The following quote from the NY Business Journal article on Arthena nicely sums up this new approach for the fine art investor (not collector) with a limited budget.
"For a minimum of $5,000, an investor can join up to 98 other casual investors to fund a collection of three to five works, which are sourced and acquired by expert art advisors. Then, the website will track the ongoing appraisals over time for the investor, and Arthena takes a percentage of the profits."
The NY Business Journal reports
Source: The NY Business JournalMadelaine D'Angelo studied art and museums at Harvard, and spent her early career studying trends among art collectors before she decided two things were missing: The Internet, and regular people.
The 27-year-old saw a business idea in front of her, took it to the AngelPad accelerator program last year, where she fine-tuned it. Today it's called Arthena, and it's bringing the crowdfunding concept to fine art. It's like AngelList or iAngels, but investors here are backing the startups of the art world, so to speak — undervalued, modern artists who are producing works that could rapidly appreciate in value.
For a minimum of $5,000, an investor can join up to 98 other casual investors to fund a collection of three to five works, which are sourced and acquired by expert art advisors. Then, the website will track the ongoing appraisals over time for the investor, and Arthena takes a percentage of the profits.
It's not a complicated concept, but D'Angelo thinks it could bring big changes to the opaque, insular world of art collecting.
"One of the reasons I started Arthena is I wanted to give transparency to art investment," she said. "It's such a multifaceted world, and there's a lot of kind of shady dealing going on."
Aside from bringing more lay people into the art world, she also sees Arthena as a way to bring new business to art advisors, who generally haven't embraced the Internet as a business development tool.
After emerging from the accelerator program, Arthena raised a $1 million seed investment round, led by Foundation Capital with help from Aslanoba Capital, Beamonte Investments, C15 Ventures, and 2020 Ventures. After working under the radar for several months to build the platform, Arthena is starting to be more public.
On Thursday, D'Angelo and her team rented space in the WeWork at Bryant Park for an elite panel discussion aimed at private family foundations she hopes will become investors through the site. More than 100 people attended. "I hope this is not just an investment, but that we're teaching people how to collect," she said during a break from setting up the event. "I think that's kind of being diminished with the emergence of all these e-commerce platforms."
D'Angelo is focused on art for the foreseeable future, but she has designs on a much bigger concept: Crowdfunding for any tangible property. Think fine wine, cars, sculptures, the list goes on.
"My background is in art, and i want to make art accessible, and I want to teach people how to collect art," she said. "But I can certainly see past my early hopes and visions to a much larger vision for the next five years."
One of the most intriguing challenges of Arthena is the legal and logistical complications of collective ownership of real property. Unlike securities, somebody has to decide where the invested works are stored, displayed and relocated. Also, there's touchy issues about security and possession that must be worked out.
None of those are deal breakers compared to the larger issue of value growth, but still, it's a substantial wrinkle for a tech startup looking to keep things simple in the early days. Fortunately, D'Angelo's parents ran a shipping and logistics business, and she says she "learned through osmosis" as a child.
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