Artifact's launch exhibition, NYC 2019, in the spirit of interactivity (video above)

Artifact: Building the Connected Art World — and Paying the Price for It

In a world where art is increasingly commoditized, Artifact was created to rebuild a deeper relationship between art, artists, and audiences. Conceived in 2016, Artifact aimed to go beyond the transactional nature of galleries and online marketplaces by building a digital ecosystem that privileged storytelling, data integrity, and discovery. The goal was simple yet ambitious: make art not just 'viewable', but truly understandable and accessible to the world at large.

Artifact was more than a startup, it was a tribute to my father, an Artist who lived with a hearing impairment but taught me the value of seeing and feeling the world differently. A belief that Art is not just about aesthetic value, but about the stories, moments, and struggles behind it, the human side. A creation never done in a vacuum but with influences and references that span our living world, and the world that existed before.

At its heart, Artifact was a rebellion.

A rebellion against the closed-door, pay-to-play model of the global art world.

A rebellion against the sterile galleries and gatekeepers who had turned art into a commodity instead of a connection.

Artifact’s Vision:

• Build a digital ecosystem that empowered artists to tell the real stories behind their work.

• Create a platform where discovery wasn’t gamified by “likes” and “followers,” but by depth, authenticity, and meaning.

• Record the primary-source data about artists and artworks — a living encyclopedia for the future.

• Build new bridges between artists, brands, universities, and audiences that had been locked out for too long.

And we did it.

By 2019:

• We deployed interactive tablets at exhibitions in New York City, capturing audience attention for over 9 minutes per artwork, unheard of in today’s distracted world.
  
  

  

  
  

• We worked with universities across the U.S. and Europe to catalog student showcases into living, growing portfolios.

• We raised capital from prominent old-world families to fuel our vision of a new art economy.

• I even got to teach an MFA class on how the next generation could reclaim their voices outside traditional galleries and catalogue their work for public engagement and empowerment.

• We joined 500 Startups in San Francisco and fought to scale a movement.

But success has a cost — especially when it threatens those who profit from opacity.

When Artifact needed to pivot, to adapt to our learnings, to scale our technology, to protect the artists we served, some investors, whose names carry centuries of entitlement, refused.

They undermined.

They sided with institutions designed to keep the old system intact, called gallery owners and pushed them away from us, and forced us to focus on Universities as clients alone (longer sales cycles, limited by adjunct professors with no existing relationship with technology, and who never understood the empowerment of personal distribution channels.

The betrayal cut deeper than money.

They found ways to tear my family apart, friendships lost, health tested, at times it felt like a personal crucifixion.

Artifact wasn’t a failure.

It was a sacrifice, a first stand against a broken, rigged multi-sided economy where true connection threatens the profit of the elite.

It was ahead of its time, or the product of a 'just' parallel world.

Artifact proved that audiences wanted/want to hear artists’ real stories. That artists needed tools that honored their humanity, not just their market value.

Today, the problems Artifact fought against are even bigger.

And its principles, decentralization, authenticity, human-first storytelling, have become the blueprints for new movements across art, tech, and culture. The lack of data present in the art world is the demise of the majority of Artists out there who trusted/trust a system that was never there for them in the first place.

Artifact was never just a platform. It was a declaration:

Art belongs to the people who make it, not to the institutions that sell it.

This was an ode to fixing old-world multi-sided economies built on greed. Unwanted "Change" is the poison on Gen X or maybe humans as a whole. Maybe we need ai to take the baton from us all now instead.. We financial engineer better than we value engineer after-all.

Here's a video of how an Artwork is registered to Artifact:

Today, the global art market remains fragmented, opaque, and elitist:

• Information about artworks and artists is often secondary, filtered through galleries and dealers whose incentives prioritize exclusivity and speculation.

• Artists have limited direct control over how their narratives are shared, affecting both cultural impact and economic opportunity.

• The public’s experience of art, whether online or at fairs, is surface-level at best: driven by visual spectacle rather than deeper engagement.

At the structural level, art discovery still mirrors a 19th-century model, reliant on networks, insider access, and gatekeepers, even as other industries like music and publishing have evolved toward direct creator-audience relationships

As they say.... "C'est la Vie"