Space name / team name:
Blackbird
Name of primary contact:
Greg Rook
Names of additional Space admins:
None
SuperRare username(s) of everyone who will be a Space admin:
@gregrook
Short bio of you and/or your team:
I’ve been a practising artist since 2000, enjoying a fair degree of success, with museum group shows and international solo shows, but at the end of 2016, one of my collectors asked me to help him build a collection of contemporary art, and Greg Rook Advisory was born. I have since built a successful art consultancy, working with private collectors and businesses. I’ve also taught Fine Art, consulted for galleries and auction houses and written about contemporary art for newspapers and magazines. Earlier this year I joined SuperRare as an artist and as a curator of featured group shows.
Website & Social Media Links:
https://www.instagram.com/gregrookadvisory/?hl=en
https://twitter.com/gregcorbeau?lang=en
https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-rook-abaa8936/?originalSubdomain=uk
https://www.instagram.com/greg_rook/?hl=en
Summary/manifesto of your Space. What is the unique value prop / elevator pitch? What type of art will you focus on? How will your Space stand out among the crowd?
I come from the traditional contemporary art world – the world of physical galleries and physical works – paintings and sculptures and videos shown on screens in darkened spaces. And I love that world. I’ve made, taught, written about and sold contemporary art for decades. But now, there are NFTs and a new audience for contemporary digital art and I’m fascinated by the variety and difference and possibilities of this new format, with this new audience.
So, my intentions are twofold: firstly, to bring the best traditional contemporary artists to this new world in order to see what they can do and what creativity they can bring; and secondly to bring all the collectors that I work with (and all the collectors who work with the artists that I bring) to SuperRare and to the world of collecting NFTs.
I am interested in working with artists (whether emerging or established) whose art I admire and respect, who have a thoughtful practise away from the world of digital art, but who are looking to see how to make links across the genres. I fully understand that it is not a given that even the most celebrated traditional contemporary artists will necessarily be successful in making the switch to a digitally native format, or immediately produce work of real significance and interest. And I appreciate that the collector base that has already invested in the NFT space might not be impressed by traditional art world celebrity, but, I’m approaching people who I believe will bring something progressive and idiosyncratic to SuperRare and there is real excitement in this being a forum for brilliant experimentation.
It would be easy to turn old images into jpegs and mint them as NFTs, but as thoughtful contemporary artists, I will work with those who are interested in seeing this as an opportunity to make work that reflects the enormous possibilities of the new tools. Looking around the NFT space and you can see the incredible talent, knowledge and creativity on display, and so we would work hard to make sure that new NFTs are reflecting both the best of the traditional art world and the new tools and format available. They would not be offering digital versions of previous work but would be using the platform to reimagine and to take their work in unexpected directions. On the whole successful traditional contemporary artists are successful because they are thoughtful, bright and creative, and I look forward to seeing what they will produce.
And to the second part – introducing collectors. Most of the pieces minted by artists I have introduced through the two featured SuperRare shows have sold to collectors that I, or the other artists, have introduced to the space. Each time an artist is brought to this world, they bring with them dozens of past collectors – wealthy collectors invested in contemporary art. I look forward to continuing to merge the worlds and bring new investment and enthusiasm to the space.
Describe you/your team’s experience curating and promoting artwork:
In the last five years, I have worked with dozens of emerging and high-profile contemporary artists in the UK and around the world. I have curated nearly two hundred individual artist presentations, and monthly modern and contemporary online art auctions since January 2020. More recently I curated two contemporary art NFT exhibitions on SuperRare.
I have also written extensively on art for newspapers and journals, and I have taught and run a contemporary Fine Art BA degree course since 2003. I am adept at discussing and explaining contemporary art to a wide variety of people. I have used social media (as you can see from my profiles above) to promote the artists I’m working with and to find new collectors.
After 20 years working within the art world as an artist, university lecturer, writer and consultant, I have unique access to artists and their studios, and a deep critical, historical and practical understanding of what constitutes progressive art. As a poacher turned gamekeeper, I have offered collectors intelligent, peer-reviewed art before it has become eye-wateringly expensive.
I promoted all the NFTs and artists in the SuperRare shows I curated, and they all sold those NFTs, as well as most of the subsequent drops.
Describe you/your team’s experience organizing exhibitions, making art sales, running auctions, networking with collectors, etc.:
I have been involved in the artworld commercially as an artist since 2000, and since late 2016 with direct contemporary art market experience as an art consultant and dealer. I have built the business from one collector in 2016, to near 60 collectors actively buying or searching now, and just under 1000 on the advisory mailing list.
As an art advisor with a background as an artist and university lecturer, and with no ‘stock’ to sell, I have presented only the art that I know to be critical and from artists of real merit. I have placed over 300 works of credible contemporary art with private collections and businesses during the past five years. Many of the artists that I presented early in their careers are now highly sought after by investors and critically acclaimed with multiple museum shows.
Since January 2020 I have also worked with an online auction house based in New York. I curated and organised half a dozen separate London based auctions as well as working on consignments for their New York auctions. More recently I have also been liaising with collectors on broader websites like 1stDibs and Printed Editions
Are there new artists you’d like to bring into the Space in the first six months? What is your relationship to them?:
As the months have passed more and more artists have approached me about inclusion in the SuperRare NFT space and I’ve been contacting others who I’d love to work with. As with my advisory, I will always be conscious of ensuring that I’m inclusive and international in my approach.
Just two examples of artists who I’ve had conversations with so far are:
Marcus Harvey gained recognition when his painting of serial killer Myra Hindley was included in the “Sensation” exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997). He has since been classed as a Young British Artist (YBA), though he is driven by his enduring interest in materials and technique, not shock value. Since the YBAs came to prominence, he has continued to pursue painting and sculpture, and, more recently, the crossover between them. As he explains: “There is a [kind of] painting that releases a charge that goes to your thumb. It makes you want to pull the painting into the world. And there are sculptures whose fluidity make you want to celebrate the urge to paint.” Working figuratively, and with subjects ranging from porn to politics, Harvey foregrounds the lush physicality of art making in everything he produces and is now interested in taking this sensibility to a digital format.
Jem Finer (a founding member of the band The Pogues) is an artist, composer and musician with a background in mathematics and computer science, dating back to the ICL 1900 mainframe computers of the early 1970s. An enduring fascination with deep time and space, self-organising systems and long-durational processes has been the impetus behind much of his work including his Artangel commission, Longplayer, a thousand-year-long musical composition playing since the last moments of 1999, Cosmolog, a two-year-long artists residency in the astrophysics department of Oxford University and the 2005 PRSF New Music Award winner, Score For a Hole In the Ground, a permanent, self-sustaining musical installation in a forest in Kent, which relies only on gravity and the elements to be audible. Recent work focuses on these interests and includes Kung Fu Pinball, a pinball machine modified to auto-compose music, Slowplayer, a 3 r.p.m. sound system and Spiegelei, a 360-degree spherical camera obscura. Supercomputer found Finer’s “post-digital” thinking come full circle in the form of a sculptural machine of a computational process, indebted as much to Jean Tinguely’s Métamatics as to John Conway’s Game of Life. Current work includes Sonic Ray, the music of Longplayer encoded in a beam of light and projected across the Thames from Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse to Richard Wilson’s Slice of Reality.
Are there any artists already in the CryptoArt space that you are planning to work with for this Space? Have they committed to participating yet?
All the artists who participated in the first two shows that I curated on SuperRare will continue to work with me in a new space. Those shows were:
https://superrare.com/features/a-lot-of-what-im-about-to-tell-you-is-made-up
https://superrare.com/features/from-can-see-to-cant-see
James Scott Brooks
@jamesscottbrooks
https://www.jamesbrooks.co.uk
Rebecca Harper
Ansel Krut
@anselkrut
https://www.saatchigallery.com/artist/ansel_krut
Andy Holden
@andy_holden
Elizabeth Magill
Instagram @elizabethxmagill
https://elizabethmagill.com
Damien Meade
Instagram @damien_meade
Justin Mortimer
@justinmortimer
Hannah Murgatroyd
@hannahmurgatroyd
Barry Reigate
@breigate71
https://www.saatchigallery.com/artist/barry_reigate
Lottie Stoddart
@lottiestoddart
Phoebe Unwin
www.phoebeunwin.com
Douglas White
@digital_douglas
https://www.douglaswhite.co.uk
Please provide any additional details you can about how you plan to operate this Space; e.g. cadence of exhibitions, auction strategy, number of artworks, other ideas for promoting your art and artists, etc.
My initial approach, taken in the first two curated exhibitions, was to see the exhibitions and my presence on SuperRare as being modelled after a traditional contemporary art gallery and their 8 to 10 a year exhibition programme. Although I think a series of group shows, focused on a particular idea or way of working, occurring every six to eight weeks, would still provide a strong backbone, I would also like to look beyond a traditional programme.
The space should be a forum for experimentation – allowing individual artist’s projects to be showcased in between the group shows. One artist has talked about interactivity and gamification of their NFT drops. Several would like to work more with sound. We have already had some collaborations with musicians, and this seems like rich territory - the constraints of the file size for image and sound are fascinating. As one artist said, working now in the world of NFTs, is a bit like being in at the start of vinyl and the 3-minute pop song. The experimentation and blue sky possibilities are incredibly exciting.
Traditional galleries don’t fully exploit online connectivity yet and we would also look for a way for greater connectivity to be factored in. The traditional gallery model is too static. Maybe a radio station is a better model.
How do you plan to structure commission rates for the artists who release in your Space?
The standard 15% commission - 10% going to the Space and 5% to the SR DAO.
To you, what is the importance of NFTs as a medium/technology? Where do you see the NFT and CryptoArt space in five years?
I have absolutely no doubt that NFTs will soon be ubiquitous. We will carry them with us and interact with them in our public lives, and I think that, as well as being innovative and exciting in their own right, there are opportunities for them to breathe new life into traditional worlds.
As the artist Ansel Krut recently emailed me: “NFTs are going to evolve. They will look very different in just a few years. (No one could even begin to imagine 3D animation when the first animations were hand made in the early part of the last century for example). It’s pretty incredible to be in on the ground floor. And with the chance to participate in, and maybe even help shape, the history of the development of the format. It’s not where I thought I’d end up as a dyed in the wool painter.”
If we are careful to build bridges between the artworlds and ensure that there is cross over and mutual respect, then I think we will find that in five years NFTs and CryptoArt are either considered just one art form equal to all the others, or that they are, very possibly in ten or twenty years, the predominant art form.
If your Space were a cocktail or a dish, what would it be and why?
I’d hope the space to be experimental, exciting, professional, and international – perhaps like a Singapore Gin Sling.
Anything else you’d like the community to consider?
I have worked within the contemporary art world for over 20 years, in all capacities, and I am incredibly excited to bring that experience and knowledge to the world of NFTs. Attached here is a link to a complementary ebook of the publication I produced a year ago on some of the work I placed over the first few years of Greg Rook Advisory: Collecting Contemporary Art Ebook by Greg Rook | Blurb Books UK
In terms of the environmental impact, I have begun to work with Point Advisory, a leading sustainability advisory firm using Gold Standard certified carbon offsets to compensate for each drop.
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I totally support your mission of finding unknown artists and giving them a space to be recognized and celebrated. I’d probably consider myself a “layperson”, since I don’t have any previous experience in the art world, so I hope to bring that perspective and voice to the NFT community.
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