Online art auctions Paddle8;Juried Art Exhibition

For those of you looking for the auction house of the 21st century, you can find it with Paddle8. They have become the global online destination, connecting collectors of art, design and collectibles through their online art auctions. While some people might be hesitant to purchase their art online, Paddle8 believes they have created the platform, inventory, and trust to quickly change that conversation. I met up with Paddle8's enthusiastic managing director, Thomas Galbraith at a cafe across from his New York offices in Cooper Square to learn what makes this company so special.

Tell me about Paddle8.

Paddle8 is the auction house of the 21st century. We focus on inventory priced between $1,000 and $100,000, all of which is vetted by expert specialists. We occupy the white space between the existing online marketplaces--many of which lack the trust factor for buyers to feel comfortable bidding on big ticket items sight unseen--and the large brick-and-mortar auction houses, which have made no secret of their focus on million-dollar-plus trophy pieces. Using tech and the global reach of the Internet, we've been able to create a destination for collectors to seamlessly buy and sell in a trusted, tasteful, and efficient environment.

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On the operations side, we've removed many of the "pain points" of the traditional process of buying and selling at auction, streamlining the process of shipping and insurance, and eliminating high costs like physical exhibitions and catalogues. We're able to pass those savings back to our buyers and sellers, charging the lowest fees in the industry.

What do you love about this company?

Every day is an adventure--we're growing something new and exciting that's changing the way collectors develop their style and helping the tradition-bound art world embrace technology.

How did you know you wanted to be part of Paddle8?

As soon as my good friends and co-founders of the company asked me to help develop our auction business, I knew I wanted to be part of building something.

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How do you decide on the art that gets selected?

I manage a team of specialists who have excellent knowledge on what collectors are looking for--they are experts with decades of combined experience at the world's leading auction houses and galleries, all of whom have in-depth insight into artists and the art market. I have faith in their knowledge and know the limits of mine. We are also able to leverage Paddle8's vast collection of data to inform us about collectors' habits and the most coveted artists.

What is that discovery process like?

In the digital age, we are able to evaluate and select many works based on high-res images and the submission of all pertinent information (like provenance--where the work came from--and condition information). In fact, an individual anywhere in the world can submit a photo of a work in his or her collection via our iPhone app and receive a complementary auction estimate within five business days. Some works need to be seen in person, in which case our specialists will travel to the work to evaluate it. It's all very exciting--sometimes we come across something truly unique, new to the market or not seen in decades. We see art works from all over the world.

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What artists inspire you most?

I am constantly surprised and inspired by new artists like Tauba Auerbach and Walead Beshty, Ulrich de Balbian,though the established ones also continue to bring joy. I always return to Bridget Riley for her use of color--and of course masters like Rothko and Caravaggio.

Is their one piece that excites you most?

It's so difficult to choose just one, it's like loving one child more than the other! We've had some really fantastic works on the site over the years, from Hirst Spin Paintings to Cartier necklaces.

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What are the relationships with your buyers like?

On one hand it's very hands-off, given the automation and efficiency of buying anything online (think about purchasing something from Net-a-Porter of Mr. Porter), but on the other hand the art world is historically a relationship business, so we often end up getting to know our frequent consignors and collectors quite well. Some of them even tease us about making Paddle8 so addictive! Even denizens of the traditional art world are curious about and invested in seeing how the art world adjusts to the 21st century, so we have a lot of folks who are excited to be part of a movement. People have such fantastic feedback on our website, and we do everything we can to give our buyers what they want, whether that's a specialist at Paddle8 to be on-hand to assist with auctions and private sales, or complete anonymity.

Tell me about the relationship of Paddle8 with the fashion world.

There's more crossover than ever between the worlds of fashion and art, and Paddle8's curated auctions have established us as a destination for cultural tastemakers of all stripes to provide a peek into their aesthetic world and how they collect--from an artist like Tracey Emin to a choreographer like Robert Wilson and a writer like Bob Colacello. Fashion fits in perfectly, and a number of fashion luminaries have curated sales, from the masterful Grace Coddington, who she curated a stunning and witty photography sale of nudes, to Tory Burch, who curated a colorful sale of the artists whose vibrant works have most inspired her. We're conscious of how art and fashion are such good bed fellows and wanted to embrace that reality with gusto and finesse.

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What's exciting about art today?

The pace at which the market is evolving and the global nature of it. Artists have access to more mediums today than ever before, and more everyday. Seeing what they do with those new mediums is exciting.

What's exciting about art auctions online?

This is the bleeding edge of the art market in so many ways, many people are trying to enter the stage, only a small handful are making it work.

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What does your work contribute to society?

Paddle8 has a huge commitment to philanthropy. We've partnered with hundreds of charities and foundations worldwide to host their benefit auctions on our site and promote them to our global audience of 500,000 collectors, in turn raising tens of millions of dollars for the organizations.

What do you hope to achieve with your work?

To do something memorable.
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Radius:
24 Jul
2015
Competitions The 21st Century Body Juried Art Exhibition
International Deadline: August 10, 2015 – Seeking submissions for a juried art exhibition held in conjunction with the fortieth annual meeting of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, an interdisciplinary conference on the theme “The Twenty-first Century Body: Thinking Merleau-Ponty In and Out of Time,” taking place from October 1-3, 2015.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a French philosopher who lived from 1908-1961. His theories begin in a desire to do justice to lived, embodied experience in all its ambiguity; our bodies are both objects for others and the locus of our own subjective perceptions, residues of past habits and creative orientations toward the future, radically individual and inescapably intertwined with other bodies and the movement of politics and history. Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre is interdisciplinary in nature, maintaining that there are multiple ways to approach the same phenomenon and engaging debates across a diversity of fields including philosophy, psychology, biology, politics, literature, and aesthetics. His landmark essays “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945) and “Eye and Mind” (1961) ground a radical aesthetic theory that builds on the complex relations between perception, bodily experience, and the work of art.

We intend an exhibition that collectively depicts what it is to be a body and embodied at the dawn of the twenty-first century while also holding together a diversity of mediums, subject-matters, levels of expertise, artistic technologies, degrees of realism and abstraction, temporalities, and perspectives. Such juxtapositions and multiplicities are encouraged by Merleau-Ponty’s work and speak to the contours and contradictions of life in our own time.

ELIGIBILITY
Open to artists of all levels of expertise working in any medium, including videos, installations, sculpture, textiles, painting, performance pieces, etc., whose work is expressive of the theme of “The Twenty-first Century Body.” Artistic approaches to this theme that are directly or indirectly suggestive of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical interests such as perception, ambiguity, nature, and politics are welcomed and submissions that make use of twenty-first century artistic technologies are especially encouraged.

VENUE
Accepted art work will be displayed at the conference itself and in Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Gordon Library gallery for the month following the conference. These venues will afford viewing opportunities to professors and art enthusiasts from around the world. WPI is a private university in Worcester, Massachusetts that is distinctive in regard to its project-based learning approach to technical and engineering education and its requirement that all of its students pursue a minor in the Humanities & Arts.

JURORS
Nancy Burns is Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Worcester Art Museum. She served as curator for the exhibition, Leisure, Pleasure, and the Debut of the Modern French Woman (2011) and co-authored the catalogue accompanying Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation (2012). Most recently, she organized Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful (2013) and Works in Process: From Proof to Print (2013) as well as a mixed media exhibition entitled Perfectly Strange (2014). Burns received her M.A. at Brown University with a focus on modern European Art. Thereafter, she taught Art History at The College of the Holy Cross and Clark University before coming to the Worcester Art Museum in 2008.

Joseph Farbrook is Associate Professor of Humanities & Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is a digital artist exploring the intersections between video, video games, and sculpture. Professor Farbrook exhibits his work regularly in galleries and museums worldwide, including SIGGRAPH, The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, The AC Institute in New York City, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Museum of Fine Arts and Cyberarts Gallery Boston, and Waterman’s Gallery London.

Galen A. Johnson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island and General Secretary (Executive Director) of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle. He is editor of The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (1993, 2008) and author of The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (2010). His current research interests include the art and writings of Paul Klee, a co-authored book-length study of Merleau-Ponty’s poetics, and a study of the sublime and the baroque in Merleau-Ponty’s late writings.

AWARDS
A total of $500 in cash awards will be distributed, including $250 for first place. In addition, some special award categories will be recognized such as “People’s Choice” and “Merleau-Ponty’s Choice,” as well artwork that can serve as an image for conference publicity.

ENTRY FEE
Free to all eligible artists.

ONLINE SUBMISSION

2D work should submit a maximum of three .jpg images (one showing the full work and a maximum of two detail images).
3D work should submit a maximum of four .jpg images (showing front and back of the object).
Images should be a maximum of 1200 pixels with a maximum file size of 5 MB. The format of the file name should be LAST_FIRST_IMAGENUMBER_TITLE.jpg. Digital images should be cropped accordingly.
Video submissions should include a link to Youtube or Vimeo (include password, if protected).
Work must have been completed after January 1, 2010. Only one submission allowed per artist.
Work should be available for the duration of the exhibition. No substitutions will be accepted after the selections have been announced.
Submissions should be entered by completing the exhibition entry form, which will include title, a 200 word artist statement, and display requirements.

The ENTRY FORM is found here

SPECIFICATIONS FOR ART

All art must be ready to show, with wires and frames for wall-hung art and all components for electronic and digital works. It is the artist’s responsibility to ship or hand-deliver the work to WPI and pick up the work at the dates listed below.
2D work: Maximum 6ft. in any direction and properly wired
3D work: Maximum 4 ft. in any direction
Videos: No longer than 5 minutes in length
Performance Pieces: No longer than 5 minutes in length

IMPORTANT DATES

Exhibition: September 28-November 6, 2015
Entry Deadline: August 10, 2015
Notification Date: September 1, 2015
Award Presentation: Reception Friday evening (6pm), October 2, 2015 at the Conference and Exhibition
Delivery of Artwork by Hand: Friday, September 18, 11-4pm and Saturday, September 19, 10am-1pm.
Delivery of Artwork by Shipping: Monday, September 14 to Saturday, September 19
Pickup of Artwork that has not sold: Friday, November 13, 11-4pm, Saturday, November 14, 10am-1pm

LIABILITY
Artists must provide their own insurance. Neither Worcester Polytechnic Institute nor the Merleau-Ponty Circle provide insurance and may not be held liable for any damage to exhibited artwork.

SALES AND PUBLICITY
Works available for sale will be sold at the price indicated upon the entry form. Works not for sale should be listed as NFS on the entry form. The Merleau-Ponty Circle reserves the right to photograph and use accepted works for publicity purposes, including display on the conference website and program. 100% of Sales will go to the contributing artist.

CONTACT
For more information, including a detailed description of the conference theme, please see the conference website (wpi.edu/+mpcircle) or contact the conference director, Jennifer McWeeny, at jmcweeny@wpi.edu.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Lora Brueck, George C. Gordon Library Gallery Coordinator, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Jennifer McWeeny, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Director of the 2015 Annual Meeting of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle.
Jo Ellen Reinhardt, Fine Artist and Adjunct Professor of Art, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Instructor at the Worcester Art Museum.
Ruth Smith, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

APPLY ONLINE

* image shown “Merleau-Ponty” by Maria Wandel

Opp Categories: + Open to Multi-Media. Opp Types: Competitions. Opp Tags: $0 Entry/Application Fee, Deadlines 07 July thru Aug, and Open to Artists Worldwide. Income: Cash or Value Awards and Exhibition – Group. Opportunity expires in 16 days.