The homepage of Arcademi

Last July I was privileged enough to attend the opening of the 53rd Biennale di Venezia. It was an extrodinary display of marketing, complete with showbags, fancy dress cocktail parties, and naked men presenting artworks. All of these methods get your attention. And so they should; art likes the names that attract media.

Many artists and designers have skill, but perhaps do not have the exhibition space, the screenprinting skills or enough good-looking friends to pull a crowd. So their work is not recognised and they wither away in the wings of the art world, slowly developing their client list and waiting to be discovered. Unless they are artists with initiative. Then they may find other ways to sell and promote their work.

Arcademi is a new online platform that has been designed to make links between new artists and interested curators or collectors. Curators often have to travel and may not have time to make to look at every pavillion or go to every show. They can get distracted; particularly when they are being handed glasses of champagne by naked men. And even then, many buyers would hestitate to take a chance on a new artist with perceptable talent but no brand power.

Using Arcademi, buyers can take the time to assess new work. Young artists and designers can upload images of their fashion design, objects, jewellery, sculpture, paintings or photographs. Artists can also upload profiles and biographies to give visitors more information about their work. Smaller galleries can register to use it as a way to promote all their artists and a buyer or any interested shopper can browse through the art gallery or design showroom in any given category. Or alternatively they can punch in keywords, for example, ‘naked man’, and see what they find. If they want to buy a work, they must register. They can create a watch list, write in the forum or make purchases. They can also check out local design or art events and read artist blogs. This all sounds democratic for the buyer.

If you are an artist or gallery and you wish to set up a profile and upload your work then you must first submit an application, which has to be approved by a panel. While the internet should enable open slather democracy, the art world would like its members to be included according to taste, which often comes down to the aesthetic and conceptual judgement of specialists. The specialists who set up and moderate Arcademi are a group of art historians, designers and architects from Germany.

A photograph from Arcademi by Gilles et Dada

So it is not necessarily a revolution in the buying and selling of art, but rather a transference of power to a new group. Having said that, the website does look more slick than most art sale websites. It is essentially a new gallery concept, which can exhibit all artworks all the time, and therefore does not have the limits on space that other galleries are governed by. For this reason, new artists and designers may have a better than average chance of selling. But this move into the new frontier of cyberspace does create other limits.

While Arcademi may be somewhat more democratic, the one thing the Biennale has over an online portal is that it is an event. It’s more fun and you may encounter new art by surprise; not based on preconceived search criteria. In addition to this, when you are face to face with an artwork you can appreciate it’s sensory properties in a way that you cannot when you are staring at an image on a screen. This may not be such a problem for photographs, but to know an object you should see the way it handles, it’s odour, the way you experience it in a room alongside other objects.

It is likely therefore, that this kind of wholesale internet gallery can not actually replace the event as the main forum for showing and making a fuss of art. And it is not completely democratic, otherwise it would not be art. What it can do is provide a place for the more cautious buyer to find that artwork or look for something new once the excitement has died down. It is a new way to sell art. And it is best administered alongside one of the older ways, such as a naked man holding out a glass of champagne.

Check out Arcademi online here.