Late last year I was asked to create a workshop for a A/D/A, a hybrid festival and exhibition in Hamburg Germany examining the creative city through the lens of a series of artist run workshops, rather than put together a one off workshop I sought to found the world’s first startup accelerator for artists. Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day.
Hamburg, like many small post industrial cities, is searching for it’s next big thing. For many community leaders lost adrift amid churning economic seas, california Startup Culture is a bright beacon of hope. In the last decade cities around the world have scrambled to create and subsidize the conditions for their own Startup Culture. Along the way they’ve also left behind, Culture culture. You know, art, music, dance, expression. In that time much of the culture cities had once been focused on nurturing has been replaced by an entrepreneurial culture built on venture capital and 20 something software founders. Incubators, Accelerators, Bootcamps, Venture Capitalists, Quick Wins and Low Hanging Fruit have all crept into our collective vocabulary. Where galleries and concert venues once stood creative corridors have popped up, filled with co-working spaces where espresso’d millennials hustle to disrupt each other.
I’ve personally worked part time at a successful startup in Toronto for over 7 years. It has been a phenomenal experience. I’ve learned more than I can possibly recount here alongside amazing diverse individuals, and I’ve prospered more than I ever thought possible. Throughout this time I’ve also worked as an artist. As an artist my experience has been nearly opposite to my life in startups. As my skills, networks and fame have grown my financial success has long since plateaued. In nearly every year of my 10 years since graduating from my MFA my income as an artist has never exceeded $20,000. In fact the average artist internationally makes on average less than $10,000 USD a year. In those same ten years, most of Europe has significantly defunded the arts, in many cases by as much as fifty percent. In the United States where funding is already bereft, Trump recently proposed shutting down what remains of the National Endowment for the Arts completely.
Maybe we should just accept startup culture is now just everyday culture. Where our parents lived in a world of the Beatles and Free Love, we live in a world of Amazon and Free Shipping. But that’s not all we live with, Startup Culture, flying high on the wings of a self proclaimed meritocracy and a record 65 billion dollars in venture capital investment last year, has also become well known for mysogony, racism and the political right. How did such bad people do so well? Easy, by supporting each other. Specifically by joining and contributing to accelerators like Y-Combinator, an accelerator that has launched many of the largest household names in technology. By joining an accelerator you get a small amount of money and a large amount of support in the form of mentorship. But what are they teaching? Simple, they’ve been teaching each other how to innovate consistently without waste. Specifically they’ve been teaching Lean Methodologies. A group of bottom-up management methods that emerged out of Japan in the 1980s to help automakers like Toyota iteratively increase quality and decrease risk (waste.)
I’ve also learned these methods and in late 2016 I asked myself, why am I keeping this knowledge to myself. Why am I not applying these tools to my own career as an artist? For that matter why am I keeping these tools from artists, many of whom are much more empathetic than your average san francisco bro. Perhaps the right people with the right skills could transform startup culture from a wasteland of rape and corruption into a utopia of social progress and peer support. Maybe startup culture could be real culture after all.
Borrowing from one of the tech industry's most cooperative and uniting concepts, I founded Lean Artist, an accelerator that offers a small amount of funding along with community mentorship from startups and art world heroes to empower artists to run their own culturally disruptive startups. Using the same Lean methods of top silicon valley startups, our first cohort conceived of 10 beautiful non-exploitative companies, from a not for profit focused on creating a creative commons for volunteer labour, to a jewelry brand that makes stylish wearables that auto-report sexual harassment.
At the conclusion of a four day boot camp in Hamburg I continued working actively with 5 of the artists to build out their concepts further. The first step toward startup growth is proving product market fit. Many startups conduct a marketing Smoke Test to prove there is initial evidence of this market fit. They often do so by creating pay per click marketing campaigns and website landing pages, long before they’ve written a single line of code. For this anthology I have assembled these marketing materials along with artifacts from the startup processes that produced them. I encourage you to evaluate each concept as both a critical artwork and a potential product that might make the world a better place and to offer your support if you feel appropriate.
I’m not the only one thinking this way of course, author and artist Astra Taylor suggests artists take back control of the platforms upon “which all of us create, consume, and connect.” and in his book Uber Worked and Underpaid Trebor Scholz proposes platform cooperativism as a model in which not for profits own the means of production on the internet. Proletariat producers should own the platforms upon which they create value, not the bourgeoisie. In fact, many are now been founded. Stocksy is a stock photography site entirely owned by its photographers and Ride Austin is an uber like taxi service owned by it drivers.
I’m confident I’ll be wrong about much of what I propose here but I’ve also learned to believe one of the core tenants of startup culture, “fail fast, fail often.” I also believe as an artist I’ve learned enough about failure to embrace the potential that thinking differently might finally bring us all greater success.
– Jeremy Bailey, Famous New Media Artist
