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Opinion: Internet Spells Opportunity For African Contemporary Art

Opinion: Internet Spells Opportunity For African Contemporary Art

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Julie Taylor is an anthropologist, communications guru, and art entrepreneur. She earned degrees from Oxford and Cambridge and is author of “Naming the Land,” a book based on her doctoral research about San identity in Northern Namibia. She is based in Johannesburg, where she sells online contemporary fine art. Before that, she ran Google’s communications for Africa.

From MarkLives. Story by Julie Taylor.

During the last two years, the Western-dominated art world has shifted its attention towards African art, based on both a rising interest in multiculturalism and an appetite for new material and markets.

There are growing numbers of African sales by leading auction houses like Bonhams, as well as by a variety of online platforms such as Paddle8.

Whilst African contemporary art is now firmly entrenched as trendy, African artists are still significantly under-represented on the global scene.

Fascinated by the intersection of technology, the creative spirit and the under-representation of African art in the global economy, I founded Guns & Rain, a curated online gallery of contemporary fine art from Southern Africa.

Underrepresentation means that whilst the quality of artists’ work is often very high, it is more affordable than similar works sold in Europe or North America.

Moving forward, a number of curators hope to see more maturity in the way the international art community views art from Africa: they would like to see some artists making a transition from the “African Contemporary Art” niche into the mainstream “Contemporary Art” market, as peers in terms of quality, content, and price.

The Internet provides a huge opportunity for African contemporary art. Whilst the web will not supplant the entrenched mores of the art market, finding and buying art is no longer as tricky or as intimidating as it used to be, and African contemporary art is increasingly accessible.

I’m greatly looking forward to seeing African artists rise in prominence.

Read more at MarkLives. This feature first ran in The Future by Design, published by Ornico..