Actionable advice: learn why Bitcoin should become your unit of account and imagine saving up for an arts fund that is 100% Bitcoin that will be sustainable for decades into the future. I don’t see any other pathway for someone that wants to be an art patron long-term. Then you just have to make tons of mistakes for years, upgrading your eye, upgrading your ear, until you’re confident about what you like. I don’t think anyone can just go right out of the gate making great choices about who they’re supporting. It’s a constant learning process.
Not what you’re looking for but Cuba does this. There are committees in each genre that choose which artists get funding based on what their peers and not the market wants.
This podcast about the Cuban punk band Los Frikis is amazing.
https://radiolab.org/episodes/los-frikis
I point it out, one because it’s a great story, but also because it is useful to look at radically different systems, even if you’d not want that system, when designing new ways of doing things.
Thank you for sharing, that’s very interesting!
I think the avenues available for patronage of new music is doing really, really well. Extremely obscure bands are able to find their niche fans and connect with them. For visual arts it’s much more difficult I think, because you really need to find a small handful of patrons that are willing to go into 4-5 figures and be a substantial long-term supporter. It’s much harder to share the experience of an original work of art with more than one person. You can sell art books I guess but it’s really not the same thing as selling CDs and vinyl to thousands of fans. There really needs to be hundreds of people doing what I’m doing, but following their own tastes, and I really don’t see that happening right now.
This is worth reading/watching for anyone that wants a closer look at their strategy:
I want to demonstrate what it looks like when you go all-in on funding what living artists actually want to make, instead of what the market wants them to make.
I definitely became more thoughtful about what I wanted to say because of the limitation.
To be fair it’s not enjoyable to use for anything else either, I just want to play with the app!
I think my phone is too old to get the “fast and smooth” experience
I like River. They’ve had Lightning deposit/withdrawal for years
That’s really cool, thanks for sharing!
I’ve been learning about music superfans who attend 50% to 100% of all live shows across an entire cross-country tour. It sounds really brutal because the logistics, transportation costs, lodging costs eat up so much of the budget, but for them each of those live experiences is worth the effort. But I do wonder how much of the total spent goes to the artist? 10%? 15%? What I like about direct art patronage is that 90%-100% of what I’m spending is going to the artist, and I’m not sure there is an equivalent for that for musicians who are tied to a label. Granted, I’m just one person, and famous musicians could have tens of thousands of fans supporting them in smaller ways.
I think about it like this: the artist has their portfolio that they want to share with the world. What can I sponsor that would upgrade their portfolio in a way that showcases this artist at their best?
conceptart.org used to have a dedicated section for artists working in traditional mediums, but I’m not seeing that on ArtStation
I’ve seen it happen where a popular band is no longer represented by a music label and simply goes to Kickstarter or GoFundMe to raise the funds needed to record the next album they want to make. That’s a very similar idea with crowdfunding patronage vs. the patronage of one individual. It’s just that the nature of original works of physical art cannot be shared or distributed so easily!
Which may also be true of visual artists who are represented by art galleries, where the direct kind of one-on-one collaborations that I do become closed off. But I’ve never worked with artists who are represented by a gallery like that. I tried to once but the response was, Sorry you have to go through one of my galleries to work with me, and I didn’t like that.
But the key thing with commissions is that I don’t ask for something that I want, I ask the artist what they would be excited to make next and sponsor their next dream project. I get out of their way, but I sponsor it. Maybe this is equivalent to sponsoring one single or one song from a musician/band, but I don’t think the public is allowed to just do that, are they? There’s kind of a detached or indirect relationship between the musicians and the audience because the music labels are handling most of those decisions.
When I find the work I’m really looking for I buy the original from the artist or commission something new from them, but otherwise the Instagram bookmarks folder has something like 8,000 posts in it 😂
Here’s something that’s very confusing: when it comes to music, musicians who are extremely talented do get recognized, go viral, and find millions of fans, and thus they can easily be stumbled upon using YouTube’s algorithms. However, I have found that this does not hold true in the visual arts, and so on Instagram the algorithm picks up on things that go viral for reasons other than the quality of the work. So for me if I find something using Instagram’s algorithms, I automatically assume that my standards are not high enough, and I need to dig much deeper into recent posts of various hashtags, because the top quality stuff doesn’t make enough noise to “attract” the algorithm.