? (New York: Simon & Trebor Scholz, Digital Labor: 31. The scientific termgenetic 33. Ryzik, “Online, a Genome word that we were surprised Schuster, 2012), 19–20. The Internet as Playground and drift refers to the change in the Project for the World of Art.” Israel did not utter was 28. Stanislava Chyzhykova, Factory (London: Routledge, frequency of a gene variant in 34. We noted Israel’s use of “algorithm.” “My Miart 2014 Highlights,” 2012). a population due to random the transitive verb “catalyze” 35. Mike Pepi, “Is a Museum Art.sy, Inc., accessed August 30. Karl Marx, Capital, sampling. This will result in the and tagged it, along with a Database?: Institutional 16, 2014, https://artsy.net/post/ Volume 1: A Critique of Political loss of genetic variation. “genoming,” under the category Conditions in Net Utopia,” stanislava-chyzhykova-my- Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes 32. Lev Manovich, Language “science analogies.” The Artsy manuscript pending publica- miart-2014-highlights. (London: Penguin Books, 1992, of New Media (Cambridge: MIT lexicon moves to positivism: tion, 2014, 3–4. 29. See, for example, the [1867]), 876. Press, 2001), 225. To genome is to know. The one

56 57 Music Genome to locate listeners whose musical tastes shared traits and attributes to James Brown’s music. According to their press release, Pandora “hyper-targeted the listeners with innovative ad banners that dynamically surface insights from the genome in a way that is directly and immediately relevant to the listener. Listen to Bruno Mars and you’ll discover that [sic ] the R&B connection between him and James Brown.”36 The campaign allowed Universal to reach a wider audience beyond identified James Brown fans. It is conceivable that the Art Genome could be applied to the next artist movie biopic. If you like Keith Haring, George Condo, and Julian Schnabel, then you will like the next Basquiat film. While the database can reduce an artist to twenty-five genes, a new biopic can reinscribe his narrative.

Co-Evolution

This spring, in addition to the posting for genomers, Artsy announced a job opening on their website for a product designer. Under the heading “Our Design Ethos” it announced: “Design doesn’t stop at screens and pixels. Every part of the customer experience can and should be designed.”37 Nothing is left to chance when total design dictates this encounter with an artwork. Graphic user interfaces (GUIs) are engineered to animate arrays of images for web browsers. Pictures are no longer inert. They are to be touched, pinched, clicked, and zoomed, while algorithms coax eyeballs to lock on a select JPEGS in the screen’s “infinite vertical scroll.” Here we are educated in the attention economy.

The infinite scroll is screen design hyperbole. This illusion approaches fact as the number of available search results increase. Artsy has over 180,000 results, which produces an adequate semblance of the infinite. Artsy’s competitors typically contain web pages with a footer: The Paddle8 platform has buttons to unravel additional thumbnails while Artspace frames browsing with paginated results. It was the Contemporary Art Daily art blog that received a sustained analysis of the “infinite” or “running” scroll in the 2013 Artforum article “2011: Art and Transmission” by Michael Sanchez. These observations focused on Contemporary Art Daily as an image aggre- gator that benefited from the ubiquitous web access provided by the iPhone and iPad. Sanchez states that we are living in an aftermath, where “a set of technical innovations have arisen that have reconfigured conditions for the production and distribution of art.”38 The rest of his essay explores this disruption in the art field.

36. “Universal Entices 37. “Jobs at Artsy,” Art.sy, Inc., Audiences to ‘Get On Up’ by accessed May 12, 2014, https:// Reversing Pandora’s Music artsy.net/job/product-designer. Genome Project,” Pandora 38. Michael Sanchez, “2011: Media Inc., accessed August Art and Transmission,” Artforum 18, 2014, http://advertising. 51.10 (Summer 2013), 295. pandora.com/2014/07/22/ universal-entices-audiences- to-get-on-up-by-reversing-pan- Alfredo Jaar, Gold in the Morning, 1985. Lightbox with color transparency, 102 × 153 × 15 inches. doras-music-genome-project/. © Alfredo Jaar. Courtesy Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan/Naples, and the artist, New York. Screenshot, Artsy.net, August 8, 2014.

58 Alfredo Jaar, Gold in the Morning, 1985. Lightbox with color transparency, 102 × 153 × 15 inches. © Alfredo Jaar. Courtesy Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan/Naples, and the artist, New York. Contemporary Art Daily was launched in 2008 by Forrest Nash, then becomes a Petri dish where a young art critic might see the ingredients for a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. He started with a modest fol- “a complex dynamic of causes and effects, reciprocal mimicry and recur- lowing but quickly increased his audience by posting installation views of sion, in which traditional models of artistic influence no longer apply.”40 current worldwide exhibitions in a recognizably austere and cool style per- Again, the Internet is deployed as a disruptive force to flatten out some of fectly suited to the clean aesthetic of Apple products. According to Sanchez, the old institutional gatekeepers only to replace them with a feedback loop 2011 was a pivotal year for the iPhone and the iPad, and most critically for of self-regulation. The cycle of images coming from Contemporary Art Daily the images one could view on these surfaces. A prominent pull quote in become trapped in a recursive space of white walls, cool fluorescent lights, Artforum announced, “Art is no longer discovered in biennials and fairs and and even cooler pulsating screens dotting the globe. This relatively small, magazines, but on the phone.” “Contemporary Art Daily,” Sanchez points anxious network of micro-trends has gradually hardened under new insti- out, “replaces the discrete pages of the print journal and the gallery with a tutionalized terms.41 running scroll.”39 To quote the media theorist Benjamin Bratton: “‘[P]latforms’ are not only As the influence of Contemporary Art Daily grew, Sanchez suggests that a a technical architecture; they are also an institutional form. They central- crop of galleries synchronously emerged to meet the demands of screen ize (like states), scaffolding the terms of participation according to rigid platforms. “These galleries all employ a large number of high-wattage flu- but universal protocols, even as they decentralize (like markets).”42 These orescent-light fixtures, as opposed to more traditional spot lighting.” This criteria allow for the categorical reframing of Artsy and Contemporary Art observation by Sanchez is verifiable by a visit to any contemporary space Daily as institutional platforms. in Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, London, and other, smaller art worlds. Whether lighting fixture upgrades came as a result of Contemporary Art How might these platforms shape the dispositions, practices, and produc- Daily or, as Sanchez claims, were a response to the white pulsating LCD tion of artists—their habitus as described by Pierre Bourdieu? Sanchez has technology introduced by Apple in 2010, remains up for debate. argued that conventional sociological positioning by artists has been re- shaped by the quantitative acceleration of digital networks. Under these The stakes of developing an analytic toolkit for art consumed via the Inter- conditions, Sanchez claims that artists have become non-subjects, which net are high for a company like Artsy, which has wagered its future on this leads the author away from social theory and toward a theory of systems. If form of transmission. It is undeniable that the computer screen, albeit one we break out of this particular feedback loop and revisit the art market, the anchored to a desktop, fosters novel viewing habits. Sanchez has, at the very role of social distinctions and taste are still very much intact, “since taste least, initiated a move toward understanding such tendencies. Might this is the basis of all that one has—people and things—and all that one is for variety of art criticism become indistinguishable from e-commerce art con- others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others,” Bourdieu sulting and ultimately be more valuable than the Art Genome Project itself? wrote in Distinction, his study of taste.43 Could a Clement Greenberg of the computer screen emerge to demystify the habits and desires of elusive customers? ArtRank (formerly SellYouLater) was introduced in early 2014. It has since become the subject of much controversy as it claims to “graph prime emerging artists based on qualitatively-weighted metrics.” Like a brokerage firm, Extinction a collector consults ArtRank to know which emerging artists to buy and sell to minimize their investment risk. ArtRank’s “qualitatively-weighted met- If we return to Contemporary Art Daily and scan its content, it quickly rics” shape a standard of taste thereby regulating an unregulated market. becomes apparent that the blog promotes a limited constellation of gal- The results have led to the homogenizing effects represented by a new class leries. This coterie of institutions, with its considered selection of artists, of paintings known as crapstraction, flip art, and zombie formalism, among meets the narrow criteria for an over-reaching theory of the now. Sanchez other designations. It is probably not a coincidence that these paintings also deconstructs the visual effects of vertical scrolling with the language of pop- fit the description of the “therapeutic” and “low-contrast” abstract paintings neuroscience. Gray paintings serve as “visually therapeutic” forms that that Sanchez claims are suited for the iPad screen.44 Various critiques of the counter “the anxiety fed by the speed of the scroll interface, slowing the phenomenon have played out in the art press, with the best known being a eye down and dilating the pupils.” This “affective content” is brought into a piece by Jerry Saltz for Vulture .45 larger feedback loop of networks, informational feeds, and iPhone interfaces that ultimately shapes the contemporary art world. Contemporary Art Daily

40. Sanchez responding to to describe the feedback of in- com/journal/the-black-stack/. on the Walls: Why Does So 39. Contemporary Art Daily 2011 in those numbers. Forrest Daniel Lefcourt, “Causes and formation and affective content 43. Pierre Bourdieu, Much New Abstraction Look is not optimized for mobile Nash, founder of Contemporary Effects,” “Letters,” Artforum in the art world he describes Distinction: A Social Critique The Same?” Vulture (June devices. The vast majority of Art Daily, in conversation with (September 2013). (Sanchez, 301). of the Judgement of Taste 17, 2014), accessed August visitors to Contemporary Art the authors, January 14, 2014, 41. In an effort to stake a 42. Benjamin Bratton, “The (Cambridge: Harvard 14, 2014, http://www.vulture. Daily continue to visit the site and email, August 19, 2014. claim, Sanchez follows Giorgio Black Stack,” e-flux Journal 53 University Press, 1984), 56. com/2014/06/why-new-ab- on large screens, and there Agamben and scraps the term (March 2014), accessed August 44. Sanchez, 298. stract-paintings-look-the-same. was no discernible change in institution in favor of apparatus 14, 2014, http://www.e-flux. 45. Jerry Saltz, “Zombies html.

62 63 Alfredo Jaar, Field, Road, Cloud, 1997. Three color Cibachrome prints, three B/W Cibachrome prints. Color prints: 40 × 60 inches; black and white prints: 6 × 9 inches; overall: 40 × 275 inches. Edition of 5. © Alfredo Jaar. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. Screenshot, Artsy.net, August 22, 2014. The young art historian Alex Bacon responded to what he perceived as a one-sided debate with a prompt: “Critics, whether they like or dislike the work formally, should be fighting back against this hijacking of art, by at least taking the terms of the work seriously.” Bacon calls for a new crite- rion. “Today a ‘collector’ wants to own the same things his ten friends do. It’s a status symbol, a register of a certain kind of taste...a certain level of economic achievement, and corresponding entry into an ‘in crowd’ who all have the same art portfolio.”46 These concerns were central to Bourdieu’s sociology of art and to his acolytes, which included a wave of institutional critique artists in the 1980s and 1990s.

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Carter Cleveland predicted that the art market would massively expand in the future. He wrote, “If art becomes a ubiquitous part of culture, collecting could become normal behavior for households with disposable income, just like buying luxury fashion and jewelry.”47 This presents a paradox, where the symbolic value of art (as an expression of individual and/or class taste) would collapse when everyone participates in the “democracy” of art collecting. Cleveland continued, “At Artsy we are seeing this phenomenon firsthand among new collectors in Silicon Valley, a market we have early visibility into given our tech startup roots.” From this statement it becomes clear where the “disposable income” will emerge in a nation with $11.65 trillion in total household debt.48 The promise of the Art Genome Project is to connect more people to art more efficiently. The bottleneck that stood between Cleveland and his abil- ity to buy fine art from his Princeton dorm room was not a supply and demand problem to be solved by the Long Tail business model perfected by Amazon.49 Fine art is unlike books, music, or really any other commodity. To provide art for everyone may actually require changing the world.

João Enxuto and Erica Love have been collaborating since 2009 on work that examines the effects of new technology on aesthetic categories, institutions, and labor. They live in New York City.

46. Alex Bacon with Jarrett hold Debt Increases,” Wall Earnest, “Who’s Afraid of Street Journal, May 13, 2014, the New Abstraction?” SFAQ: accessed August 19, 2014, International Arts and Culture http://online.wsj.com/news/ 17 (August–October 2014), ac- articles/SB100014240527023040 cessed August 17, 2014, http:// 81804579559813544267206. www.sfaqonline.com/2014/08/ 49. This theory was popular- print-issue-17-pullout-whos- ized by former Wired editor afraid-of-the-new-abstraction/. Chris Anderson in his book 47. Carter Cleveland, “Carter The Long Tail: Why the Future Cleveland Says Art in the of Business Is Selling Less of Future Will Be for Everyone,” More (New York: Hyperion João Enxuto and Erica Love, Artsy Office, New York, NY (8/13/14, 6:54:27 PM), 2014, photograph. Courtesy of Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2014. Press, 2006). the artists. 48. Neil Shah, “U.S. House-