People and companies have talked for years about "democratizing art", and what they usually have meant by that phrase is to "make it possible for normal people to find and purchase original art." But that narrative has never made sense to me. I owned an art gallery in the 1990s and early 2000s and I can assure you that plenty of "normal people" bought art. If anyone walked in with money and wanted to purchase a painting, we would sell it to them. Normal people have always had plenty of access to art.
The real part of the art market that needed democratization wasn't the collector side, but the artist side.
We would sell paintings to anybody who wanted to purchase one but we wouldn't accept any artist who applied into the gallery. We were gatekeepers. And artists outside of the gallery system were essentially out of luck. But starting with the internet of the late 1990s, that started to change. Artists could show their art online directly. And every passing year added more needed pieces to the technology stack and connected more and more people to the network.
And today, gatekeepers have now largely been removed by this technology. And those that remain are increasingly struggling and are relatively easy to bypass for most artists.
The coming change was so apparent, that I quit the gallery business in 2005 and dedicated my life to building the infrastructure and tools that support this democratization of art. I didn't want to be a gatekeeper. I wanted to see an explosion of art and beauty. And, for sixteen years now, I've been building tools and technology to put the power in the hands of the artists.
The Sovereign Artist Era Begins
Since the big shift in 2020, we've left the era of gatekeepers behind and entered what I call The Sovereign Artist Era.
And finally, this beautiful dream of democratizing art is happening.
I fully believe that we are now on the cusp of an explosion of creativity in the world of visual art.
More artists than ever will be creating more art than we've ever seen - using both traditional and newer digital mediums. And just like the explosion of science in the 20th century led to ever-increasing knowledge and technology, the explosion of art in the 21st century will lead to ever-increasing beauty.
In other words, we are at the very beginning of a new global enlightenment. A new renaissance.
We are at the beginning of Renaissance 2.0.
And just like the original Renaissance and Enlightenment tore down existing power structures and remade the world in a way that opened opportunity to vastly more people, Renaissance 2.0 has made a new type of artist possible - a Sovereign Artist.
The trends I outlined above are accelerating. More technology arrives daily and at a dizzying and increasing pace. And each new technology puts more tools in the hands of artists.
This is changing everything. Middlemen are going away. Gatekeepers no longer exist. Art galleries are a dying breed. The "art market" is no longer controlled by a handful of dealers in New York city but is, instead, expanding across the internet at a growing rate.
Hence, we've entered the Sovereign Artist Era.
This era is the culmination of centuries of technological advances, bit by bit, expanding the art market.
Sovereign Artists across the globe are already taking advantage of these changes. They are selling directly from their websites.
Instagram has replaced galleries as a channel for discovery. Print on demand technologies allow artists to sell an image an unlimited number of times. And NFTs are taking what Print on Demand started and pushing it even further.
Being a sovereign artist requires being bold. Letting go of the past and letting go of your fear. But artists have always been bold. And Bold Sovereign Artists have ditched galleries, gatekeepers, physical portfolios and have replaced them with Instagram, personal storefronts, NFTs and entire platforms dedicated to selling art online.
If you're ready to let go over your fear and boldly step into Renaissance 2.0, becoming a member of the Sovereign Artist Club is a good first step.
If you're ready to let go over your fear and boldly step into Renaissance 2.0, first we must take a look inside you and uncover your true motivations for becoming an artist.
