Democratizing The Art World

Maureen Farrell, 05.08.08, 6:00 PM ET

Chris Vroom is the kind of ex-investment banker a starving artist can love.

Back in 1999, Vroom launched Artadia, a nonprofit devoted to discovering new artists in unlikely locales. Vroom wants to do for aspiring artists what Sundance and other national film festivals have done for filmmakers.

It’s a daunting mission: Like Wall Street, the art world is a very clubby, opaque and cut-throat one–and by no means a meritocracy. For artists, timing, connections and luck are everything. And that means throngs of talented folks are left outside looking in.

Enter Artadia, which aims to introduce healthy competition by hosting biannual contests for visual artists–painters, sculptors, photographers and videographers–in San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Boston and, later this summer, Atlanta. Vroom’s goal: to open up an imperfect market mainly controlled by a handful of powerful gallery owners and collectors in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and London. “The art market is a $50 billion business with zero transparency where insider trading is allowed,” says Vroom, 43, now a portfolio manager at Roanoke Asset Management in Manhattan. “I felt like we could break down some of the anti-competitive barriers.

Terrific art is going on in every community in America and around the world.” While by no means looking to displace gallery owners, Artadia at least offers aspiring artists some helpful exposure and advice.

Shaun O’Dell, a 39-year-old San Francisco-based multimedia artist and 2005 Artadia award winner, says he tapped the nonprofit to learn about individual idiosyncrasies of certain gallery owners. “It’s a tricky sort of world to navigate if you’re not in New York,” he says. “There’s a lot of weird etiquette and signals to pick up on.”

In the last nine years, roughly 9,000 artists have applied to Artadia’s competitions, judged by curators from major museums. Each contest is like “a little IPO [as in, the initial public offering of a stock]” for the artists, says Vroom. “We launch them and give them after-market support.”

This year Artadia judges will choose 20 artists to receive $110,000 in total prize money (six $15,000 awards and 14 $1,500 awards). Of the hundreds of submissions Artadia receives for each competition, only 15 make the cut to the second round. At that point…

JimG

has been writing computer programs since 1970, and is still debugging them. The first modem he used was as big as a washing machine but not nearly as useful.