Selling Art in an Age of Disruption‌‌

Q: Where are art and technology coming together in interesting ways right now?‌

The thing that excites me the most is how artists will unlock digital tools as part of their physical practices. A paintbrush is a tool. A hammer and chisel, those are tools. AI is a tool. ‌

What artists are really good at is figuring out how to use things in new and unexpected ways—not just following the rule book, not just doing the same things everybody else is doing, but having a much broader view on what’s possible.‌

It’s so compelling to imagine how AI will be a tool that’s transformative in the way artists think about and make their work.‌

Q: Some artists are angry about their work being used to train AIs without compensation or even permission. And while there’s excitement about AI in the general public, there’s also wariness, even fear. ‌

‌When the rest of the world is scared about something new, often artists are the ones who go toward it. They like to try new things. They like to innovate. It’s kind of what makes them artists! Even if it’s not totally obvious how something new will be relevant, artists can’t help but say, “I’ll check it out. I’ll see if it can add some value to what I do.” ‌

‌I’m so excited to see where architects take it, where poets, painters, sculptors, and photographers take it. I know of a great choreographer who is working with AI right now, but in general so far, it’s just been a handful of artists experimenting. I think that’s about to crack open. If I could have my way, the companies that are building these tools would provide support for creators, defined very broadly, to explore and experiment with them.‌

And to your point, if these companies, particularly the ones that have an image problem from how their AI has been trained, from being seen as potentially supplanting human creativity, were to welcome and support great artists in using and experimenting with their tools, it might start as the company thinking it was being beneficent, but it’s going to be totally reciprocal. What’s going to happen is the artist will say, your tool’s missing this key functionality. It’s got to be able to do this thing. And that’s what’s going to open it up to a broader user base. It will humanize the tool. That’s what artists do.‌

I can’t imagine how any company could sit down with any set of great thinkers—artists are great creative thinkers—and not learn something about what they could do to improve their tool.‌

Q: Is that happening?‌

I’ve made the rounds with enough of these companies to know it’s not really happening right now. It feels really early. They’re very tech-focused, focused on the profitability of their specific product. For now, they really can’t see the forest for the trees, the value creators based in the physical world can provide, but they’re going to get there at some point.‌

‌So, short of being a Pace artist who has access to Pace Verso, where do you go if you’re a great artist and you think maybe AI could support your research on a new series of sculptures or with sketches towards a new show? Where do you go to figure out what’s the right tool to use? How do you partner with an engineer to evolve a tool for your particular use case? Right now, there’s not a lot of support available. That’s a miss. ‌

Q: Would you give some context on the Pace Gallery and Pace Verso?‌

Pace Gallery is a 65-year-old art gallery. It’s headquartered in New York but has a global footprint. We represent over 100 great artists and artist estates from around the world. Our aim is to support those artists in a 360-degree way over the long term. These relationships often last many decades. ‌

A few years ago, Pace artists started approaching our CEO, Mark Glimcher, saying they were interested in integrating new technologies into their practices. He asked me to build out that support function. That’s Pace Verso. ‌

Generally it starts with my sitting down with an artist (a Pace artist) to hear what they’re thinking about and what they’re interested in exploring. From there we work to meet their individual interests. We’ve done projects with over a dozen artists now, including Maya Lin, Jeff Koons, and teamLab, mostly around generative art.‌

Q: What is generative art?‌

Generative art is algorithmically generated, not AI generated, if that makes sense. A distinction I found helpful is that the algorithm used with generative art is a closed system. It knows only what you provide it. That might only be very basic parameters, for example around color and shape. ‌

When you run the algorithm, it produces as many variations on an artwork as you want based on the parameters you gave it. You can then tweak the parameters to shift the results in a way that meets your needs. It takes a tremendous amount of work to set up, but it becomes a tool to do precisely what you want.‌

On the other hand, ChatGPT and other generative AIs are open systems. They have been trained on a broad swath of the internet, so the outputs that are produced are calling on a much larger set of inputs, that, in most cases, weren’t created by the user, they were pre-existing, created by some third party. The same is true when an artist trains their own generative AI model.‌

Q: Would you give an example of a Pace Verso project?‌

My favorite project, and one that I hope is emblematic of the type of work we do going forward, started when Maya Lin came to us in 2021 saying she was curious about algorithmically generative art. We spent some time showing her what other artists were doing in the space, how they were doing it, why, where it was being shown, where it was been sold, and what was technically possible.‌

She began to develop an idea for the generative art project she wanted to do. She had recently finished a huge installation, Ghost Forest, where she built an actual forest in Madison Square Park. She wanted to extend that idea, which focused on what we see aboveground, by exploring the beautiful root structures that are below the surface.‌

We found her a technical partner to work with. For a year and a half, Maya and a coder sat shoulder to shoulder—sometimes literally, sometimes virtually. She’d say: that blue isn’t right, I want it more this blue. Or, when the algorithm generates this type of output, it’s too dense. Let’s make that type of output a little less dense.‌

Then once the algorithm’s various outputs are looking pretty good, they adjust the weighting so that for 100 outputs, 20 fit this variation type, 30 fit this other variation, and 50 are yet another variation type. Eventually, they finalized the algorithm and ran it thousands of times.‌

Maya picked her favorite 500 outputs and we had prints made of them. She was just as particular about everything in that process, from the paper used to the way the way the edges were deckled. She signed each one. Collectors got the print and an NFT, which was the digital image used to create the print and also served as proof of ownership on the blockchain.‌

Q: I can imagine her doing something similar by hand. Maybe she produces 5 or 50, not 500. Is that the fundamental difference? ‌

That’s a really good question. Roots bend, twist, and branch while they grow in the real world in patterns defined by Lindenmayer systems (“L-systems”). An artist can’t replicate those by hand, but they can be mathematically modeled, and that’s exactly what the algorithmic model did. With the prints, it looks like you are seeing roots organically emerge from a seed. It’s an amazing use of generative art.‌

Then, thinking from the business side, the efficiency is actually important. If this approach could scale up, it would have a real impact on the art world. Each print sold for $1,000. It’s not an edition; each of the 500 prints is a unique, signed, beautifully printed artwork by Maya Lin. There’s really no other way to deliver something like that at that price point, honestly. ‌

A lot of artists really care about reaching a wider audience through their art. They want people to own their art. The price points for their larger pieces mean that’s not possible. Some artists are interested in generative tools simply as a way to make their work more accessible and affordable. ‌

Q: Leading Pace Verso is only one piece of your job. Would you explain the other role you have?‌

I was hired to do business development and strategy. It’s a pretty unique role within the gallery world. I’m almost like an internal management consultant, helping to identify opportunities—growth opportunities, efficiency opportunities, both internally and externally. ‌

I’ll often work with a big cross-functional team from around the globe to analyze an opportunity and then propose a path forward. Then if we decide to go ahead—and this part is different than my experience in management consulting—I’m part of operationalizing the change. ‌

Q: Does the existence of your role suggest a change in the business of selling art?‌

Selling art is a challenging business. It’s very high touch. Most galleries fail. So it’s unusual—and impressive--that Pace has been successful for over six decades. ‌

Pace has done that by being really smart about identifying great artists and representing them effectively, by building relationships with collectors, and by putting that all together into a profitable business.‌

Over the last 10-plus years, Pace has expanded internationally. With new spaces and leases and global infrastructure come a lot more management decisions that need to be made. It’s useful to have someone with a business background to read the P&L, to negotiate contracts and partnerships, to evaluate new opportunities.‌

Q: How is the commercialization of art impacting artists?‌

Not too long ago, there was a separation of church and state—great artists were removed from the commercial side of things. In part, that was because artists wanted and still do want to be purely art-focused. But also it was as if there was something discordant about an artist being involved in anything commercial. ‌

It’s no longer a secret that art is sold and the selling is what allows artists to keep making art. One example of that would be how many artists are now eager to have their artworks shown at art fairs, which are explicitly commercial spaces for seeing and buying art. ‌

Another example is that auction houses have started to work directly with artists for the first time. Something that concerns me about that is their business model is so transactional. They don’t have the incentive to take that long-term view of what’s good for the artists the way galleries do. ‌

Regardless, many artists are opening up to the commercial aspects of art. Not all artists, and not in all ways, but there’s a clear change from the past. ‌

Q: Where do galleries fit in the ecosystem of the art world?‌

Fundamentally, galleries are the point of connection for artists, collectors, and museums.‌

Galleries have deep relationships with the artists and are typically involved in everything the artist does, from supporting the production of the artworks, to shaping the scope, providing some funding, crafting the messaging, and planning concurrent gallery exhibitions.‌

And a gallery is the only player within the ecosystem set up to own both collector and artist relationships. Sometimes collectors will build relationships with artists, but usually it starts with an introduction from the gallery. Some collectors will have relationships with museums; they might sit on the board. But again, galleries are generally the central point connecting artists, collectors, and museums.‌

Q: Does your experience at Yale SOM show up in the work you’re doing at the Pace Gallery?‌

I learned all the core business skills at Yale SOM—I hadn’t opened a spreadsheet once in undergrad. And more than just business skills, I chose Yale SOM because the Yale School of Art is where the world’s best artists are being trained. I thought it was important to get my training side by side with them. ‌

I spent a lot of time at the School of Art. I took some theory classes, and I went to a lot of studio crits. And now, sure enough, many of the artists I met at Yale are represented by peer galleries. Some may be in the pipeline to join Pace. It’s amazing to see the side-by-side trajectory continue to play out. ‌

Q: What do you find gratifying about being a businessperson in the art world?‌

When I’m supporting artists, if I do what I do really well and they do what they do really well, there’s this “one plus one equals three” element to the work. It’s something I really love and want to always keep at the heart of what I do.‌

I don’t think you would want to be in the art world, even on the commercial side, if you’re just a nuts-and-bolts businessperson. But for me, I think it’s important for society that there are opportunities for great art to be made, seen, and circulated. For artists to build a career, they need a community of people around them providing various kinds of support. What I understand is the commercial underpinning that lets artists sell work, keep their studios going, and keep making new art. What drives me is supporting that process for artists and for the world that gets to see their art.‌