Convergence culture: The new web is helping artists make connections - and sales, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.
What normally grips computer geeks is raw power, but at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas they were focused on the visual impact. The show was chock-full of new interfaces and good-looking screens. But what about those real masters of the visual, the fine artists? How are they affected by the trend toward media convergence that was getting the geeks so excited?
Traditionally artists, like writers, have relied for their success on an intermediary between them and the public. While the writer has to be taken on by an agent, and then a publisher, the artist relies on being spotted by a gallery.
Posting pictures of your paintings to the web is an obvious but not an easy alternative to the gallery system. In principle it merely transfers the arduous task of building an audience from handshaking in the physical world, through the support of a gallery owner, to the virtual world and oneself. Yet artists have begun using the broadband web to great effect, transforming their career prospects in the process.
Artist and accidental broadband entrepreneur Amie Gillingham runs a service called EBSQ from her home in rural Pennsylvania, and she has 20,000 artist members, 9,000 of them paying around €6 a month for EBSQ's services. What is EBSQ? A place for artists to bypass the galleries and become their own representatives.
It began as an eBay cooperative seven years ago. EBay is a logical recourse for artists who want to sell their own work. Place a picture of an artwork on eBay, set a reserve price and art lovers can bid to buy it. The problem is, who is going to notice? There are literally millions of objects for sale on eBay.
To get round that, EBSQ organised what's known as a simple tagging system. When artists sell on eBay they can now use a tag, or keyword, EBSQ. Say you have a watercolour landscape of the Cliffs of Moher for sale. Rather than get lost among the millions, if you are an EBSQ member, you can tag the description of your painting EBSQ. Over seven years EBSQ has proselytised the brand. Art buyers know if they want to buy at eBay, life is easier if you search using the EBSQ tag.
The second part of the EBSQ strategy is to make sure its members score high in Google's search engine returns. Now that it has 20,000 members, EBSQ also has 20,000 incoming links from those artists to its site. Incoming links are what help a website go to the top of Google.
Does it make a difference? "Oh I'd say it's transformed the way artists represent themselves," says Amie quoting one member who regularly earns $10,000 a month, in part because of the support of the service. Of course she has a vested interest in saying that, but just looking at the simple mechanics of EBSQ two things stand out.
The service has captured the essence of how marketing over the web works. But the service is replicable. If somebody wanted to go out and start a rival, they could. EBSQ succeeds because it's logical and because its members value it. The puzzle is that no Irish artists belong to EBSQ.
The Irish art world has moved online but in a piecemeal fashion. Groups such as the Original Print gallery in Dublin have a strong web presence, and I spoke with one of the artists represented there, Cork-based Paul Larocque, who also exhibits at Cork Printmakers. "In general we haven't made the best of the web," says Paul, who believes artists still need galleries.
Amie says the key is relentless self-promotion, a tactic that's made easier through online services. "Irish artists tend to be self-effacing," says Paul. "Just go to England and the States. They're pushing at you even if it's bad art." But the key is not just to harness confidence and technology. What EBSQ relies on is strength in numbers - the human network of 20,000 people obeying the simple rules of web commerce and linking to each other. In a converged world the solution for Irish artists may well lie in these wider networks rather than in home-grown initiatives.
• Haydn Shaughnessy edits the online magazine wripe.net. Next: how the web influences TV drama.
Words in your ear
Convergence: The gradual assimilation of different media so that TVs behave like computers, computers like TVs, it signals the dependence of all media on computing power and broadband communications.
Tagging: Tags are an easy way to build an index or classification system. They are like keywords, a way to describe a product or a piece of content with a few words. Search engines are coming to rely on them more and more.
Links: All websites rely on links to other websites. As a general rule it is valuable to have people link to your site because it drives other readers/viewers to you.
