In the second in this series about how blockchain is transforming art, let’s touch on the ability for an artist to advance their career.
In part 1 we established that the ability to get paid on digital work sparks new creativity, but what it also does is enable new ways of executing the business of being an artist.
One of the major ways is through audience expansion. For physical art, your audience is always bounded by a few factors. First, you can only sell to people based on proximity. If your work sells in galleries, you’re limited to people who are near the gallery and / or who visit the physical location. Some galleries or auctions may add remote purchases to expand a bit, and online sales of physical art have been growing tremendously, but digital art takes it much further, much faster.
Digital collectible art is purely, intrinsically, natively global. When an artist creates digital collectible art, it can be sold from NY to Paris to Johannesburg to Delhi to Tokyo and beyond. With a digital release, the artist immediately has a wider pool of buyers and fans.
This also augments artists’ modern marketing methods. Artists spend enormous amounts of time developing a global social media following. Digital collectible art delivers incredible new opportunity to deliver works of art to those who are already expressing interest. They’ve got fans, now they can also have work that services that demand.
The second big boundary is the pricing struggle – Blockchain opens up the ability to develop multiple artistic product lines for differentiated marketing. What that means is that artists can still sell high end, original, physical works of art for tens of thousands or however much they wish, same as they always have done.
But now, they can also create incredible artistic works for a mass market at an attainable price point, while still getting paid. In fact, they could even create a “masstige” line of art for those in between the mass market and ultra-premium. The authentication capability of blockchain allows for limited editions and generative work to fill new market demand, while retaining exclusivity and avoiding brand dilution.
Each time a new collector makes a purchase, there are psychological impacts – they go from being a fan to being a collector – they go from a viewer to a participant. The concept of the “Ben Franklin effect” explains that people like someone more if they’ve done a small favor for them.
If you can get your audience to purchase a work, even if it’s just for 10 or 20$, they become deeper and more committed fans of yours. More likely to tell friends, more likely to buy other works, and more likely to engage with you and your art, boosting your profile, and driving attention to your traditional works as well.
All of this drives the brand, expands the audience, and accelerates the career, all thanks to blockchain. This is all part of how we’re striving to help artists over at Three43 – we work to make it easy for them finally incorporate digital work in order to change the trajectory of their art careers!
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