The Art-Technology Paradox
As someone who grew up playing competitive tennis and now works in venture capital, I’ve become quite used to objective results: the ball is in or out; an investment was successful or it wasn’t. These are objective, binary outcomes. As someone who appreciates art, I’ve often grappled with trying to understand the subjectivity that comes with evaluating a piece and assessing the art market, in general. To sate this curiosity, I even took a class in business school entitled “Entrepreneurial Leadership in the Creative Industries” — essentially a course on entrepreneurs and creators that changed the worlds of music, fashion, food, film, and art.
Throughout my time in venture, I’ve continued to be fascinated by these creative industries and their overlap with technology, whether it’s looking at new types of brands, analyzing the evolution of creative networks to social networks, or, in this case, thinking about how technology influences the creative process in and of itself. In one of my favorite Tweetstorms in a long time (maybe ever) Zach Klein laid out how Facebook’s “victory” over MySpace was the beginning of the end of creative and unique identities on the web. And while there are sites like ShopJeen or creative networks like NewHive, which make one recall the days of Geocities and MySpace, I largely agree with Zach, particularly on this point:
