Crowd-funded artwork - is it possible?
Every artist needs income, most don't ask for much besides making their art and a living. Unfortunately for many members of the public art isn't a necessity and for more the purchase of art is a luxury that is difficult to justify (especially in the current economic climate).
With the meteoric rise of crowd-funding and the associated platforms on the web ( kickstarter et al), is there an opportunity for artists to create artwork that a mass audience will find fulfilling enough to help with the associated costs? What does the artist have to offer their micro-patrons for their initial support?
Process
When looking at crowd-funding through popular website Kickstarter , the process is clearly defined and straight forward, they offer suggestions to help make your project a success and spell out the conditions of holding the funding call on their site. For the privilege of running your campaign Kickstarter will take a small percentage of the overall amount raised but only when your predetermined funding goal has been reached. Don't reach the goal - don't get the cash.
What to ask for... CASH
Although love makes the world go round it only goes so far when creating artwork. MONEY helps take inspiration and creativity into the physical world, whether it is $300 for supplies of an ephemeral installation or $80,000 for a permanent public sculpture installation.
What to offer
This is where things can get difficult. Say you need $4000 for materials for a major artwork you wish to create. You break the call for funding down into small manageable bites.
- $5 gets a thank you
- $15 gets a postcard
- $50 gets a invite to the opening (et al)
- $100 gets a limited editon screenprint (et al)
- $500 gets a personal thank you and your name added to the base of the sculpture (et al)
But with rewards there are costs. a postcard printed - $1 + postage $0.60 so you already spent $1.60 of the donation on materials for the thank you. If we don't factor in time. but remove the commission that the website applies you have already spent $2 of your kind micro-patron's money without investing it in the artwork.
To balance that, they (the patron) is getting something tangible for their investment. The above rewards seem plausible to me on a small scale but what if we scale the funding goal up, to $40,000. How many micro-patrons are needed to fulfil the funding goal.
- $5 = 8,000
- $15 = 2,667
- $50 = 800
- $100 = 400
- $500 = 80
Again is seems possible (given a world wide economy) but when you factor in the funding campaign has a time limit, often only 4 weeks, It starts to get a little trickier. Then when looking at the time it would take to sort 2,667 postcards, the financial gain has suddenly been wiped out through your eagerness to return something to your micro-patrons. YIKES.
The obvious answer is to up the investment threshold (ie. to receive a postcard you have to invest $50 not $15) but this may start to restrict your potential pool of investors.
Decisions
With [generally] less transferable mediums, fine arts will find it difficult to compete with other art forms, such as music and film, that can offer more content more easily than object based art forms. It would be far easier to offer an MP3 download to your micro-patrons of your album they helped fund if you were recording artist.
It is possible that object based artist look further a field to offer their potential micro-patrons tangible rewards for their assistance but without offsetting the level of funding they have requested.
Perhaps offering a MP4 (video) download of the making of the artwork or a special never seen images sent to their email of images suitable for their desktop or iPhone. Giving their micro-patrons a unique experience but without sacrificing the invested funds to do so.
Ownership
This is a tricky area, and must be given some serious attention by the artist. They need to specify exactly what the micro-patron is getting, and also define what the micro-patron IS NOT getting. ie. For $XX you receive a limited ed print derived from the final artwork, you do not receive part ownership in the final artwork that is the subject of this funding.
If the work is for sale, the issue over ownership must be crystal clear, as the prospective owner of the artwork will not be interested if others believe they have ownership of the work.
It is also prudent to itemise exactly what you are going to use the funding on. From my perspective I see the crowd-funding of specific materials/processes as an obvious area to explore, while asking for funds for tools or to cover your time may not be so successful.
