Over the past few months, Phillip Williams and I have been working with one of the world's most important art galleries, Material Matters Contemporary Glass Gallery [1], in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to develop their virtual community. The site has been up for about a month now, and has generated lots of global traffic (and congratulations to the gallery on that), and this weekend the site really paid off, as we can attribute a first major sale of art by Material Matters to the fact the new website exists - the buyers (from Cleveland, as a matter of fact), saw two major works by an amazing Canadian glass artist they otherwise would not know, and they bought his only available work I know of in the world. The Canadian glass artist made money, the gallery made money, Phillip and I made money, and the collectors in Cleveland got two amazing works of art (for a great price), shown in their new NEO home above. This is just a small beginning for Material Matters' virtual community, which already represents the greatest glass artists of Canada, as they are in the process of going glocal in many important ways, in the process improving Toronto's Glocal arts economy. NEO arts leadership may learn more here...
These collectors are not suddently converted into Canada-only glass collectors. They will buy another work from local glass artist Brent Young - they have one by him already and like his lampwork - but there is no intelligent way for them to buy his work locally (they could see and buy his work in Santa Fe [2], where he has competent representation, I suppose, but why pay $9,000 commission to a gallery in New Mexico for having the wisdom to promote a NEO artist there and online, when the collectors know and live a few miles from Brent).
These collectors would buy other local work online, if local arts worked onlne. But it does not. What is starting to work online is the virtual community we are creating for the arts industry in Toronto, because we use good technology there in innovative ways, and are working to market that. NEO needs to do the same, and we will help NEO. We have $20 million a year in fresh, good sin-tax funds and no good resaons to spend it on anything in particular - that is in fact a good starting point.
Imagine a world where every artist in NEO was provided with optimal technology, and some hand holding, and empowered to sell their art at the Glocal level. Imagine money spent on well represented art now sold from Toronto to Cleveland collectors instead staying in Cleveland. Imagine NEO competing in the glocal arts market with our NEO artists.
Cuyahoga County voters just agreed to give some people (no one knows who) $20 million a year to make art work in NEO. Here is one example of local entrepreneurs making art work in the Glocal economy in Canada, and we will be very vocal about how to make art work here.