The Cusp of a New Renaissance, Futurism
Artwork by John Buron
Art is the greatest record of human existence in history. Collected art in museums bears the weight of being the art on view for the masses. Text books are guides for art students and they are written by experts. Have museums and texts been biased and has our collective knowledge of art been skewed? (Rhetorical) Hell, yes.
The feeling at Juniper Rag is that is the art world is changing at lightning speed and collective global changes like this have not occurred in hundreds of years. The energy is high and the world reflects so much of this collective vibe. We want to share these thoughts with you. It may help, you may not care, or you may be be bored and have a minute to read. We are all here because we value art and creatives. We are glad you are here and look forward to getting to know you. So many of the artists, curators and art organizations that we work with are now friends. We did not imagine how much promoting artists would change our lives. Well you have. We love what we do and are fired up to enter into a new year.
This post is about where our heads are right now. What we have learned, predictions (maybe we are dead wrong) and our own opinions. A reminder that we are not art experts and these opinions are based on our experiences and research. We research everything. Attending Basel was recon for us. We wanted to know where we fit in the scheme of it all. Our artists have game and our wheels are turning to bring more opportunities to you for growing your art collection or showing your work.
As always, art is a catalyst for understanding, exploration, and imagination of our evolving world. Viewing art is a way to transform our antiquated ideas and to envision new ones. Art brings people to a seat at the table of discourse. Modernism in the art world is getting tossed on its head. Disruptors have great traction and young people are engaging in great numbers. Technology and equity are advancing at exponential speed. The art world is also begging the question: “Is everything we now know changing?”
We are trend watchers and temperature takers and found great success in our early careers by paying close attention to these things in order to capitalize on what was to come. Early adoption of ideas can help set you apart as a visionary, IF you are right and IF people still remember by the time the predictions roll around.
The changes that have been occurring in the last decade or so with surely have lasting affects. So many advances in the economy, shifts in society and the wider movements that are engulfing people in general have impacted art and are reshaping our world and how young people view the world. In twenty years children have gone from playing a video game to being a virtual person in a virtual world, leaving no desire to interact in the real world they live in. The pandemic, women’s movements, politics and global warming with power hungry empires killing to stay on top are impacting the canon of our lives. The next decade will be very interesting.
Christopher Jeauhn Bayne, Thorns, digital artwork that comes alive when you use an augmented reality tool, the app artvive.
Renaissance: Digitization has rapidly changed the art world in the last twenty years, from online galleries and auctions to the way art is made. The pandemic and world-wide fear has globally impacted people on a grand scale. Political upheaval and isolation will have lasting affects on the global population. New methods of communication and socialization are rooted in these changes. Juniper Rag was developed because of the loss of a job, the freedom of time during isolation and the realization of dreams. The web gave us a way to promote and sell art and tell the stories of hundreds of artists, that now reach around the lines of latitude and longitude. Digital art has emerged and is ramping up quickly, causing a shit storm. With zero sign of any dust settling, AI, VR and the digital world will have its own future world and economy. Early adopters are have been hard at work for over a decade and now the subculture is anything but sub.
Shift in Society: People started getting sick at the beginning of 2020. March was the official declaration of a global pandemic. Death was the fear and we did not emerge from our homes. Socializing came to a halt for those that understood the risks and could not take a chance. Most of us are suffering from some form of PTSD and depressions. Adolescents’ lives are forever changed as are all the people who faced losing loved ones. In the past decade even before the pandemic, many rally cries rang out— mass shootings in schools, bans on immigrants, guns, opioids, Black Lives Matter, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, women’s rights around the world threatened, the war in Ukraine. All of these global shifts are impacting art and making us very worried about the future, so vote your asses off.
Equity is Changing the Art Game: A white dominated art industry is finally seeing some color. Women and marginalized artists are now gaining a place for the first time ever in history. We saw it at Basel. It was real and wonderful. New art will be seen and new audiences will be wanting to view it. For once, art will begin to reflect our real society. Not without a good fight first, though we can wager! This change comes with predictable tension and criticisms and those who embrace this collective change will ultimately have a hand in creating a more equitable world. Art reflects ever facet of our world. Art history text books are about to have some big issues. Our own Michael Bobbitt, the Executive Director of Mass Cultural featured in V.3 Shift says it succinctly, “In a time marked by national conversations regarding race and belonging, Bobbitt remains deeply committed to equity, both within the Council and across the industry. When assessing antiracism in arts and culture, Bobbitt acknowledges the need for structural, policy-driven reform while recognizing that, without cultural shifts, shifts in policy will be an incomplete solution. ‘The 1964 Civil Rights Act didn’t turn bigots into not being bigots,’ he said. ‘It just made it illegal to discriminate against Black people. So policy can do a lot — it’s not going to fix the culture. It’s not going to change people’s hearts and minds.” - from theCrimson.com
Art Is In Fashion: Millions of dollars are spent on the art of living artists. Money, money, money. As the rich get richer, they are flaunting their cash and galleries and art fairs do not mind. Art fairs are everywhere. Anything connected to celebrity and socialites are in the news and instantly inflated in price. Dirty and fleshy decadence, like the art of Adolfo Alonso comes to mind. A causal byproduct of this? Buying art is cool. Decorating your home with real art sets you apart. Artists networks are growing by leaps and bounds by using the web. Artsy and Saatchi are cranking. NFTs and blockchain are gaining traction. AI is controversial and seems pretty malignant right now. Time will tell, but the path of art is now looking a lot different than it every has since the beginning of time as we know it. There will clearly be two separate worlds.
Meaningful Art: Newsworthy art is in your face almost every day even if you are not a follower of the art world. The internet makes art visible from anywhere in the world. Artists from Worcester, MA can be seen with artists from New Zealand, Sweden and San Diego. New narratives focus on global warming, pollution, social justice, equity, agency, politics, identity and there has been a surge for women’s rights. The story of the artist is also gaining importance. The subjective nature of art is more and more impacted by soft criticism, and having a magazine that is curated will hopefully pull up the artwork that deserves a brighter stage. There is a lot of art out there in the world. We like to focus on what we think is significant and so good you can’t stop looking at it. We hope to separate artists from the pack and ultimately get their art into private or public collections.
“F-ed Up” photograph by Al Weems
Things we learned this year:
For collectors, your art collection earns a distinct personality because it is created choosing art you love, we gave you over 300 artists’ stories this year.
For artists, your body of work has a distinct personality and we are committed to finding your people, your niche and helping you to expand your market and increase sales.
Collecting art is a highly subjective and a very personal journey because we are most often captivated by artwork that reflects our human experience, our taste, aesthetics or art that challenges us. Juniper Rag is really committed to sharing a diverse body of work, by introducing a new curator with each issue.
We have learned indispensable knowledge about curating this year from our curators and from talking to individual collectors.
Promotion and selling artwork has been a mission since 2008, with a goal to introduce a local community of 250,000 people to the talented artists, musicians, dancers, chefs and creatives in Worcester, MA. We took a chance with knowledge of the ecosystem of the art world locally and expanded our reach further than we dreamed with Juniper Rag.
Invaluable knowledge from collaborating with galleries, curators and communities was gained to help build peoples collections by introducing our Juniper Rag artists.
Each issue of the magazine and every single image we put up on social media as an ongoing curatorial project.
We love showcasing artwork that culminates in bringing together a collector with a creative that makes exceptional work that expresses the collector’s individual taste, intellect, and proclivities.
For Juniper Rag, it is important to strike a balance between personal taste and intrinsic value for each piece of art we show. We consider the idea of place, timing, social movements, economic forces, demographics, market idiosyncracies and also how each artists’ history assigns value to their work.
Juniper Rag is so committed to bridging the gap between geolocations and the international art market by promoting emerging American and international artists to a world stage.
AI and technology are rapidly changing the landscape of the artworld. Early adopters are already decades old. Mainstream folks are just now being introduced to computer generated art. Deep fakes, virtual worlds, gamification of everything will make our real world very different in a few years. We hope everyone has their seatbelt on. It doesn't matter how you feel, it’s happening, just like the internet changed our lives. Futurism is here.
2023 is already looking spectacular! Thank you to everyone that has joined our little community over here —collectors and artists in the wider world of art. Cheers to a very successful new year.
Michelle & Payal
Viewing Sung Tieu's work at Art Basel Miami Beach
Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu searches for evidence that Havana Syndrome is real with her installation of etched metal plates of the brain at Art Basel Miami Beach with Exposure To Havana Syndrome, Brain Anatomy, Coronal Plane (2022). Tieu’s work is focused around warfare and the psychological impact. Tieu has been making work about the mysterious, classified/unclassified illness for years. A year after this Hanoi attack in 2021, involving Vice President Kamala Harris, the artist kept on investigating the causal effects, that includes personally experiencing “anomalous acoustic incidents” like the ones that led to symptoms of the Havana Syndrome, allegedly caused by covert sonic attacks to military personnel in Havana, Cuba in 2016.
Tieu took images of her own brain with an MRI machine while being subjected to sonic attacks, proving that art is instrumental in learning and finding truths in our society.
