I want to talk today about two fears I
think we all have the fear of not being
able to make a living and the fear of
not being true to yourself creatively
these fears are scary I think because
they’re intertwined their intention even
and the financial fear is real you know
we all have to pay for the cost of our
lives but the creative side is real – on
the one hand we live in the midst of one
of the most vast market economies of all
time but on the other hand I believe
that everyone is an artist and that
everyone has a contribution
that’s yours alone to make there’s an
intersection of this economic reality
and hopeful possibility and it’s the
idea of owning the upside owning the
upside is thinking about yourself as an
early stage investor in your own work
it’s asking the question what are we
creating of value and how can we share
in it with each other I say we because I
often work with individual artists who
feel isolated in a sense of shame or
vulnerability about the difficulties of
economic work I think we can all relate
to that and but at the same time that
that feels isolating it’s actually a
shared problem and a solution that
requires a collective design so this is
what I want to talk to you about today I
want to talk to you about how we can
think about the future of work
differently so that we can think from a
shared ownership of upside perspective
if this sounds like an unusual idea
think for a second about how you spend
your spare time on Instagram or Facebook
you’re creating things of value all the
time that you don’t own any of in fact
we live in an age of democratized
creativity but not yet democratized
ownership and if we haven’t thought
about work that way
it’s partly that we haven’t had the
technologies to allow us to do that and
we do now or we’re starting to and that
technology is the blockchain so what I
want to talk about today is how we might
be able to think about getting there
collectively let me tell you a little
bit about my background and relationship
to this topic I have both an MBA and an
MFA in painting
I work as a professor at New York
University and I study the intersections
of business and art and I’ve started
looking at the art market
from an artist point of view which led
me to look at property rates and value
as a case study in 1958 the famous
American artist Robert Rauschenberg sold
a painting called thaw for nine hundred
dollars about fifteen years later in
1973 the same painting sold at auction
for $85,000
Rauschenberg didn’t own any of that
increase in value even though his
continued career helped to create it so
I started thinking what are the models
by which artists could be included in
this I started working on this in 2012
with a group of artists who are looking
at property and this year I’ve gotten to
model it empirically collaborating with
a finance professor named Roman korzel
who’s at the University of Luxembourg
and what we found is that if you look at
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’s
early work the work they sold through
their gallery between 1958 and 1963 if
they had retained 10% equity in that
work when it was first sold they would
have outperformed the US equities market
by between two and nine hundred eighty
five times that is equivalent to a
twenty to forty percent return every
year from 1958 to 2005 now it would be
easy to say you know we know they were
successful artists so we kind of thought
that was going to happen
we have the benefit of hindsight that’s
exactly the point when they made that
work they did not know they would be
successful they had to buy paint rent
studios well before they knew anyone
would be interested and in that sense
they weren’t just making their work they
were investing in it this is the core
idea of a book I wrote in 2016 called
art thinking and that idea is inventing
point B if you are making a work of art
in any field you are not going from a
known point A to a known point B you are
inventing point B for instance in 1954
Sir Roger Bannister became the first
person in modern recorded sporting
history to run a mile in under four
minutes at the time he did it in the
point a world people truly believed that
it was impossible for a person to run
that fast then he did it and he only
held the record for 45 days because in a
point B world someone saw that it was
possible and bested his effort creative
work in any field demands this kind of
frontier thinking but economics as a
system makes it very hard to pay for
this is what I would call the R&D
problem or the research and development
problem which is this economics as a
system is pretty good at paying you for
what you already know how to do and but
it’s pretty bad at paying you to
experiment and try new things at the
same time long-term economic value
depends on trying new things it depends
on innovation and taking the risk of
investing and the trick is that you have
to make that investment decision in the
point a world that the value is not
known until the point B world this means
that it’s much easier to think in
fractions than in dollar amounts it’s
much easier to know that you contributed
five percent or 50 percent or 0.02
percent to a project
it is to know that that is worth five
dollars or five million dollars ahead of
time we have this kind of model in some
other fields we pay royalties or equity
consider the story of andreas Van
Bechtel shyam the founder of Sun
Microsystems in 1973 Bechtel shyam was
an unassuming fifteen year old kid
growing up in Germany when he invented
an improved version of an Intel 8080
processing chip he was too young by law
to be paid a salary and so the company
gave him a royalty instead that royalty
ended up being foundational in Bechtel
shames life it allowed him to move to
the US a couple of years later to study
and to go on to found Sun Microsystems
and in 1998 to write the hundred
thousand dollar check to Google Inc that
caused them to have to incorporate so
that they could cash it royalties are
generative equity is generative to you
they allow you to claim the upside that
you’ve helped to create and then to pay
it forward investing in other projects
and if we haven’t had this system it’s
partly because the transaction costs of
managing it have seemed too high and
this is where the technology of the
blockchain comes in so when I say
blockchain you might be thinking of the
cryptocurrency Bitcoin and it’s true the
blockchain is the underlying structure
underneath Bitcoin and but it’s a much
more profound tool the blockchain is as
versatile and society altering a
structure as a computer processing chip
or democracy it’s a distributed ledger
that allows us to keep track of any
information transactions ownership
without a trusted central authority if
you think about Robert Rauschenberg if
he had had the option of issuing his
artwork over the blockchain before he
first sold it through his gallery
he could have registered his ownership
rates as the creator and he could have
specified 10%
and equity when that work was resold at
auction the title would not have
transferred until he was paid his ten
percent so this is a fundamentally new
way of looking at the structure of work
and the structure of pay for creative
work and it extends far beyond the arts
it extends to any form of asking that we
question what are we creating a value
and how do we share in it right now most
of us rent our time for a salary and
this is different this is a hybrid
rental investment model this is about
owning the upside as well as working on
ongoing projects so the idea I really
want to leave you with today is don’t
fear creative risk embrace it but on the
upside think of yourself as an investor
and give yourself permission and
encouragement to invest in the projects
that really matter to you so that
together we can invent the point-b world we all want to live in thank you
think we all have the fear of not being
able to make a living and the fear of
not being true to yourself creatively
these fears are scary I think because
they’re intertwined their intention even
and the financial fear is real you know
we all have to pay for the cost of our
lives but the creative side is real – on
the one hand we live in the midst of one
of the most vast market economies of all
time but on the other hand I believe
that everyone is an artist and that
everyone has a contribution
that’s yours alone to make there’s an
intersection of this economic reality
and hopeful possibility and it’s the
idea of owning the upside owning the
upside is thinking about yourself as an
early stage investor in your own work
it’s asking the question what are we
creating of value and how can we share
in it with each other I say we because I
often work with individual artists who
feel isolated in a sense of shame or
vulnerability about the difficulties of
economic work I think we can all relate
to that and but at the same time that
that feels isolating it’s actually a
shared problem and a solution that
requires a collective design so this is
what I want to talk to you about today I
want to talk to you about how we can
think about the future of work
differently so that we can think from a
shared ownership of upside perspective
if this sounds like an unusual idea
think for a second about how you spend
your spare time on Instagram or Facebook
you’re creating things of value all the
time that you don’t own any of in fact
we live in an age of democratized
creativity but not yet democratized
ownership and if we haven’t thought
about work that way
it’s partly that we haven’t had the
technologies to allow us to do that and
we do now or we’re starting to and that
technology is the blockchain so what I
want to talk about today is how we might
be able to think about getting there
collectively let me tell you a little
bit about my background and relationship
to this topic I have both an MBA and an
MFA in painting
I work as a professor at New York
University and I study the intersections
of business and art and I’ve started
looking at the art market
from an artist point of view which led
me to look at property rates and value
as a case study in 1958 the famous
American artist Robert Rauschenberg sold
a painting called thaw for nine hundred
dollars about fifteen years later in
1973 the same painting sold at auction
for $85,000
Rauschenberg didn’t own any of that
increase in value even though his
continued career helped to create it so
I started thinking what are the models
by which artists could be included in
this I started working on this in 2012
with a group of artists who are looking
at property and this year I’ve gotten to
model it empirically collaborating with
a finance professor named Roman korzel
who’s at the University of Luxembourg
and what we found is that if you look at
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’s
early work the work they sold through
their gallery between 1958 and 1963 if
they had retained 10% equity in that
work when it was first sold they would
have outperformed the US equities market
by between two and nine hundred eighty
five times that is equivalent to a
twenty to forty percent return every
year from 1958 to 2005 now it would be
easy to say you know we know they were
successful artists so we kind of thought
that was going to happen
we have the benefit of hindsight that’s
exactly the point when they made that
work they did not know they would be
successful they had to buy paint rent
studios well before they knew anyone
would be interested and in that sense
they weren’t just making their work they
were investing in it this is the core
idea of a book I wrote in 2016 called
art thinking and that idea is inventing
point B if you are making a work of art
in any field you are not going from a
known point A to a known point B you are
inventing point B for instance in 1954
Sir Roger Bannister became the first
person in modern recorded sporting
history to run a mile in under four
minutes at the time he did it in the
point a world people truly believed that
it was impossible for a person to run
that fast then he did it and he only
held the record for 45 days because in a
point B world someone saw that it was
possible and bested his effort creative
work in any field demands this kind of
frontier thinking but economics as a
system makes it very hard to pay for
this is what I would call the R&D
problem or the research and development
problem which is this economics as a
system is pretty good at paying you for
what you already know how to do and but
it’s pretty bad at paying you to
experiment and try new things at the
same time long-term economic value
depends on trying new things it depends
on innovation and taking the risk of
investing and the trick is that you have
to make that investment decision in the
point a world that the value is not
known until the point B world this means
that it’s much easier to think in
fractions than in dollar amounts it’s
much easier to know that you contributed
five percent or 50 percent or 0.02
percent to a project
it is to know that that is worth five
dollars or five million dollars ahead of
time we have this kind of model in some
other fields we pay royalties or equity
consider the story of andreas Van
Bechtel shyam the founder of Sun
Microsystems in 1973 Bechtel shyam was
an unassuming fifteen year old kid
growing up in Germany when he invented
an improved version of an Intel 8080
processing chip he was too young by law
to be paid a salary and so the company
gave him a royalty instead that royalty
ended up being foundational in Bechtel
shames life it allowed him to move to
the US a couple of years later to study
and to go on to found Sun Microsystems
and in 1998 to write the hundred
thousand dollar check to Google Inc that
caused them to have to incorporate so
that they could cash it royalties are
generative equity is generative to you
they allow you to claim the upside that
you’ve helped to create and then to pay
it forward investing in other projects
and if we haven’t had this system it’s
partly because the transaction costs of
managing it have seemed too high and
this is where the technology of the
blockchain comes in so when I say
blockchain you might be thinking of the
cryptocurrency Bitcoin and it’s true the
blockchain is the underlying structure
underneath Bitcoin and but it’s a much
more profound tool the blockchain is as
versatile and society altering a
structure as a computer processing chip
or democracy it’s a distributed ledger
that allows us to keep track of any
information transactions ownership
without a trusted central authority if
you think about Robert Rauschenberg if
he had had the option of issuing his
artwork over the blockchain before he
first sold it through his gallery
he could have registered his ownership
rates as the creator and he could have
specified 10%
and equity when that work was resold at
auction the title would not have
transferred until he was paid his ten
percent so this is a fundamentally new
way of looking at the structure of work
and the structure of pay for creative
work and it extends far beyond the arts
it extends to any form of asking that we
question what are we creating a value
and how do we share in it right now most
of us rent our time for a salary and
this is different this is a hybrid
rental investment model this is about
owning the upside as well as working on
ongoing projects so the idea I really
want to leave you with today is don’t
fear creative risk embrace it but on the
upside think of yourself as an investor
and give yourself permission and
encouragement to invest in the projects
that really matter to you so that
together we can invent the point-b world we all want to live in thank you
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