20x200

Maclean’s charts the growth of online art selling in Canada giving credit for the emerging trend to Jen Bekman and her success with 20×200.com:

Vancouver artist Indigo quit her secretarial job last year, and has been able to support herself thanks in part to income generated on Cargoh.com, a Canadian-based website for buying and selling art. Robyn McCallum’s work was spotted onEyebuyart.com, prompting her inclusion in an exhibition at Toronto’s Drake Hotel. And Montreal photographer Robert Cadloff makes more than 200 sales a month on Etsy.com, earning “just a little less” than he did in engineering. “Ten years ago, this kind of career change and all the sales wouldn’t have been possible,” says Cadloff. “You needed to schlep your portfolio around to galleries and beg people to exhibit your work. I wasn’t born with that pushy gene.”

Luckily for Cadloff, and a growing number of artists—both emerging and well-known photographers and painters looking to further raise their profile and tap a new market of less-affluent collectors—selling art online is gaining momentum. New Yorker Jen Bekman is credited with starting the trend in 2007 when she launched 20×200.com—her site features limited-edition prints and photographs starting at $20. Others have instituted a similar curatorial policy. Claire Sykes, co-founder of Toronto-based Circuitgallery.com, says she “keeps the quality high” by featuring prints of established Canadian contemporary artists, including Robert Bean and Andrew Wright. “Earlier sites were more like clearing houses,” she says, “and artists were worried, quite rightly, about damaging their reputations by being associated with uncurated spaces and cheaply produced prints.”

March 24, 2011 By Marion Maneker - Art Market Monitor