December 8, 2003
MarkBernstein.org
 

Print Club

Print Club
Digital Storytelling
Sedona, 2003
Heather Champ is launching a photographic print club. For $100, you receive a monthly 5x7 print, plus a unique 4x5 polaroid pinhole photograph on your birthday.

This is a very interesting approach to reconstructing the art economy. The museum-and-gallery circuit may not be quite as pathological as the music industry's star-making machinery, but it's clearly unsatisfactory. There's no good way for people who aren't wealthy to participate. It's easy to find a good million-dollar painting, but it's really hard to find a good hundred-dollar painting.

But there are lots of painters who would be perfectly happy to make you a painting for a hundred dollars. Some of those paintings will be dreck, but some might be exactly what you'd like to have around your home or office. There's no good way for you to find them.

This is, at heart, a business problem, specifically a channel problem. Distribution channels are like conveyor belts, built to move product of a specific size. Hundred dollar images just won't fit in the gallery channel.

Perhaps, the combination of weblogs and feeds and web sites can give artists a channel. Thanks to the k10k RSS feed.

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