
New York Startup Artsy Raises $18.5M to Become Pandora for Fine Art - sethbannon
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/04/03/new-york-startup-artsy-raises-16m-to-become-pandora-for-fine-art/
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asharpe
Artsy is focussed on a specific niche in the art market that is not the high
end (ie $100k ++ work), but more what they would call entry level $5k - $50k
works. Artsy (and some of it's competitors) help these entry level collectors
to get a greater survey of what is happening and what is available in the art
world. To date, this would have required travel to galleries around the world
(mainly NYC for the past couple of decades) and/or travelling to one of the
big Art Fairs (see Art Basel - a one week extravaganza where more than a
billion dollars of sales is likely). If you have the time and access to those
events, you will get a great survey in a couple of days.

Artsy simply brings that to your device/home/computer. They don't make sales,
more make the introductions to galleries that are selling the work. It
continues the overall art market movement away from bricks and mortar
'galleries' to online and art fairs.

The value add (pain point) that Artsy provides is the recommendation engine.
This is unique (not sure how well it works from my experience on the site) and
is crucial in a market that is always looking for the 'new' and 'exciting'.

The overall market is terrifying in that million dollar plus works are traded
over .jpg form. That's why there is a significant cohort of art consultants
that are paid to look a work in real life to provide the '3D' context.

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dblock
I am an engineer at Artsy, ask me anything about how things work.

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anigbrowl
It's more of a business than engineering question, but I wonder what factors
led Artsy to work within the gallery/show business framework rather than
attempting to disrupt that.

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asharpe
The Gallery/Show business provides two things: 1\. Reputation/trust
(especially for younger artists) 2\. Reach to potential collectors The
validation required to spend $5,000 vs $1,000 on a work is purely intangible,
a reputable gallery and it's experts can make that difference. In terms of an
artist selling to the market directly, you have to be a Damien Hirst, or
similar, to have the brand in the market to support a direct sales
infrastructure.

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80
As a contemporary artist you've got to be increasingly sure that your work
looks damn good in .jpg form

(see: markets current preoccupation with bold, flat abstract works)

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Zigurd
Fine art photography made a transition from all chemical to 90% digital, yet
the manipulated RAW image is treated identically to a negative.

I find that remarkable. The other thing that's remarkable is how accepting
people are of highly compressed and decimated jpg images on uncalibrated
monitors for viewing the work of professional photographers (while wearing
$400 headphones, listening to highly compressed mp3s).

It is also remarkable that Neil Young is among the first to try to fix the
fidelity issue, for music anyway. I hope someone sees that photography and
images of other fine art need something analogous.

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anigbrowl
On Neil Young, there were a bunch of FLAC-compatible portable music players on
the market 2 years ago: [http://www.cnet.com/news/best-mp3-players-with-
flac/](http://www.cnet.com/news/best-mp3-players-with-flac/)

* Free Lossless Audio Codec

The super-high sample rate stuff is totally bogus, and I say that as an audio
professional of many years' standing. Neil Young is a nice guy, but Pono is
basically a branding exercise, not a technical innovation.

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rosem
I saw on Twitter today that they landed Ash Furrow as a load iOS dev.

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dblock
The mobile team is actually run by @orta of CocoaPods fame. We're definitely
excited to have Ash join. We also have two beginner iOS devs (@1aurabrown and
I) and we need some experienced guidance!

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justizin
So they're planning to tell their paying customers that they value the ad-
driven customers more, as Pandora told me in a job interview? The Future is
Now!

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peter_l_downs
Artsy is awesome! In particular I love that they have tons of high-resolution
images available for free. Although their online gallery is pretty sweet, with
a little effort you can download them in high-res for yourself [0].

[0]: [https://github.com/peterldowns/artsy-download-
script](https://github.com/peterldowns/artsy-download-script)

~~~
dblock
Just to be clear, all the images aren't available for free. These are all
copyrighted and we negotiate with rights holders which is expensive and
complicated.

Artsy does have a number of images available free in the public domain. Please
see [https://artsy.net/post/christine-downloading-images-on-
artsy](https://artsy.net/post/christine-downloading-images-on-artsy).

~~~
peter_l_downs
For anyone who happens across this — I went ahead and took down the repo
because I didn't want to encourage copyright violation.

~~~
dblock
Thanks Peter.

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diminoten
I thought they were trying to become the Netflix for fine art.

Or was that a tie company, and was it GameFly for... ties?

This is all getting very confusing.

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ScotterC
You may be thinking of Artsicle [1]. Art.sy on the other hand has always had
their sights set on a Pandora model.

1\. [http://www.artsicle.com](http://www.artsicle.com)

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sylvinus
Worth a look too: [http://artips.fr/en/](http://artips.fr/en/)

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monkeynotes
Isn't this more of an Etsy for fine art?

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bkanber
No -- Artsy maintains relationships with galleries, not individual artists.

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el-mapache
“only very few people who could afford to buy are doing so. Many are held back
by high barriers to entry, which Artsy is solving.”

Thank god.

