YOUar

June 2021

Text: Jeremy Bailey
Artwork: SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, emphasis on the Y (or the first time I gave my girlfriend head was in Indiana).obj, PRAKSIS Special Edition of 2, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a curveball at enterprises worldwide, forcing traditional production models and customer relations gameplans into chaos. The art industry is no exception. The traditional artist-institution-audience model, with its old-world studio, fabrication and gallery conventions, is increasingly looking like a broken bat.

Businesses everywhere have rushed online, where daring creative innovations have added major value. The same should go for the arts: the worldwide health crisis holds out serious scoring opportunities for smart artists willing to restructure their strategic approach to making and showing.

Traditional sculpture is an arduous sector for artists, galleries and collectors alike. Sculptures are strenuous to make, complex to exhibit and expensive to store, transport or conserve. For audiences, too, sculpture is demanding. You have to travel to it and walk round it, for example – tiring IRL, and off the menu in a locked-down gallery.

The solution is YOUar, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform for museum quality sculpture. YOUar sells affordable, exclusive one-of-a-kind Augmented Reality sculptures by real artists directly to YOU, the art consumer. There is a twist, though: each sculpture also contains a 3d scan of its maker playfully interacting with their work. With YOUar, you can collect both the artwork, and the artist!

Guided by YOUar, collectors can preview, purchase and virtually install museum-quality artworks in their homes or anywhere else they take their phone or tablet. Using Augmented Reality(AR) technology that is now widely accessible, YOUar cuts out sculpture’s physical limitations, installation costs and collection problems while offering artists new forms of expression and remuneration.

But that’s not why YOUar is truly revolutionary. The real magic of YOUar lies in the inclusivity of the relationships of collaboration and exchange it builds. 70% of New York gallery artists are white men(1), but YOUar turns these numbers upside down. Its curatorial team, dedicated to seeking out intersectional artists from across the globe, are proud to announce that 70% of the fifteen artists with works in production or available today on YOUar are women or people of colour.

New technologies such as AR are often a barrier to access – often too expensive for anyone but the early adopter and too difficult to learn without hours of trial and error. YOUar provides technical mentorship and full production support for every artist. Founder and artist Famous New Media Artist Jeremy Bailey collaborates personally with each artist to enable them to realise their sculptural concept – and he declares, “I love every minute of it!”

For a collaboration to be truly successful it must also be sustainable. The average artist earns less than $10k a year from their practice(2), while most galleries take 50% from their artists' sales. This means artists often lose rather than make money from the sale of their work. YOUar believes artists deserve more. That’s why our artists receive 100% from their sales and exhibition fees – a world first enabled by the low cost of online production and distribution (we’re not selling NFTs, just honest no-carbon certified digital sculptures). The remaining operating costs are managed through a combination of public funding, private donations and tips. That’s right, most people choose to tip a little bit on top of every purchase, seemingly because they are generous and kind.

The best part is that we pass these savings onto YOU, the art consumer. Most artworks on YOUar are priced under $100. That’s less than a meal out (unless your restaurant of choice is Subway) and millions less than the average price of a museum-quality sculpture (which exclusive art dealerships won’t let you anywhere near anyway). 

Finally, YOU get so much more from this revolutionary collaboration and exchange than a museum quality artwork at an affordable price. YOU get a relationship with an artist and their work that you’ll carry with you wherever you go. A relationship built on the idea of equitable collaboration and exchange. An ideal that you’ll share with friends: the ideal that when artists thrive, so do YOU.

To help you start your YOUar collection, we’ve partnered with PRAKSIS to bring you an exclusive and original edition by one of our first artists collaborators, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY. Her work titled “emphasis on the Y (or the first time I gave my girlfriend head was in Indiana).obj” was inspired by Robert Indiana’s iconic 1965 sculpture ‘LOVE’.  More than 50 versions of his iconic sculpture are displayed in public locations worldwide, but none that specifically celebrate lesbians. Indiana often complained that the widespread popularity and appropriation of his work caused the art world to shun him, but we’re quite certain collecting and sharing this artwork will have the opposite effect on your own popularity and attractiveness (especially in Indiana.)

Footnotes

(1) https://news.artnet.com/art-world/new-york-galleries-study-979049
(2) https://news.artnet.com/market/artists-make-less-10k-year-1162295

SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, emphasis on the Y (or the first time I gave my girlfriend head was in Indiana).obj, PRAKSIS Special Edition of 2, 2021

Scan QR code with your phone to view this sculpture in Augmented Reality(AR).

To purchase for the special price of US$99 click Add to cart above. At the artist's request 50% of sales go to Affinity Services. (Affinity Services is a longstanding nonprofit that makes space and programming for black lesbians in Chicago.)