The Artist Accelerators: Joey Flores and Jonathan T.D. Neil
The art world will need to come around to understanding that grants and charity are not the only way to help artists.
5 QUESTIONS WITH Joey Flores and Jonathan T.D. Neil
Managing Director and Founding Partner, Inversion Art
Los Angeles, CA
Joey Flores is an artist and LA-based entrepreneur with 20 years creating rapid growth for companies. In 2011, as founding CEO of the artist marketing platform Earbits, he secured seed investment from Y Combinator, the world’s leading accelerator program, which offers capital, mentoring, networking, and other benefits. After attending the program, he raised $1.7M from top investors, grew the company to work with over 15,000 artists and 600 record labels, and led it to acquisition for $8M in 2015. The extent to which that investment program impacted the company’s success, and Joey Flores’s career, cannot be overstated. Since then, he has helped two organizations launch their own accelerator investment programs – the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and as a volunteer, The Hidden Genius Project in California, which mentors black male youth in technology and entrepreneurship. Having been through the world’s best accelerator and built two others, he is now bringing the same powerful investing approach to the world of fine art.
Prior to Inversion Art, Jonathan T. D. Neil was the Founding Director of the Center for Business & Management of the Arts at Claremont Graduate University and of Sotheby’s Institute of Art – Los Angeles. Jonathan has written extensively on contemporary art and artists for ArtReview, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, Ikon, The Art Newspaper, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is the editor, with Alexander Nagel, of Bending Concepts: The Held Essays on Visual Art, 2011-2017 (2019) and has contributed numerous essays for museum and gallery catalogues and exhibitions for artists such as Robert Longo, Tara Donovan, Eve Sussman, Robert Lazzarini, Rosson Crow and Ryan McGinness. In 2018 he penned an op-ed for ArtReview championing many of the ideas Inversion is working to realize.
Inversion Art combines an investment accelerator program with an artist services agency to give artists the knowledge, connections, and operational support they need to focus on creating their greatest work. Believing that artists who have control over their own careers are set free to define their own success, Inversion Art provides artists with access to world-class mentors, a talented peer group, a high quality network, financial investment, and business support, we will have given them the means and mindset to achieve their most ambitious goals.
1. At Inversion Art, you say: “It’s time to invest in artists differently.” How do you accomplish this? Put another way, how does the current model of artistic patronage and support need upgrading?
Jonathan: Part of this has to do with distinguishing between the artist and their work. Most of the art system today is built around investing in an artist’s product - their art, the work they produce or the projects they create. And most collected visual art is a species of rival good, meaning that only one person or household or institution can own it and consume it at a time. So when people or institutions in the art system talk about supporting or being patrons of artists, what they’re doing is buying the artist’s work, which is a lot more scarce than, say, a novel, or a song, or a piece of filmed entertainment, all artistic goods that are non-rival. You and I can download the exact same song on Spotify and enjoy it just the same. Works of art are different. (Let’s put to the side for the moment the question of editions, NFTs, public exhibitions, etc.). Inversion supports artists by buying their work too, but Inversion goes one step further: we buy an artist’s work to make it possible for them to take part in our Accelerator.
The Accelerator is designed to give artists the time and space to think about their career, to make a plan for where they want their practice to be in 5 years or 10 years, for where they want to show their work, and with whom, and for who they want writing about their work. We want artists to think about the big projects that they want to do. We know artists that want to make movies, that want to collaborate with fashion brands, that want to begin arts education programs. But they feel like they don’t have the tools, the know-how, or the contacts to make that happen. Most artists just have to cross their fingers and hope that their work gets noticed enough, and bought enough, in order to build the social and financial capital that they themselves can then invest in these projects. That’s not efficient.
Also, many in the art system have no incentive to see artists move in these new directions, because they’re invested in a specific body of work or aesthetic, which is to say that they are invested in the artist’s market more than in the artist themselves. We want to surround artists with a community of support that gives them the time, intelligence and means to pursue the projects and plans that may not be supported by the market at this moment. There are a handful of nonprofit organizations that fill this gap, and they should be commended (and supported!), but the idea that only nonprofit organizations -- with their boards of trustees, fundraising requirements, and other constraints on operations -- can and should serve artists’ interests just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. You can make the markets work for artists, it just requires a different model and a longer view.
2. You aim to “build a wealth-generating and culture-defining organization that puts artists’ interests first.” How could this shift in investment philosophy create a more equitable artistic production ecosystem?
Jonathan: First and foremost by giving artists greater leverage over their own careers. In countless conversations with artists, one of the most consistent things that was voiced over and over was how artists feel like they are at the mercy of all of these other players in the art system, and that they aren’t quite sure what everyone is after. Even just doing a studio visit can feel like this awkward experience, because no one is forthcoming about how you represent yourself to a collector, or a curator, or a dealer or advisor. Everyone wants different things, and a lot of pressure is placed upon artists to be the representatives of their own work -- what it means, not just to them, but in the context of contemporary practice and art history. So by beginning there, by giving artists this community of support and being there for them when they have questions about how to handle different and divergent situations, we will be giving artists the means to make better decisions for themselves and to negotiate better arrangements for themselves in whatever projects they choose to pursue.
Now, as this community grows, as this organic network begins to establish some gravity in the art world and beyond, you begin to shape other people’s and organization’s behavior. Artists who have both the confidence and the support system to say “no” to compromising or even exploitative terms coming from collectors or dealers or even museums will be looking out for not just themselves but for other artists and participants in the art system. There are a lot of business practices out there that simply aren’t sustainable, but that artists don’t feel empowered to do anything about, or even to speak out about, for example. The Inversion network of people will be a place where our artists can and will be encouraged to be candid with one another about their experiences with other participants and organizations in the art world. And we fully expect, as our network grows, it will begin to exert a positive influence on the way that we, and others, do business.
Echoing my answer to the first question, Inversion’s business model is built with a long time horizon in mind. When we buy artists work, we commit to holding it for at least five years, to prioritizing sales to institutional collections, to an artist resale right, and to an option to acquire more work over an eight year period – which is really designed to help artists with their future projects (think of it as a kind of capital reserve on which artist can rely). We trust that these kinds of commitments, though not widely adopted in the ecosystem currently, could become industry standard, which would be good for all involved, artists especially.
3. Tell me about the importance of mentorship in the accelerator…
Joey: When we talk about mentorship at Inversion Art, it's about more than just giving artists advice. It's about taking them under the wings of our team and helping them be successful in any way we can. When I was lucky enough to go through Y Combinator, the technology accelerator that Inversion is inspired by, we were being mentored by world class entrepreneurs who had built and sold huge companies. They would sit with us and ask us what we were trying to accomplish and, unlike a lot of situations where portraying strength is important and you're expected to smile and talk about how great everything is going, in these sessions you could be completely real. In fact, you have to be. You have to make yourself vulnerable and trust that these folks are here to help. You would share your ambitions, and in many cases, be figuring out those ambitions in those meetings. You would open up about challenges, fears, pressure, the things you were facing everyday. The mentors there would provide incredible advice from the perspective of someone who has actually been where you are, and sometimes that included tough love, but they would also leverage their own personal network to help you get to where you wanted to go.
I remember when I was fundraising and discussing it with one of the founders of YC, he said, "You know who would be interested in this, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress." Matt is roundly considered one of the more influential angel investors. The partner made an intro to Matt over email and, without hesitation, of course, Matt took my call. Within 25 minutes on the phone, and without even asking about the terms of the investment, he said, "Sounds great, I'm in." I don't have any delusions that it was because our company was perfect. It was the validation by the YC founder that made Matt sit up and pay attention. Those high quality introductions and endorsements are the kind of dynamic we're trying to replicate at Inversion Art. Yes, our mentors will be sitting with the artists and giving them a perspective on how to get to where they want to go, but also if they know a curator, collector, critic, or industry leader that they believe could be impactful for the artists' career, they'll be helping to make those connections.
Another dynamic that will happen over time is that the artists who have gone through the program previously will become mentors to the artists who are going through after them. These days, many of the partners at Y Combinator are alumni from previous years. They've either sold companies or died in the trenches and want to pass on what they've learned to the next round of entrepreneurs. And because everyone feels so grateful to have received such support from the organization and community in the past, it's both expected and simply natural to want to pass on that help to those who come behind you. Now, that organization has over 5,000 company founders who all work together to support one another. I've gotten countless job offers from the alumni network, introductions to valuable people, and much more. You can only imagine that, at Inversion Art, once dozens of our artists have gone on to have solo shows at incredible institutions, or are selling out all of their works to incredible collectors, most will feel inclined to pay that forward. That generous spirit will actually be something we look for in the artists we work with and it's an ethos that we will instill in everyone who goes through the program. It's core to our values. It's an absolutely incredible feeling to have such powerful leaders and peers behind you, and it's equally rewarding when you are the one that is able to provide help to the next generation.
4. What lessons from the entrepreneurial journey could best inform artists and cultural funders/investors?
Joey: One thing that I've heard several times from people is that artists are not necessarily as supportive to one another as entrepreneurs can be. They are protective of their collector and curator relationships. There's this sense among many that it's a zero sum game, that to share those contacts might mean less sales or opportunity for them in the future.
In the startup community, it's widely understood that we are all more powerful together. Eleven years ago, when I was starting my first company, I reached out to someone who had been a significant leader at Google and asked if they might consider becoming an advisor to me. They took my meeting, liked what we were working on, and agreed to help out. That person has been a mentor to me for over 10 years now. I have called them at my most difficult moments and they have always been there for me. At Inversion Art, we'll be building a culture of shared success and mutual support from day one.
The other thing that I think the art world will need to come around to understanding is that grants and charity are not the only way to help artists. I understand that there is a long history of artists being taken advantage of by business people and many people like to have separation of church and state, but pretending that begging for charity and grants is the only honorable way for artists to make progress in their careers is doing them a tremendous disservice. My previous artist marketing company was a streaming music service that high quality artists could pay to have their music featured on, and we got an earful about the ethics of asking artists to pay for radio airtime. But the same people who complained about that had no problem with artists wasting money on fliers, posters and press kits. Those were considered reasonable things to sell to independent and emerging artists even though they didn't work at all, while simply receiving a fee to put an artist on the radio was considered taboo. Meanwhile, the major labels spend vast fortunes making sure their artists are constantly in radio rotation, and the artists who used our service said it was the first marketing tool they had used that actually got them profit-generating results. The fact is that the most important thing to ensure when doing business with artists is to align your incentives so that you are successful when they are successful. Providing a fair and equitable exchange of value is what really matters, and it is going to take different forms in the 2020's than it did in the 1960's. Pretending that the old, traditional way of doing things is the only honorable way to do business is what keeps artists sitting in their studios wondering why things haven't gotten any easier over the last four decades.
5. Arts Funders Forum (AFF) research shows that the cultural sector has been experiencing a crisis of relevance, and that the sector must shift its narrative to show how the arts contribute to solving our significant global challenges (and how artists are entrepreneurs and patrons are investors). How do you see IA aiding this shift, and based on your experience, what stories should we be telling to best accomplish this?
Jonathan: This is a very interesting challenge at the moment. But first and foremost, artists should be free to pursue their practices, whatever these may be. There are artists whose careers have been defined by their commitments to what you call significant global challenges. For example, Agnes Denes and Mel Chin are two artists that come to mind whose work is inextricable from the environmental movement of the 1970s and 80s. Denes’ Wheatfield - A Confrontation from 1982 is just one of those interventions in the world that continues to resonate today, and Denes is a hero to many artists working today who are looking for ways to make their practices relevant to similar types of challenges. Today I think of artists like Hank Willis Thomas and For Freedoms, or Alexandra Grant’s grantLOVE projects, as examples of artists who have aligned their practices with civic and social activism and support systems.
At the same time, there needs to be room for artists whose work isn’t immediately associated with contemporary politics and issues of representation, if for the simple fact that many of the artists we admire most today are often those that have been out ahead of where their society’s politics and social challenges have been at the time they were working. Or they have addressed those challenges in ways that just weren’t yet legible to the public. At Inversion, we want to find artists with compelling visions for their practices and their careers. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, though they are often thought about as such by older generations of artists who are hostile to terms such as “the market” or “investment.” But the fact remains that, ambitious work, work that is going to be seen to have an impact on, and to tell the story of, these big “global challenges,” requires both a capacity to plan, to direct significant resources, and to take time. This is exactly what Inversion Art is designed to provide. We won’t know what stories we “should” be telling until we know what stories our artists are interested in telling.
Joey Flores is an artist and LA-based entrepreneur with 20 years creating rapid growth for companies. In 2011, as founding CEO of the artist marketing platform Earbits, he secured seed investment from Y Combinator, the world’s leading accelerator program, which offers capital, mentoring, networking, and other benefits. After attending the program, he raised $1.7M from top investors, grew the company to work with over 15,000 artists and 600 record labels, and led it to acquisition for $8M in 2015. The extent to which that investment program impacted the company’s success, and Joey Flores’s career, cannot be overstated. Since then, he has helped two organizations launch their own accelerator investment programs – the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and as a volunteer, The Hidden Genius Project in California, which mentors black male youth in technology and entrepreneurship. Having been through the world’s best accelerator and built two others, he is now bringing the same powerful investing approach to the world of fine art.
Prior to Inversion Art, Jonathan T. D. Neil was the Founding Director of the Center for Business & Management of the Arts at Claremont Graduate University and of Sotheby’s Institute of Art – Los Angeles. Jonathan has written extensively on contemporary art and artists for ArtReview, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, Ikon, The Art Newspaper, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is the editor, with Alexander Nagel, of Bending Concepts: The Held Essays on Visual Art, 2011-2017 (2019) and has contributed numerous essays for museum and gallery catalogues and exhibitions for artists such as Robert Longo, Tara Donovan, Eve Sussman, Robert Lazzarini, Rosson Crow and Ryan McGinness. In 2018 he penned an op-ed for ArtReview championing many of the ideas Inversion is working to realize.
The Path Forward interview series, an initiative of MCW Projects LLC, investigates how cultural and philanthropic leaders are re-envisioning the future of the arts.