The recent development of online art commerce, from online auctions featuring physical artworks to websites selling intangible, time-based art, promises to mutate the concept of ownership just as the multiple did before it. Many have used the success and prevalence of iTunes as the analogy to the artworks they are selling. From their point of view, it is only a matter of time until collectors would eventually get accustomed to this new way of consuming. As part of the series, Collecting on the Cloud, we spoke to key figures in the future shape of the art maker, under the premise that these platforms are nearly as fascinating as the art projects themselves.
Sedition is one of the pioneering online platforms that came onto the scene early. Founded in 2011 by former art dealers Harry and Rory Blain, and the former executive of Saatchi Online, Robert Norton, Sedition pitches itself as the first platform ever to sell screen based “multiples” online. In one of the first conversations of this series, SCREEN interviewed Rory Blain, director of Sedition, to talk about their vision for this developing market.
Protrait of Rory Blain, Director of Sedition, Courtesy of Sedition.
Jiayin Chen (JC): Can you tell us a little bit about your background before you started with Sedition? And tell us a bit about how the idea came about.
Rory Blain (RB): I actually started my professional life as a dancer, for the first few years. But I realized pretty young that I didn’t want to be dancing professionally my whole life, so at a certain point I moved into the gallery world. My brother had founded a gallery at that time and I started working there on weekends. After a period of time it became more and more obvious that that was where my future would be. So I started to work in visual arts, and have stayed there. Now, how the idea of Sedition came about… My brother founded this company and it was his idea. It’s been around quite a long time, since Harry had the idea before it could even possibly exist. We needed advancements in two main areas then: one was screen resolution, it had to be a a point where you could actually put an art work on the screen without disadvantaging it, in terms of the quality, the color and the depth. And we have that, now.
The other factor was Internet bandwidth. The artwork files that we put into the internet tend to be quite large at such high definition. At that time, we were still using dialup modems with tiny pinhole bandwidth. It wasn’t possible to deliver. Then those two things came around. It was obvious we could take the company forward.
We were looking at things like woodcut, etchings and silkscreens—all the traditional media that artists have used to make multiples, to make the image available to a wider audience. It’s exactly the same thing, simply the 21st century evolution. The digital edition is, we think, a very natural evolution from the traditional multiples.
JC: Have you ever considered Sedition to be an alternate way to purchase from the gallery?
RB: Absolutely not. Digital editions, by nature, tend to be smaller, brief snapshots of the original art. We have some works that are 15 or 20 minutes long, but most of the editions tend to be a small snapshot, a glimpse of the art. The galleries would be selling individual, unique pieces and generally at much, much higher prices. The idea of Sedition is to broadcast to a wider audience. That’s something most galleries don’t even plan to do.
Jenny Holzer, Sense displayed on TV, Courtesy of Sedition.
JC: So you wanted to sell multiples, rather than original video artworks from the very beginning? What has been the biggest challenge for you so far?
RB: The biggest challenge is to make sure people understand that the artwork does not exist physically. You have a certificate of the work, so you know what exact edition number you have, and that it can be bought and be sold again too—pretty much like any physical artwork. But we are moving everything possible in the digital domain. Sedition artwork can be bought and sold, so you can make money on it or you can lose money on it. You could do everything you should be able to do with the physical artwork, except handling it.
JC: Is your interest in Sedition derived from a particular inclination towards digital art?
RB: No. I think ultimately it really is about bringing the best contemporary art to the widest audience possible. Internet and the digital media have made all that much easier than it ever has been in history before. We love digital media, but that’s not the driving force—the driving force really is a love for contemporary art. The digital just happened to be the medium on which we are working.
JC: Was the idea really conceived in the 1990s? That’s so early!
RB: I think it might just have been the end of the 90s. 1999 might be. That was certainly when the genesis of the concept come about. Only the technology we needed wasn’t in place at that time.
Cheng Ran, Joss displayed on iPad3, Courtesy of Sedition.
Ryoichi Kurokawa,syn mod3 on iPhone6, Courtesy of Sedition.
JC: Can you tell us about your active members? How many do you have on Sedition?
RB: 50,000. We have a wider audience in a broader sense; the audience we can put works in front of is over half a million. But in terms of active membership on the site, it’s about 50,000.
JC: Could you describe your target audience? Has it changed since the launch of the website? What has surprised you?
RB: it hasn’t changed but has certainly developed in one direction. When we first launched, we were expecting very much our target demographic to be college-educated people who’re interested in the arts—the same people who visit galleries and museums, and love art but traditionally were priced out of the market. And Sedition was really founded to combat that, to make art accessible to a much wider audience.
What we were surprised by was the fact that the initial group and (still to this day) the most committed group of collectors on Sedition are a fairly small number of the same people who visit galleries and buy physical art works. Obviously the prices on Sedition are very affordable compared to the values that they’re used to, but they don’t care about the price and simply want a representation of the latest thing the artist is doing. The landscape has become more accepting of digital media, and people have become more used to what we’re doing too. All this is being reasoned into what we do and expanding our market. The overall growth of the landscape, of digital art, is pretty much as I have predicted. It’s a visual language, and the younger generation now tends to get a lot of their entertainment or their information through vloggers and bloggers. Instagram is another great way of shopping imagery, and these have very much become the “currency” of the Internet generation.
JC: After launching the website almost four years ago, what has changed in the market of video art? Or what have you observed in this field during the past few years?
RB: Well, quite a few things. I think in some ways it’s similar what happened to the photography market. Photography has been around as an art medium for quite some time, but it was only really a decade or so ago that it got what you might called full acceptance by the art community. And what I mean by that is photographs are being traded in the auctions, holding up a secondary sale value. Andreas Gursky pictures now make 7 figure sums. So, in talking about digital art, people were naturally cautious and some people were quite confused, but it’s been around for a while and people are far more accepting it as another medium.
JC: When do you think we will see be the full acceptance of the market of video art?
RB: If I knew that already I would probably be a more successful man than I am now (laughs)… When the timing is right, you start to see there’s a lot in the market place. Obviously, you’ve got iTunes, and that made us entirely comfortable in getting music from the digital sphere. But the visual art is still a bit behind that. That’s something changing now, since there are several companies coming up to cater to this. Sedition was one of the first, but a number of providers are now coming out to offer screens for digital art. Also in the government in UK here, you can see that all the funding is going into projects in this industry, so that acceptance that you are talking about is rapidly becoming widespread and this year would very likely be a pivotal year, I would say.
Quayola, Natures, Courtesy of Sedition.
JC: This images on the homepage of Sedition are always stunning—what’s the criteria for selecting them? in terms of sales, what kind of artworks performs best? Is it limited to more visually-stunning art, that is to say, retinal art?
RB: It’s hard to say, but you are right that the works that are usually very visually entertaining and beautiful, often grab a lot of attention and do quite well, but not as much as you might think. It’s exactly like what you’d see in the physical domain. People respond to pretty pictures, but for example, one of the most successful editions that we had was by the Japanese sound and performance artist called Ryoji Ikeda. Ryoji wanted to do a very limited experiment so he offered us a work which is fairly conceptual and not very visual. It looks like static on the screen when it’s running. He also set this work at a very, very low value, which was five pounds for each edition. That fixed price it didn’t go up, and the edition was fixed to 300 editions. This was a very small and low value, but because it’s very faithful to Ikeda’s body of work, it sold out immediately, and on the “trade platform” they’ve been since trading to up to 100 pounds each. It’s the customers who set these secondary prices. That artwork was one of the most successful art pieces we had gone through, in terms of sale history and trade history, but it definitely not as visually engaging as you would expect.
JC: So it’s actually not very different from the physical gallery world.
RB: Yes. And that’s actually incredibly pleasing to us, because that’d exactly what it should do. Be like the physical world in every way except it’s not in the physical world.
JC: Sedition introduced a “Trade” section, which is a secondary market to allow collectors to trade works within the platform. In a way, it is to reassure them of the monetary value of intangible art works. However, the transactions are limited to your own platform. Have you considered how to expand to a more open platform? Could someone consign these works to other auction houses in the future? Otherwise, it’s not so different from trading objects in online games.
RB: Exactly. It’s something we’ve looked at. At the moment the set up is that you have to buy and sell Sedition work within the Sedition universe, but we are also planning to open up in the years to come. We have been doing some research, and the best way to do this at the moment looks to be to make use of the block chain technology, the technology Bitcoin uses. The idea behind it is that any transaction history over the artwork would be carried within the code of the object itself. So it’s perfect for this kind of artwork. If you want to sell it you can even do it peer to peer in auctions, as long as you are able to change the block chain technology and inscribe new ownership to it. We are definitely researching it.
Ultimately the main difference is twofold: one is that it is a very secured system, because the information, the ledger, is not held in any one place, and exists in numerous different notes. To hack or attack that, you have to hit every single node simultaneously. For that reason, the system is more secure than any existing systems. And the other idea is that each transaction, each change of ownership, is carried in the code itself. From the perspective of art, it carries its own provenance with it. It allows the works not to be distributed illegally.
Wang Qingsong, Follow Me, Courtsey of Sedition.
JC: Could this be understood as forming a new kind of ownership?
RB: Yes or no; a new way of tracking and monitoring ownership.
JC: You have both high-profile artists and emerging artists on your website. How do you reach out to artists?
RB: We have many different routes. The main road is coming from the gallery background. We have contacts with a lot of artists, and we make a direct approach if we like someone’s work. We also work with galleries. Galleries are welcome to encourage the artist to sign up with us, and they can share the revenue from that. What we’ve tried very hard not to do is to be competing against any physical galleries. We don’t sell physical works and we don’t plan to sell physical works, so if any interest comes in about a physical work by an artist we would just forward to the gallery. We are only working in the digital sphere.
Bob Roberta Smith, Art Makes Children Powerful displayed on a tablet, Courtesy of Sedition.
Gordon Cheung, New Order Collection, Courtesey of Sedition.
JC: Do you have in-house programmers to assist with the artists? What’s the production process like?
RB: Yes we do. Certain artists that we work with, their studios are very, very adept in digital media. Other artists have a very clear idea of what they want to do, but are not so used to the digital medium. A good example is Tracey Emin. Her neon series exist in a physical form, but she had an idea for neon letters, as if written by her invisible hand, and that’s exactly what she asked our technicians to do, working with our digital producer. Tracey would look at the animation and would say “I want it like this”, “make it this speed”… and give her instructions, but it’s our digital producer who makes it suitable for the Sedition platform.
Now we’re working closely with museums as well and are placing screens into museum gift shops. We just placed one in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and we’re about to put one into the Royal Academy, and The Atkinson Gallery up in the Southport. And a screen in the Stifting Museum Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf in Germany. We just began, but this will be growing quite a lot in the rest of this year.
JC: You mean there’s a museum store and there’d be a screen where people could purchase works directly?
RB: Exactly. The screen will be there to show the artwork, and how to use them, and what you buy is actually a physical object. It’s like an iTunes gift card. It’s a small plastic card and has the artwork picture one side, and on the reverse it has a silver strip, where you scratch off the silver strip and follow the instruction printed on the card. The code from the from the silver strip will enable you to have that art work in your collection. You redeem the artwork and get it on your device.
JC: What’s the demographic of your collectors like?
RB: It’s a fairly even split. Roughly 30% in Europe, 30% in the US and 30% in the UK, and the remaining 10% is everywhere. We also plan to expand to China, as we have translated the site into Chinese.
