There’s a new arts project in progress that could have massive and positive ramifications for the future of the  street art  market and on the surface it’s one of those ideas that makes so much sense anyone who checks out the site www.streetartdealer.com will immediately think, "why didn’t I think of that?", However it’s taken a great deal of research and development to get the service under way as you will soon learn. In short this is what Street Art Dealer does.

At the website their are currently 5 artists showing their work, Dotmasters, GRL, Inkie, Solo One and Zeus. They’re listing to the side of a Google Maps mash-up that allows anyone passing by to scan their works in situe i.e on a wall, and read their bio, check out their other works or even purchase a piece. That’s it, no art gallery, no smarmy middleman with one eye on the art and the other on their ever bulging bank balance, no snooty woman sitting behind a reception desk looking down on you over their designer specs, no worrying about leaving dirty finger prints all over their pristine white exhibition space, and of course no over inflated price tags.

The graffiti/street art movement, or as some are now describing it "industry" has made some serious in roads into the mainstream arts market over the past few years, and alongside a raft of new and exciting artists and artworks, the prices have been spiralling out of control, mainly due to the greed of a few commercial collectors and galleries who are shifting their finances from the failing property and stock markets into the sexy investment returns afforded by the rise in street art. The problem with this goes way beyond one of philosophy of the movement, to the hard and fast rule that seems to infiltrate every part of the creative industries, the rich are making a killing in more ways than one. Unlike many genres throughout art history graffiti is in essence ‘by the common man for the common man’, those who decide, with no discernable talent or product of their own on offer to ‘play the market’ are for the main part disconnecting the street artist from their audience, crumbling the foundations of a public relationship which has built up against the wishes of the authorities and the establishment over the past few decades.

StreetArtDealer.com with the support of Turner Prize nominee Tomoko Takahashi; artists James Powderley, Zeus, Joseph Watts, Haywood Slucutt, CHU, plus organisations such as Media Sandbox‘s South West development programme, and c6.org plan to extend this bold and innovative initiative at a rate and to an extent that we may very well see the end of the middleman as we know it. This is an all out assault on the outdated and unfair way that art has for many centuries been presented and sold to the public, the elitist factions and their customers concerned solely with art as commodity may at last find themselves disenfranchised from the process once and for all.

‘The system relies on embracing the latest in bar code technology, QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created in Japan in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes. In the UK QR codes, storing addresses and URLs, now appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or on just about any object that people might need information about. The majority of camera phones are now equipped with QR code reader software and can scan a code and instantly launch, and redirect, a phone’s browser to a pre-programmed URL.’

Come and witness the future of the graffiti arts market at www.streetartdealer.com
 

This post is tagged art marketing, art sales, gallery, graffiti art, software, streetartdealer, streetartdealer.com