This week I watched this BBC4 documentary, ‘The Great Contemporary Art Bubble,’ by Ben Lewis an art writer for the London Evening Standard. Here’s the trailer on YouTube:

The entire program is still available on BBC iPlayer so if you have a spare hour, it’s worth finding out whether Damien Hirst did sell his diamond skull for US$50 million as the headlines said he did and how the auction houses are adopting Private Equity-esque practices when they underwrite sales, make loans and act as principals rather than agents.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kmt51

Obviously, I watched the documentary as part of my ongoing research for Project ART. The auction house system is clearly not an efficient market one since the inferences from the documentary are:

(1.) a handful of gallery owners participate in auctions to support inflated prices for certain artists;

(2.) some buyers are assisted during acquisitions of works via the auction house’s lending practices; and

(3.) some form of oligopolistic mechanism is operating.

From my perspective this represents an opportunity to develop a new model for the promotion, sale and exhibition of contemporary art which leverages the Internet and better private equity practices. There are corporate frameworks which can be introduced to make the acquisition, sale and valuation of art independent and accountable in a way which isn’t wholly contingent on the auction houses and art cliques.

Art appreciation and value can be democratized — much in the same way opinion and commentary (politics, tech launches, cookery, television, etc.) on the Internet is democratizing.

The missing elements for the art sector include:

* How can we quantify this value on a democratic basis?

* What are the financial instruments that can be applied to diversify and underwrite the risks of acquiring a piece of art which is above a US$N valuation threshold?

* What are the legal parameters and triggers that take effect during licensing/assignment of rights to produce and monetize digital versions?

* How can a charitable aspect be incorporated (e.g. so that at least 15% of net profits is allocated to nominated charities)?

It’s by no means an easy challenge. However, it is DO-ABLE and I tend to be extremely pragmatic about challenges. The starting point is always to be acutely aware of the existing limitations of a system and to go in search of focussed and specific materials that will genuinely help you think through to realizing the solution(s). These materials are ones I classify as “pivots and torques” — in other words, they’re the keys which exert the forces that open the doors to the secret chambers that house innovation and Holy Grails in your own mind.

I’m fairly happy the Project ART business model I’ve conceived is a compelling vision and proposition; the appropriate pivots and torques are being sought and applied.

In this post I’m going to broadly cover how to adapt Bloomberg-esque stock trading graphs and transform them into the art auction world of the Christies and Sothebys, in an innovative way (which may make eBay seem anachronistic). Now, this is what a typical Bloomberg chart and an eBay auction format look like:

I’ve been using Bloomberg for well over a decade and, personally, I find Google Finance a much more intuitive and navigable layout:

GOOG is clearly attempting to take best-of-breed Adobe Flex, blogging software, dynamic RSS feeds and more to create a fusion portal for day/semi-professional traders and others interested in companies and their stocks. Google Finance is a great example of cross-pollination which works. Some of GOOG’s other properties have not quite managed to be fertilized in this way for monetization…………..yet, but the Google Finance team certainly know what they’re doing.

CROSS-POLLINATION IS GOOD

Actually, the more I see of these best-of-breed portals the happier I am.

One of the things which has interested me since childhood is how to adapt knowhow from one field and apply it to others. This, I believe, is how a person cross-trains their brain to anticipate and solve current and future problems. It’s how I’m going to think out what measures are needed to “technologically twain” Web 2.0 technologies with what is, currently, the closed and vaguely restrictive business that is the international art market.

THE MIND OF A CURIOUS CHILD

Before that, a wee bit about my personal journey and realization that everything is relative and related to everything else, that there is some Unified Grand Solution with components which are serendipitously synched with each other, and that each of our lives is about piecing our paths ahead — from a priori knowledge acquired, assimilated and attuned.

This forms our personal strategic approach: in life, in work, in play. In its optimal form it’s……….WISDOM.

THE ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT OF A CURIOUS CHILD

For me, playing team sports as a child wasn’t simply about the health benefits involved, which my parents encouraged, or to delay doing my homework. Extra-curricular activities meant I usually got home around eight o’clock, Mon-Fri and weekends were dedicated to Chinese school, so it’s a wonder I did any h/w in English school — much less got As for it! LOL.

Sport was principally about learning how each player is co-ordinated into an overall team strategy, the sequence of ball passing and tactical persuasion needed to move towards the understanding of team goals and then converting those hours of training into achieving collective objectives: win the game and bring honor to our school and sports teacher(s) or lose with good sportsmanship and try better next championship.

This translated in my young mind as, “How to get the best out of a collection of concepts: game technicalities and rules, people motivation and visual-spatial anticipation and flow of play.” Of and in themselves, people are also a “collection of concepts”, btw.

PUTTING CHILDHOOD LEARNING INTO ADULT PRACTICE

The childhood discipline of proactive perception and practice later helped me to grasp complex economics / mathematical / biochemical / physics concepts — like “How is this cross product related to the corollary on the preceding page?” and “What are the intermediate steps to get from an alcohol to a ketone?” and “In the Mundell-Fleming model, if the average savings increase by X%, how much will the government need to adjust base interest rates to ensure the liquidity of money point doesn’t migrate where it will affect inflation and its contingent wages?”

Very early on I grasped that the world must work according to some form of symbiotic strategy. This realization was partially due to my father teaching me how to play chess when I was 5, so I was exposed to the concept that every piece has a direct and indirect connection to another piece and it’s important to be able to see the entire landscape you’re playing on, all the binomials of possible moves and how specifically they’re inter-related. Chess is a complex game for a 5 year-old to grasp and I’d probably attribute it to helping me in ways well beyond being able to beat my father in the second game and thereafter.

It taught me that what are seemingly discrete pieces can be combined in a matrix of possible moves and that there are always more than one solution to arrive at a win (or a gracious lose and………learn from it!).

Additionally, the way my parents taught me about Nature’s cycles (wind, water, earth, fire) and how radicals in Chinese calligraphy can be transposed to create other (sometimes new) characters meant that I was given the assurance it’s good to cross-pollinate constructs if the end result is more holistic, functions more efficiently and is more readily understood than the individual parts.

Strategic thinking becomes a natural and organic personal process — as second nature as breathing — if a person trains their brain sufficiently and efficiently, and are open to improving from mistakes. I, unequivocally, believe that each piece of knowledge a person acquires in life isn’t supposed to be put into some kind of glass cabinet for posterity or to be used for ill and nor is it designed to be a static and isolated event.

It’s supposed to be systematically filtered, conjoined with other discrete pieces and metamorphosed into transposed meaning to produce implementable solutions for the greater good.

APPLYING INTELLIGENT INNOVATION

My business partner(s) and I have been going through my most recent iteration of the business model for Project ART. They’ve been somewhat surprised at how I’ve turned the constructs around. That’s what happens when you’re a trained corporate strategist and adopt approaches which are as creative as they are technical and financial. Somehow the component spheres can fission and fuse in a way which makes sense, generates revenue, rewards user-members and is do-able.

So what am I cooking in my code bunker? How about something like this…………