Discover more from BoldBrush
The 21st century started in earnest in 2020. Here’s why that’s great news for artists.
The seeds of the 21st century were, of course, sown in the late 1990’s when the Internet started seeing mainstream adoption, and, for over 25 years we have watched astonishing increases in deployment, bandwidth, and access to computing devices spread across the globe. Innovative founders built amazing software and technology and, in the process, the world economy was slowly remade to revolve around the network. The way people work, and the way people live has been changed during this fourth revolution of humanity: the information revolution.
But until 2020, we, collectively, still had one foot in the 20th century. Even though all the technology needed was in place by about 2010, we still lived and worked largely as we had always lived and worked.
Then the pandemic hit us.
And every technological and social trend that had been slowly transforming the world instantly accelerated forward in time from the future to the present.
Suddenly remote work was not only possible, but became the norm. We all started having groceries and food delivered. Our entertainment shifted from going out on Friday nights to staying in and streaming video and online interactions. Trust in national governments was eroded. New forms of Internet native money, such as Bitcoin, are increasingly considered mainstream. We now have meetings and legal proceedings over Zoom. We purchase real estate without ever sitting at a closing table. Investors no longer require meeting company founders in person. And at BoldBrush, we’ve hired people we’ve never met in person.
We can debate whether these changes are largely good or bad, but there is no denying that they have happened and life today is fully a 21st century experience. We’ve truly, finally, left the 20th century in the rear view mirror (with a few exceptions that are beyond the scope of this article).
This acceleration of the future into the present has wrought another change - and this one is important for artists - it has enabled, really for the first time, what is being called “the creator economy.” And visual artists are the nobility of the creator economy.
Many people lost some or all of their income during 2020 as businesses shut down. And many of those people looked at their options and realized that everything they needed to simply and effectively start their own one-person creative business was now in place. Everything from marketing your creative works, to accepting payments, to delivering your products digitally - the entire stack you need to run a creative business online now exists. It’s all affordable, relatively easy, and you can get started with a click of your mouse or even a tap on your phone.
And more importantly, all of these new opportunities are unlocked by the sheer scale of the network of the Internet. By “network”, I mean the massive number of people who are connected to the Internet and therefore, the number of people you can reach from your desktop computer or the phone in your pocket.
Now, for the first time in history, technology has connected nearly everyone on the planet.
The fact that you can now access all the technology you need to show and sell your visual art, combined with the fact that you can, in theory, communicate with anyone on planet earth represents a fundamental shift in the history of art and creates a huge golden opportunity for artists.
This ubiquitous level of connectedness, combined with easy online tools has truly democratized access to the art market and made it available to all visual artists.
People and companies have talked for years about “democratizing art”, and what they usually have meant by that phrase is to “make it possible for normal people to find and purchase original art.” But that narrative has never made sense to me. I owned an art gallery in the 1990s and early 2000s and I can assure you that plenty of “normal people” bought art. If anyone walked in with money and wanted to purchase a painting, we would sell it to them. Normal people have always had plenty of access to art.
The real part of the art market that needed democratization wasn’t the collector side, but the artist side.
We would sell paintings to anybody who wanted to purchase one but we wouldn’t accept any artist who applied into the gallery. We were gatekeepers. And artists outside of the gallery system were essentially out of luck. But starting with the internet of the late 1990s, that started to change. Artists could show their art online directly. And every passing year added more needed pieces to the technology stack and connected more and more people to the network.
And today, gatekeepers have now largely been removed by this technology. And those that remain are increasingly struggling and are relatively easy to bypass for most artists.
The coming change was so apparent, that I quit the gallery business in 2005 and dedicated my life to building the infrastructure and tools that support this democratization of art. I didn’t want to be a gatekeeper. I wanted to see an explosion of art and beauty. And, for sixteen years now, I’ve been building tools and technology to put the power in the hands of the artists.
The Sovereign Artist Era Begins
Since the big shift in 2020, we’ve left the era of gatekeepers behind and entered what I call The Sovereign Artist Era.
And finally, this beautiful dream of democratizing art is happening.
I fully believe that we are now on the cusp of an explosion of creativity in the world of visual art.
More artists than ever will be creating more art than we’ve ever seen - using both traditional and newer digital mediums. And just like the explosion of science in the 20th century led to ever-increasing knowledge and technology, the explosion of art in the 21st century will lead to ever-increasing beauty.
In other words, we are at the very beginning of a new global enlightenment. A new renaissance.
We are at the beginning of Renaissance 2.0
And just like the original Renaissance and Enlightenment tore down existing power structures and remade the world in a way that opened opportunity to vastly more people, Renaissance 2.0 has made a new type of artist possible - a Sovereign Artist.
The trends I outlined above are accelerating. More technology arrives daily and at a dizzying and increasing pace. And each new technology puts more tools in the hands of artists.
This is changing everything. Middlemen are going away. Gatekeepers no longer exist. Art galleries are a dying breed. The "art market" is no longer controlled by a handful of dealers in New York city but is, instead, expanding across the internet at a growing rate.
Hence, we’ve entered the Sovereign Artist Era.
This era is the culmination of centuries of technological advances, bit by bit, expanding the art market.
Sovereign Artists across the globe are already taking advantage of these changes. They are selling directly from their websites. Instagram has replaced galleries as a channel for discovery. Print on demand technologies allow artists to sell an image an unlimited number of times. And NFTs are taking what Print on Demand started and pushing it even further.
Being a sovereign artist requires being bold. Letting go of the past and letting go of your fear. But artists have always been bold. And Bold Sovereign Artists have ditched galleries, gatekeepers, physical portfolios and have replaced them with Instagram, personal storefronts, NFTs and entire platforms dedicated to selling art online.
If you’re ready to let go over your fear and boldly step into Renaissance 2.0, becoming a member of the Sovereign Artist Club is a good first step.
As a matter of fact, we just posted, for club members, our video version of the step-by-step guide that some of our Sovereign Artists have used to conduct a studio sale netting tens of thousands of dollars - all online on Instagram and via email.
It’s now available here:
If you’re not yet a member, you might consider joining.
Thank you so much for being a subscriber.
Clintavo