ri141117 Estate Planning: Preparing an innovator’s will 

While drafting his last will and testament, the innovative artist reviews his account of the matter of artists’ asset management and legacy transfer methods and then contrasts it with the innovative artist’s and teacher’s Intellectual Property management. 

Preface

After a few years at sea, so to speak—having launched myself off the shores of the island-like University of Washington School Of Art to search for my Perfect Studios—I took my boxed set of paperbacks, the Perfect Studios Trilogy, to a lawyer. He and I had been discussing online education and teachers’ Intellectual Property with the idea of publishing IP on a CD/ROM. The boxed set of books I call the Perfect Studios Trilogy was a kind of stock basis—perhaps bankable.

He showed up for our meeting in a coffee shop with one of the firm’s partners, which surprised me. Even more surprising was their response, which was positive and encouraging. They said, “If your idea as a computer program for artists’ assets management actually functions, then this idea would be worth a lot of money because there would be a good market for this sort of thing.”

They thought it could be monetized, in other words because they knew that artists’ families usually have a big problem with their artist members’ legacy when he or she passes on. There is no systematic way to assess the value of the legacy except in cases where the artist is famous and has a deep and wide following among wealthy art collectors.

If the artist is not famous, or if he or she has somehow not shown up on the art world’s radar screen, then their lifetime of work is disposed of willy-nilly, destroyed, given away. If the family knows the ropes, then the art might be consigned to an auction house where, in all likelihood, it will molder away in a storage unit until it is forgotten.[1]

Perfect Studios

In 1984 I conceived of the Perfect Studios as being a place, under one roof so to speak, which art could be taught, researched, practiced and be a source of community services. The teaching hospital was my model because the UW Hospital is a teaching hospital, and the four functions—teaching, research, practice and service (TRPS)—are the basis for it work.

All these functions are carried on at the same time, “under one roof,” as it were, or concurrently. Interchange among these functions should lead to a viable company if it were translated into an arts institution, and I wanted the UW Art School to be like the UW Hospital in that regard. My plan didn’t fly, although I had 19 good years to test out my method.

What the attorneys saw that day was my way of putting the idea into words. In three books I wrote the basics: monetizing assets (The Art of Selling Art), new technologies (Reinventing Arts Studios), and innovation (Ghosts in the New Machine). I was satisfied with the first book because it met the field-testing of ways artists can learn about marketing and sales in keeping with their artistic bent.

I drafted the second and third books, but technology changes outpaced my ability. It was a moving target. As for the third, it was two generations of ahead of the times and, like the technological changes that were propelling the “new machines,” my grasp of the future exceeded my reach. Half-dozen years later, the Internet was accessible and it meant that mechanization and digital communication had taken over the artist’s studio and the artists’ intellectual properties.

Last will and testament

Writing wills, for example, has been automated. Those attorneys I talked with in the 1980s moved to issues which are not as easy to automate as such things as personal and real properties. Intellectual property became a specialization when industry added the value of workers’ creative brains put to work writing code for industrial software, games, entertainment, and banking. Thus, today, lawyers specializing in IP are numerous; they may outnumber estate planning lawyers or, I hope, work in concert with them.

I hope so, because I have, in effect, erected a “virtual” mansion over the past fifty years, all devoted to art education, with a specialty in media arts with its roots in the old-fashioned printmaking crafts. When the UW turned down my offer to transform the printmaking division to suit the coming age of digital communication, I took the idea into my little boat and rowed away, and I netted a huge asset base, most of it in digital formats for graphics, text, spreadsheets, multimedia and databases.

If there were an institution around Seattle to which I could will this lode, I could sure use it now. If it is not available, I will build one and I will call it the Seattle Printmakers Center, and my IP will be the “stock basis” for this enterprise.

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[1] In Seattle, for example, the Pacific Galleries and Auction House www.pacgal.com has many artworks on consignment, and a review of their online auctions will show well-known and lesser-known Northwest Artists whose work is cycled through the auctions periodically, hoping for a buyer.

141115 A lesson from technology  

I read the following in the book by Christensen, “The Innovator’s Dilemma”: “The popular slogan ‘Stay close to your customers’ appears not always to be robust advice. One instead might expect customers to lead their suppliers toward sustaining innovations and provide no leadership—or explicitly mislead—in instances of disruptive technology change.”

This is after reading about the example of disc drives, their history and the changes from huge-size to small size and then to flash memory. I am tempted to make a comparison between this and my experience with art and teaching over the past fifty years, and I can do this because I happened, in 1966, to get myself into the Pacific Northwest where leading technological innovation was abundant.

Invention and creative problem solving were abundant throughout the ‘sixties all through the ‘eighties, and I saw some of it firsthand even though I was in the School Of Art at the University of Washington—not technology. The students in my art classes were affected by the atmosphere of discovery and innovation, too, and bolstered by the history of modern art—with its own kind of innovation history.

As an insider faculty member, I also saw the resistance to innovation that students met coming from the established faculty; but as I was closer to the age, in years, to the students, I was inspired to take their innovations seriously and I followed, encouraged, and in turn was inspired by their experimental ways. Consequently, I became a closet outsider and consequently I lost my job.

As I read Christensen’s book, trying to understand what happened and how things might have been different if I had known how to effect innovation in teaching, I think there is a parallel between the history of the disc drive history and my domain-of-expertise. Teaching printmaking can be seen as different from other art courses because painting and drawing, for example, are visual by nature. Printmaking is not only more technical than the simpler visual arts but also is a time-based art more so than, say, drawing.

Not only does it take longer to make a lithograph or a screen print, once the master is ready, then the printing takes additional time because it has to be repeated in order to make the edition which, traditionally, is the whole point of publishing.

There is another element besides the temporal distinction, time; which is the interdependence, community, or social aspect of printmaking. Due to the complexity and costs associated with many of the printmaking studios, it is necessary to share the costs with other people. Dialog ensues and social networks develop around production, yet individuals can maintain their expertise.

This pool of social interchange goes beyond the fact that an artist makes multiples and thus works of art are available to a larger part of society; the artist becomes, as it were, involved in a technology where innovation, similar to engineering feats, may happen.

Printmaking thus becomes subject to analysis in the same way that Christensen analyzed the disc drive industry to make his point about the innovator’s dilemma. If I learn, for example, that soy sauce can be used to degrease my metal plates, I have been given a “disruptive technology” to the old, established way, which was to use whiting and vinegar or cleansers as taught by established and encouraged by institutionalized art school printmakers.

Taking this a step further, I make a videotape of the process, disrupting, again, the old, established way that master printmakers imparted their expertise. It is another disruptive technology—such as I invested in when I began using videotapes to teach printmaking in the ‘seventies.

Coming back, now, to the comment, “Stay close to your customers,” can be interpreted in my story to fallacious in the same sense that Christensen outlined the failures of established disc drive makers to adopt disruptive technologies which, in the end, meant the end of their dominance in their markets.

If I “stay close to my customers” for my art, the etching presses I designed, and so forth, they would, in turn, prevent me from adopting new, disruptive ideas. Like the frustrated engineers of the past who left the established disc drive makers so that they could develop their new ideas—the disruptive technologies—I left the UW to try my new ideas about art and teaching printmaking.

Christensen said these startups had to find new customers who were not enamored and married to the sustaining, old technologies. Again, my experience was similar; I found among the art school students those who were outsiders to the normal art students’ aims. It was a time of protest, the ‘seventies, so it was not hard to find students who wanted to take a different route instead of staying in the line of the mainstream.

Outsiders, who happened to teach briefly at the UW, encouraged them more than I could. Jan Van Der Marck, for example, instantly approved the students wildest notions coming as he did with a global, contemporary and disruptive point of view. This was when I was making a case for “video art” and Jan and his wife’s encouragement sustained my work with the students.

Where does this bring me now? I want to spend the next decade developing the Seattle Printmakers Center, which is to be a showcase of the disruptive technologies related to printmaking. Do I listen to the established market I enjoyed for fifty years, or must I seek new markets? If so, who comprises this new market? That is the question.

141114 Why read the Innovator’s Dilemma?  

The title of Clayton Christensen’s book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” was magnetic for me. Personally, it described my dilemma as I moved printmaking from its position in the schools of art I grew up with and which sustained me for a generation.

By reading this book, which took as an example the history of the computer disc drive over thirty years’ time, I can draw a parallel between the engineers’ dilemma as they invented better disc drives and my dilemma as I invented a better reason for having printmaking in art schools.

In the book, the author used the term “disruptive technology” to describe the innovator’s introduction of new ideas. The parallel with this and art education is, for example, to say that printmaking is a time-based art and this—not a visual art base—is a viable alternative to the standard art school curriculum for printmaking.

By considering time in the equation of printmaking in addition to visual communication, the artist is invited to consider the terms of motion pictures, theater, music—a spectrum of art forms which diverge from the terms of painting and drawing.

Most importantly, the artist is invited to enter the world of collaboration and community because time makes things complicated. Compared to painting and drawing, that are mediums an individual can control without outside help, making an etching is feasible if the studio for it is shared with other people and if experts from other disciplines are engaged.

The time-honored tradition of printmaking is publishing, and as such has always been tied to economics and politics. In his famed essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin went so far as to say that the work of art itself changed to be a political practice more so than a cultural practice.

Therefore, it lands in the domain of the printmaker to understand the true meaning of printmaking and its roots in time-based arts, craft and design. I think it is more difficult, because the printmaker, who may be an artist inclined toward solitary invention and innovation using mechanical and electronic mediums, has to engage a diverse society.

I am an example. My dilemma was, when I was in the University, that I had an innovative idea—that printmaking is a time-based art and therefore the students who studied printmaking should also study new technologies. Like the examples in Christensen’s book that describe the big companies’ inability to make use of innovators’ new engineering concepts, the University had a known market and standards that were un-movable.

In my effort, I established that there was potential in bringing video art and computer graphics into the art school curriculum via printmaking, but it was not acceptable to the establishment so, of course, I had to plant my unorthodox idea in the larger community.

141104 Afterwords to “Putting my stamps on the Seattle Printmakers Center”  

Appended to a 24-page photobook on the properties on Bill Ritchie's concept of the Seattle Printmakers Center

While I worked on this book, I thought about money for the Seattle Printmakers Center. Mainly it was because I had the idea of putting my artistamp collection in the book, since I have no pictures of the Seattle Printmakers Center yet.

I thought about how you go around a place like the Pike Place Market and you see, at your feet, four-inch square tiles with peoples’ names on them. These testify as to the fact that these people and organizations gave money to see to the preservation of the Pike Place Market, this city’s treasure.

What is the equal to a tile in the digital age? When a real-time and real-space experience exists with a counterpart in virtual time and space, worldwide, what is the equivalent of a physical thing, such as a tile with your name or your child’s artwork, or the name of your organization upon it?

In this case, the reward for giving your support and your money to a project is in this physical thing, a tile or bronze cast. This has been the way of recognizing contributions. In the digital age, with the internet, video games, apps and not yet invented experiences that may defy time and space, what is the equivalent to a bronze plaque or floor tile?

The artistamp (stamp collectors call these by another name--Cinderella) is a creative way individuals mimic true, government-issue postage stamps produced by national financing for mail systems. It is a tradition that stamps indicate authenticity, such as on passports or they represent taxes paid, collectors’ provenance, etcetera.

While I worked on this book, I wondered: “How can a photobook such as this one, with its 54 stamp images placed among the text, lead toward funding or other kinds of support? Are the collectible? Is the book collectible?”

We know that collectability is important in the arts as collectors are concerned, and it will require wealth from many contributions—both in cash and effort—to build the Seattle Printmakers Center. It seems to me that, in Seattle’s art history, printmaking has not been a favorite (with the exception of Virginia Wright who, in the ‘60s, was a strong advocate of prints, printmakers and printmaking).

This sad truth (for me and many printmakers in the Seattle area) may be because printmaking is a peoples’ art, a social art, and a performance art and for long has been a middle-class art. Also it is because mainstream technology of which printing is a part brings difficulties in appreciating prints, encumbered as some prints are by special look and the feel of industrial sources.

The visual and tactile qualities confuse as much as they please the viewer who may be accustomed to separating the two worlds of fine art and popular, peoples’ art.
My aim is to stamp the Seattle Printmakers Center with the uniqueness of Seattle Printmaking since the 1950s.

This “stamp” is the transformation of printmaking from its being taught and promoted as a visual art form, like painting, to the realization that printmaking is the artifact of performances, social networks and technologies. Printmaking is the ancestor of all technologies, and, hence, of the modern world.

Over the days that I have been working on my first photobook for the Seattle Printmakers Center I wondered about the Pike Place Market and how its history might be analogous to the Seattle Printmakers Center yet to be.

The challenge for me is figuring out if having my artistamps—and perhaps the artistamps of other Seattle artists—can move the project forward.

141102 A marriage of good art and good business 

The good art is what I have in my gallery, front to back. 

The good business is the aggregated startups. 

Marriage of these is an agreement that gives its equity to the other, and vice-versa. 

Case study

For example, an artist stopped by the other day because she saw, through the windows of our family art gallery, a small art object that reminded her of one of her own, and she mentioned that she still has an print I made in 1966, and which she and her husband bought. “We recently downsized, but I kept your art and it’s hanging in our condo.”

To say I was complemented would put it mildly. But there was more to this encounter than that. What she told me about her work as an early developer of the Schack Art Center in Everett was a clue toward solving the question, “How do I develop the Seattle Printmakers Center, with success anything like the Schack Art Center?”

In an email to her a few days later, I stated, “. . . the Seattle Printmakers Center as slightly different inasmuch my concept is that the development is planned around self-sustaining small businesses. One list I made has twenty of them! The business’ profits go to support the operating costs of the center’s non-profit sectors. So I visualized not only artists work/living units, but also what “work” went on in those units, i.e., the work of the twenty small businesses.”

I picture the working/living spaces as being designed to be work spaces for the worker/owners of the twenty small businesses. Visualize, for example, one of the worker/owners as being in charge of producing the medallions that go on the Halfwood Line of presses. His or her home has the space and furniture of a medallion-maker—resembling a metal designer or jeweler’s workshop. They produce hundreds or thousands of the decorative accouterments of the Halfwood line—everything from the “badges” affixed to the presses to printmakers’ specialty jewelry that are sold in the on-site Printmakers Store.

As for the marriage, above, the artist who stopped in to the gallery has a 1966 print I made, and in my gallery (and in our family collection), there are a few remaining impressions which can be used to finance the planning and completion of the Seattle Printmakers Center.

In the days and hours since meeting with her, I have been riffling through the many potential ways the entire contents of our art gallery (and condo storage room) can be liquidated over the period of a year or two and put to supporting the Seattle Printmakers Center.

In my riffling, my eyes settled on a small envelope I made for the Rembrandt & Wine concept, and in my imagination I saw myself producing a dozen of these envelopes, by hand, as special invitations to people who would like to partake of a sip and print experience as part of the promotion for the Seattle Printmakers Center.