Frame Revisioned for Artists and Media Enterprises in a Digital age

Our Vision 👀

To create and facilitate an online community of artists and patrons built on the exhibition, criticism, and informed experience of art in the modern digital age

Our Mission 🎯

To employ modern technologies and crowd-sourcing phenomena to achieve a more robust ontology and classification of art, intellectually informed art criticism, and equitable marketplace through a unique exhibition environment

Problem

• "How can artists bridge the communication gap between art and society?"
  • Although the stated problem is broad and somewhat vague, there are various aspects to this problem that invite more focused attention. The main challenges surround the issues of the ontology of art, the nature and condition of art criticism, and how these relate to the 'value' of art.
• The ontology of art engages in the classification and definitions of art; namely, 'What is art?'; what are the various genres and manifestations, what separates art from industry, what is the artist's intent, etc.. and by extension, the cousin to this profound question; how does society value art?
• The criticism of art represents both the patron/viewer and artist's reaction to and experience of art and their expression of that experience. This too gets to the heart of the 'value' of art (from another angle).
• The question of the 'value' of art presents problems of its own with both private and public interests; how do we create and/or foster a consistent and thriving economy for the free trade of art? (ie. a fair marketplace with pricing standards that reward and benefit artists and patrons equally) and how do we decide how and when to publicly fund art initiatives?

Solution

• We are proposing a unique web-based [social media] platform that focuses on building a comprehensive ontology of art by providing tools for the crowd-sourced classification and criticism of art, in the context of a unique exhibition environment and accompanying marketplace.
• The features are distributed amongst 3 main components to the platform:
  1. Artist Spaces: Artists will be able to login as users and create both private and public galleries and portfolios of their own work by uploading images/media and arranging unique digital spaces to display them .
  2. Art Criticism "Blog" Section: Artists and critics (viewers, patrons, general users, etc.) can post content in the form of 'articles' that are focused on a single work or collection of works of art by any artist(s) as the source to which they contribute reaction/criticism. The platform will provide users with a variety of tools for both the criticism and classification of art works:
     • Ontological Classification: Users can tag art, collections, and artists with special 'semantic tags' that allow them to create and/or choose from existing genres/sub-genres, topics, techniques, styles, exhibitions, etc. and populate related or corresponding info sections regarding things like artist's intent, reviews, monetary values, historical info/context, exhibitions/events, etc. The platform will maintain a growing database of artists and works that can be organized semantically for powerful search and display functions based on ontological relationships. Machine learning algorithms may later allow AI to contribute classifications automatically, while users can add to and refine the database through crowd-sourcing.
     • Discussion: Unique commentary tools will organize comments into more formal criticism components using tag structure (for contributors that opt to use the form, ie. artist intent, color theory, techniques, influences, schools/mentors, effects on society, etc.).
     • News Feed: Aggregated feed with regular and automated posting of trending news/articles related to art, artists, news and events, etc. from various sources in addition to original content.
  3. Marketplace: An extension of artist spaces and exhibitions, the marketplace allows for formal events/exhibitions to be created (that can have associated real-life counterparts managed in the platform), e-commerce components for the sale of art through the platform (including auction bidding and patronage relationships). Similar to freelance platforms, a 'patron' dashboard can allow patrons to connect with artists to commission works, establish mentoring relationships, offer real-world studio spaces, support artists through donation, and buy art that is typically more difficult to sell (ie. performance art, installations, etc.).
• The benefit of the platform is that by providing an efficient system for categorizing and classifying art, we can facilitate more informed criticism and discussion of art, and society can more easily gain an appreciation of art and thereby understand its value in a more meaningful way, ultimately leading to a more efficient economy of trade and more equitable opportunities for both artists and patrons/public alike.
• Stage of Development: Our proposed platform is a seed-stage tech startup and currently engaged in conceptual development & product design although we currently have access to the code base, assets, and intellectual property of a separate discussion platform (web app project) that shares some underlying features that could potentially be re-used, at least in part. This advantage could dramatically reduce development time and costs.

Market Validation & Competition

• There are two main market segments to consider when assessing the competitive landscape concerning the proposed product:

  1. The art marketplace space: There is a growing number of art marketplaces due to a growing trend of buyers purchasing art online, and there is room establish a new marketplace, especially one that taps new customers, provides a more accessible mechanism for artists of non-typical genres (ie. performance art, installations, etc.) to sell their work, and provides added value.
  2. The blogging/social media content & discussion space: This space is a large one but also quite saturated so disrupting the space or establishing value that distinguishes and separates from the competition is paramount.
  • Additionally, there is third possible segment in educational software. There is potential for marketing the platform or a portion of the toolset to academic institutions (universities, professors and/or students), educational companies/organizations, researchers etc.

• Refer to Industry & Market Trends, and Competitive Analysis Below:

  Attachments: Industry & Market Trends