Artsy (website)

Last updated

Artsy
Genre
Founded2 March 2009  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
FounderCarter Cleveland
Headquarters,
United States
Key people
  • Mike Steib, CEO
  • Carter Cleveland, founder, and executive chairman
  • Sebastian Cwilich, co-founder and former president and COO
  • Devang Thakkar, former VP of Marketplace and Head of Auctions
  • Wendi Murdoch, co-founder and board director
  • Dasha Zhukova, co-founder and investor
Website www.artsy.net

Artsy, formally known as Art.sy Inc is a New York City based online art brokerage. [1] Its main business is developing and hosting website for numerous galleries as well as selling art for them. [2] It utilizes a search engine and database to draw connections and map relationships among works of art. [3]

Contents

The brokerage was founded by Carter Cleveland, a Princeton University computer science graduate. [4] It is currently led by Jeffrey Yin, who was appointed CEO in June 2024. [5]

History

ARTSY Headquarters (35063018534) ARTSY Headquarters (35063018534).jpg
ARTSY Headquarters (35063018534)

Carter Cleveland, the son of an art historian, [6] founded Artsy during his senior year at Princeton University and worked on the site from his dorm room. [7]  Cleveland's goal was for the site to serve as a place where users could discover art online. [8]   In May 2010, Artsy participated in the New York City conference, TechCrunch Disrupt, where they competed in the Startup Battlefield and received the Yahoo! Rookie Award! [9]   A year later, the team demoed Artsy at the Beyeler Foundation at Art Basel (June 15, 2011). [10] [11]

In November 2011, Artsy closed a round of financing from Eric Schmidt, Wendi Deng Murdoch, Dasha Zhukova, Larry Gagosian, Jim Breyer, Joshua Kushner, Jack Dorsey, Chris Dixon, and Dave Morin. [12]

In 2019, it was reported that in 2018 the data for 1,070,000 accounts were stolen from Artsy. [13] The information included the name, email address, location, IP address and password SHA-512 hashed with a salt. The passwords were not stored in cleartext, but an email from Artsy encouraged users to change their passwords. [14]

Corporate affairs

Financials

Since launching, Artsy has raised a total of $100 million from individuals in the worlds of art, tech, and media. [15] [16] [2]

Products (website and app)

Artsy currently features over 1,000,000 works by 100,000 artists on its site through partnered galleries. [17] [18] As of March 2018, Artsy averaged 2.3 million unique visitors each month. [19]

The Art Genome Project

When Artsy launched in October 2011, its main product was The Art Genome Project — "an ongoing study of the characteristics that distinguish and connect works of art." [20]   A collaboration between art historians and engineers, and led by art historian Matthew Israel, The Art Genome Project drew upon art-historical scholarship and artificial intelligence to assign values to artwork based on eventually as many as 1211 characteristics or "genes." [21] [22]   [23] These categories ranged from color and period to "Technique: Documentary Photography" and "Group Portrait." [21] [22]   The Art Genome Project aimed to help users uncover works of art based on personal taste and preference to facilitate the discovery of art. [20] [21] [22] As of 2020 the AGP was on hold for restructuring.

Reception

According to Wired , Artsy "has the potential to introduce each buyer to a wide range of artists and artworks, all of them related in some way and—this is key—most of them unknown and otherwise inaccessible to any but the most knowledgeable connoisseurs." [11]

Critics of Art.sy label The Art Genome Project forced and artificial and point to the difficulty of representing the full experience of art online. [24]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendi Deng Murdoch</span> Chinese-American businesswoman

Wendi Deng Murdoch is a Chinese-born American entrepreneur, investor, film producer, and collector of Chinese contemporary art.

Pandora is a subscription-based music streaming service owned by the broadcasting corporation Sirius XM that is presently based in Oakland, California inside of the United States. The service carries a focus on recommendations based on the "Music Genome Project", which is a means of classifying individual songs by musical traits such as genres and shared instrumentation. The service originally launched in the consumer market as an internet radio service that would generate personalized channels based on these traits as well as specific tracks liked by the user; this service is available in an advertising-supported tier and additionally a subscription-based version. In 2017, the service launched Pandora Premium, which is an on-demand version of the service more in line with contemporary competitors.

Mint, also known as Intuit Mint and formerly known as Mint.com, was a personal financial management website and mobile app for the US and Canada produced by Intuit, Inc..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Art Basel</span> Swiss annual art fair

Art Basel is a for-profit, privately owned and managed, international art fair staged annually in Basel (Switzerland), Miami Beach (USA), Hong Kong (China) and Paris (France). Art Basel provides a platform for galleries to show and sell their work to buyers, and works in collaboration with host cities' local institutions to help grow and develop art programs.

Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.

Darya "Dasha" Alexandrovna Zhukova is a Russian-American art collector, businesswoman, magazine editor, and socialite. She is the founder of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Garage Magazine.

RockYou was a company that developed widgets for MySpace and implemented applications for various social networks and Facebook. Since 2014, it has engaged primarily in the purchases of rights to classic video games; it incorporates in-game ads and re-distributes the games.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OMGPop</span> Game studio acquired by Zynga Inc. in 2013

OMGPop, stylized as OMGPOP and formerly known as i'minlikewithyou or iilwy, was an independent flash game studio. In 2013, it was purchased by Zynga Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imgur</span> American online image hosting service

Imgur is an American online image sharing and image hosting service with a focus on social gossip that was founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009. The service has hosted viral images and memes, particularly those posted on Reddit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LivingSocial</span> Company purchased by Groupon

LivingSocial is an online marketplace that allows its registered users to buy and share things to do in their city. Formerly headquartered in Washington, D.C., LivingSocial had roughly 70 million members around the world in 2013. The company shrank from a peak of 4,500 employees in 2011 to about 200 in 2016. LivingSocial was purchased by Groupon in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Facebook</span> History of the social networking service

Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.

Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation company based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in New York, Vancouver, and Beijing. Its software, also known as Flipboard, was first released in July 2010. It aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites, and other websites, presents it in magazine format, and allows users to "flip" through the articles, images, and videos being shared. Readers can also save stories into Flipboard magazines. As of March 2016 the company claims there have been 28 million magazines created by users on Flipboard. The service can be accessed via web browser, or by a Flipboard application for Microsoft Windows and macOS, and via mobile apps for iOS and Android. The client software is available at no charge and is localized in 21 languages.

GroupMe is a mobile group messaging app owned by Microsoft. It was launched in May 2010 by the private company GroupMe. In August 2011, GroupMe delivered over 100 million messages each month and by June 2012, that number jumped to 550 million. In 2013, GroupMe had over 12 million registered users.

Tresorit is a cloud storage platform that offers functions for administration, storage, synchronization, and transfer of data using end-to-end encryption. More than 13,000 companies use Tresorit to protect confidential data and share information securely. It is also used widely by Government organizations and NGOs as well as privacy-conscious individuals to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access and data-breaches.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Art Genome Project</span> Classification system for art and design and technological framework for search on Artsy

The Art Genome Project is the search technology behind Artsy.

The history of Twitter, later known as X, can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Odeo.

Garage is a biannual publication dedicated to contemporary art and fashion. It was founded as Garage Magazine by then couple Dasha Zhukova and Jorge Jimenez Neubauer Torres after living for four years in California. They lived in Los Angeles and always were extremely happy with the biennales and how respected the exhibitions were coming up with the idea of Garage.

Match Group, Inc. is an American internet and technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, and other dating global brands. The company was owned by IAC until July 2020 when Match Group was spun off as a separate, public company. As of 2019, the company had 9.3 million subscribers, of which 4.6 million were in North America. Japan is the company's second largest market, after the United States.

Misha Nonoo is a US-based British-Bahraini fashion designer, best known for her eponymous line of women's ready-to-wear.

References

  1. Razumovskaya, Olga (July 18, 2017). "Artsy Draws $50 Million in Funding". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  2. 1 2 "Online art marketplace Artsy raises $50M at $275M valuation to double down on auctions". TechCrunch. Retrieved March 8, 2021.
  3. Chad Hanna, James. "The Power of Suggestion". www.blouinartinfo.com. BLOUINARTINFO. Archived from the original on March 13, 2016. Retrieved February 3, 2011.
  4. Miller, M.H. (June 14, 2011). "Point, Click, Collect: Art.sy Brings the Art World Online… Again". START-UPS. The New York Observer . ISSN   1052-2948. LCCN   sn88099997. OCLC   1010541123 . Retrieved June 14, 2011.
  5. Cassady, Daniel (June 17, 2024). "Artsy CFO Jeffrey Yin Moves into Chief Executive Role". ARTnews.com. Retrieved July 5, 2024.
  6. Shnayerson, Michael (March 15, 2018). "Artsy's Wendi Murdoch Just Wants to Sell You a Painting". Town & Country (published April 2018). ISSN   0040-9952. LCCN   57039998. OCLC   760318372 . Retrieved May 9, 2019.
  7. Allison, Chelsea (November 28, 2011). "New Deal: Art.sy's Innovative Online Take on Contemporary Art Sales". Vogue . ISSN   0042-8000. LCCN   08036997. OCLC   812147634. Archived from the original on September 18, 2012. Retrieved August 31, 2012.
  8. Wallis, Stephen (June–July 2011). "Who is Art.sy?". Art in America . ISSN   0004-3214. LCCN   14011738. OCLC   818946839.
  9. "Yahoo! Disrupts TechCrunch". ycorpblog.com. May 26, 2010.
  10. "Dasha Zhukova's Art.sy Site Launches to Celeb-Packed Crowd". blogs.artinfo.com. June 15, 2011. Archived from the original on August 20, 2012. Retrieved August 31, 2012.
  11. 1 2 Mufti, Shahan (November 23, 2011). "Art.sy's 'Genome' Predicts What Paintings You Will Like". Wired . ISSN   1078-3148. LCCN   94659076. OCLC   24479723 . Retrieved March 9, 2020.
  12. Frommer, Dan. "Eric Schmidt, Wendi Murdoch, And Other Huge Names Are Betting On Art.sy To Shake Up The Art Market". Business Insider. Retrieved March 25, 2024.
  13. Williams, Chris (February 11, 2019). "Artsy Alerts Users of Data-Security Breach; Report Claims Hacked Information for Sale". The Register . Retrieved May 26, 2020.
  14. Greenburger, Alex (February 14, 2019). "Artsy Alerts Users of Data-Security Breach; Report Claims Hacked Information for Sale". ARTnews . Retrieved May 26, 2020.
  15. Voien, Guelda (February 6, 2017). "As Online Art Auction Space Shrinks, Is Artsy the Heir Apparent?". Observer . Retrieved March 7, 2017.
  16. Schonfeld, Erick (November 3, 2011). "Art.sy Raises $6 Million Series A From Peter Thiel, Thrive Capital, Wendi Murdoch And Dasha Zhukova". TechCrunch . Retrieved August 31, 2012.
  17. Goel, Vindu (October 28, 2015). "Purchasing Fine Art Is Increasingly Just a Click Away". The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved July 25, 2016.
  18. Hamilton, Anita (May 25, 2012). "Fine Art for Everyone: Five Cutting-Edge Sites for Collectors and Newbies Alike". Time .
  19. Schuetz, Molly (March 27, 2018). "New York's Artsy Is Making It Even Easier to Buy Art Online". Bloomberg News . Retrieved March 9, 2020.
  20. 1 2 De Leon, Don Michael Acelar (March 29, 2012). "THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE ONLINE ART DATABASE MAPS CONNECTIONS BETWEEN WORKS". www.psfk.com. Retrieved August 31, 2012.
  21. 1 2 3 Wolfe, Alexandra (March 1, 2012). "Buying Art on the Internet". Departures . Retrieved August 31, 2012.
  22. 1 2 3 Jeffries, Adrianne (March 23, 2012). "A Peek at Art.sy's Much-Anticipated Beta". betabeat.com.
  23. Ryzik, Melena (October 8, 2012). "Online, a Genome Project for the World of Art". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved July 5, 2024.
  24. Hamilton, Anita (June 4, 2012). "Works for Me". Time. Archived from the original on May 25, 2012. Retrieved August 31, 2012.