Myartspace

» see myartspace.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

2006 was the year every category got its own version of a profile page. Musicians already had one, and if you made paintings there was now a place to put them where the layout was somebody else's problem. Myartspace was the art world's entry in that race, and it launched in May of that year with the reasonable belief that the internet was about to do to galleries what it had just done to record shops.

Catherine McCormack-Skiba had incorporated it in 2005 under Catmacart Corporation. The pitch to an artist was straightforward enough. You got a portfolio that lived at a fixed address where people searching for the kind of work you made could find it, and if somebody wanted to buy a piece you did not need a gallery taking half of it. By 2008 the site was holding more than 500,000 images of contemporary work, from a membership that ran to roughly forty thousand people.

It was not a company that sat still. There was an annual scholarship competition, free to enter and open to art students anywhere in the world, paying five thousand dollars for first place and two thousand for second. There were partnerships at Bridge Art Fair and at Aqua Art Miami, which is a serious address for a website to turn up at. Mashable listed it in 2009 among the virtual galleries worth an artist's time.

None of that is my world. I have never made a painting or tried to sell one, and the closest I get to the argument is knowing what it feels like to have your work sit somewhere that somebody else owns. What I can read from the outside is the ending, and the ending is the part everybody in that membership still talks about.

In January 2012 the site stopped. There was no announcement and no thirty days to get your files out. The domain resolved to a GoDaddy parking page. Members received email inviting them to sign up at ArtWanted.com, a competing site, which is how a good many of them learned that the place holding their portfolio had closed. Artlyst reported on 23 January that a statement was expected that week. As far as the record shows, it never came.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a portfolio page was worth ~

The bet underneath Myartspace was that discovery was the bottleneck in the art trade. Get the work visible and the buyer will find it, cut out the gallery and the artist keeps the money. It is a clean argument and it was wrong in a specific way: in art, the gallery is not a distribution channel, it is the thing certifying that the work is worth the price. Remove it and you have not disintermediated anybody, you have removed the price.

So the sites that tried this all found the same floor. Enormous supply and real traffic, with transactions that stayed small or moved offline the moment they got serious. Half a million images is a lot of art. It is not by itself a market.

~ the scholarship ~

The competition is the part of this history worth keeping. Starting in 2008 it paid five thousand dollars to a first place and scaled down to one thousand for a third, across undergraduate and graduate categories, with no entry fee. For a student that is rent, and for a website of that size it is a genuine amount of money to hand out annually rather than spend on advertising.

It also tells you what the company thought it was. Not a listings service, a patron. Which is a good instinct and a difficult one to fund from a business that was never clearly making money in the first place.

~ the email members got ~

The exit is what makes this a grave rather than a footnote. A site holding the primary portfolio of tens of thousands of artists went dark without a sentence of warning, and the notification event was a marketing email from somebody else's company. Whatever the arrangement behind that was, the effect on a member was identical: your work is gone and a stranger is offering to host the next copy.

This is why people who lived through that era keep their own files. Not out of nostalgia and not out of distrust of any particular company, but because the failure mode of a hosted portfolio is not a slow decline you can watch coming. It is a Tuesday when the address stops resolving.

~ the blog outlived the site ~

Myartspace ran a companion blog on Blogspot, and it was better read than the gallery in the end, full of interviews and arguments about where the art market was going. That blog is still sitting there, on free hosting, years after the paid infrastructure it was built to promote stopped existing.

It is not the only grave on this site where the marketing outlived the product. It happens often enough to be a rule: the cheapest thing a company builds is usually the last thing standing, because nobody has to pay a bill to keep it up.

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