Visit, Inc.

In 2017, we'd successfully "launched" an arts-based start-up in Hauser & Wirth's Roth Bar. By 2020, the Roth Bar was closed; the start-up dissolved-- COVID-19 having squeezed, amongst other benefits, free internet from the Blue Chip arts sector.

It turns out that art doesn't depend on the internet anymore than it depends on money. Somewhere in this proposition is the distinction between a tool and a product, a platform and a service; perhaps money and markets on a macroscale, but maybe also, perhaps, the petty distinctions we make in defense of Capitalized Title.

These pages don't so much catalogue an adult life at the bleeding edge of art and tech as they do perform the kind of zero-proof, deadpan conceptual fitness required of the contemporary artist today. It's yet unclear whether or not recent forays into product development could ironically, or post-ironically, be construed as a Post-Studio critical practice. I don't really care. What's interesting to me is the ontology demanded of a novel permissioning system when what's attempted is the closure of the loop between

Efforts to systematically engineer a networked environment conducive to the display, distribution and institutional development of contemporary art have been thwarted by funding, obviously, but not necessarily. In fact, when Patrick Steadman and Victoria Campbell launched Visit, Inc. from the bookstore of the gallery that now represents Lozano's estate, the team received generous feedback on how a platform-as-a-service could come to be: around $$XX promised, $$XX put to use.

It was an interesting experience. The limitations we confronted had less to do with access to venture capital than the strategic legibility we found ourselves negotiating. The start-up was founded via Stripe Atlas for the purpose of designing an app for the Studio Visit, an analogue networking protocol used for arts networking since probably Rembrandt. We spent significant resources mapping out the institutional structure of the now $XXXB art world and how its values are reproduced through things like Studio Visits, with particular attention to the Co-exhibition Network.

We chose to work this way even when detrimental to our corporate interests, especially given the taxes one can expect to pay failing a C-corporation. Yet we were dedicated to not only working in an open-source way, but in a way that mapped enterprise logic as closely as possible to the relations of production at hand. We made a million pitch decks, but we measured the success of our efforts on the viability of the functioning prototypes created and destroyed as the product developed. Sometimes, we destroyed the product without regard to development hours spent because we sensed evolution favored this approach.

What's made it difficult to document potentially valuable processes, ideas, actions and failures is the loaded business expectation that hard to solve technical problems get less, not more, complex when treated as social processes. We found that social processes, such as the transfer and sale of a work of art, involve historically embedded notions of the value of artistic labor, the meaning of money and the expectation of what an artist should or does provide.

In other words: we quickly discovered through our inquiries (pitches, really), that there is no intersection of art and technology. There is only after technology. We discovered lapses in existing forms of creative enterprise modeling when we attempted to "onboard" a product that provided services that existing art market and art institutional infrastructures had predetermined-- however "functionally".

And, in a lot of ways, we probably did it wrong. Still, I stand for a measure of success as being the development of working prototypes at the expense of business logic with the hopes that janky code will ultimately prove more useful than a dead platform. Sure, we had some prurient attachment to open-source standards-- but our decisions took form within and against established incentives for working and participating in an industry as thankless as this one, and our intimacy with the art world itself. We knew what digital product strategies would prove oppositional to the valuation methodologies of a growth-based business model because they were not strategies used or valued by working artists or by us.

To put it bluntly and crudely and in direct opposition to the 2019 Y Combinator call-for-startups that emphasized "supporting creatives", we, as artists and creative people somewhat short of familial and economic capital, have never confused art problems with money problems. Sure, artists, bohemians, we're delusional: but not delusional enough to want to make money through a process as evolved as that of painting. The difference between value and meaning was as embroiled in our economic decision-making as the price of a cup of coffee in Manhattan was pegged to the price of a one-way train ride: $2.50, or we didn't buy it.

Mostly we just knew artists. Mostly we just kept with our friends. Our team consisted of active developers and artists whose communities of sense spanned multiple, international downtown contemporary art scenes. I had just begun to write art criticism for Spike Mag, a Berlin-based contemporary art print magazine with a global and historical reach; Patrick was a Cornell graduate in C.S. and B.S. running a consultancy attuned to the digital needs of the emerging artist. Our familiarity with our addressable market was downright cultish. And the cult-like, anti-economic encryption of value in art proved stronger than the promise of profit margins in tech. At the time those returns were significant.

Patrick and I dissolved Visit during the pandemic when it became clear that the interest we'd generated from those around us did not line up with the interest of investors who, at the end of the day, didn't buy art, didn't collect art, and did not qualify as active stakeholders, market actors or customers. This by virtue of the fact that these people were not in the room.

At the same time we managed to develop working prototypes for legacy networking on a venture capital seed fundraising model, we asked ourselves what an arts based start-up was strategic to. We became attuned to the work to be done by putting our attention on the work that's been done. We acknowledged that the deep complexity of a 600 year process of historical representation-- one that's today, still, deeply embedded in both the national development of post-war Europe and the U.S.-- would remain as difficult for the sciences to exploit as ever.

We maintain these pages as a living document, an inquiry-- with regard to the biased ground for the construction of art history as it has been thought and rethought.

We remain with the hopes that we can be useful.