For most of you, its already hard enough to earn enough money from sales of artwork to sustain yourself. On the other hand, if you've already made it, then congratulations! But its never too early to think about contributing real positive social changes to society. Though I'm not at all skilled with the brush due to lack of access to art as a child, I have a deep appreciation and love for this creative subject. I think all people, especially children, should have access to art education and the act of creating itself. Those who don't often live a colorless life.

This thought led me to quitting my old business to pursue the creation of my own gallery- a social art gallery where artists, patrons, and myself can all be part of a cause. How does it work? Well proceeds from the gallery would go to funding art education for underprivileged children!

But the problem with art is that it is selfish. The art world is selfish. The collectors want the original all for themselves. It's going to change soon though. With archival print reproduction technology getting better and better, one can no longer tell the difference between an original and a print anymore, even from a close distance. When you sell an original, its one transaction. Poof, gone. You can't sell it again. But with prints, you can create recurring income for yourself, almost like getting rent if you're able to sell it consistently! But open-edition prints could devalue the work. Limited-edition prints on the other hand...

I realized that by licensing limited-edition prints and tying every print purchase to funding art education, one piece of artwork could potentially fund 1000's art workshops for children, without devaluing the artist's work.

So I set off on this new path. I spent 3 months toiling away in hard labor setting up the website, working with curators to find social-minded artists, and going through all those legal, financial, and entrepreneurial hoops. It's finally come together. I want to invite all artists to submit their works, even if its just a shoddy picture, to my curatorial team here. The chief curator will respond with an honest critique to every submission.

Or just come view the gallery and give some feedback. The official launch is on November 15, but everything is already ready. At this point, your feedback is as valuable to me as a sale. Happy viewing!

the WHOIS results for your web domain are very suscpisious especially the contact email address @ [email protected] m
that coupled with the fact your asking for money from the outset I'd suggest people avoid your site.
if you are really interested in helping children have access to art then you should contemplate getting out in your local community & actually DOING IT, instead of creating websites that ask strangers for money?

I have protection on my WHOIS results, its actually a default setting from my hosting provider. Is it suspicious? I actually never knew about this.

All submissions to the open call are completely free! So we're not asking you to pay any money from the outset.

look into your whois records, the money thing I was talking about the funding of children on the home page, but thats okay if your doing well & helping out the kids it's a wonderful thing, if thats what your doing.

Thanks for the tip. And that's why I've created this gallery in the first place! The thing with a new venture like that is we haven't began selling yet, which means it will be at least a month before our art for arts fund is large enough for the first round of funding. Trust is an issue nowadays with so many scams online- its going to take a while, but I'm all in.

yeah well so what you basically do is get permission of someones artwork so you can exclusively liscence, price and sell through your "online gallery". the artists gets nothing out of your new venture and most likely must not sell the contributed art himself?

in exchange some poor kids from rio can make tourist attractions out of the slums? they do get a nice experience which is nice and im glad people came up with that but how is this going to help better their situations on the long run anyways? and why produce money out of it?

the idea of children is always nice but i believe this is not the main purpose of it since alot of money already went into the site. theres alot of paid marketing plugins with monthly fees.

the shopsystem "shopify" itself comes with 30$/ month in its cheapest form.

your customer service from zendesk varies - lets say 20$ per month

your plugin from wufoo for forms comes free for the first 3 forms. if you have more than its another 15$

your add tracking manager shoelace charges 20$ if you spent more than 75$ for adds which seems likely.

finally the mass email retailer soundest charges according to the amount of emails lets say 10$


thats in total a hundred bucks per month just for what i mentioned and there is more. like hosting fee .. you have a couple of tracking plugins installed etc.

so there is a lot of commercial value for a presumably benefitial cause which is a very bad sign. the curator is no one known which is not the real problem - the problem i have is that there is no indication of his work and you cant even see his face. can very well be a john doe.

i even watched the whole video and i discovered that the founder was born in quite a wealthy family with opportunities.

and now after all this wall of text im telling you what i think (!) is happening. some young "privileged" guys graduated some expensive school and now try to make a living at the cost of other people and to cloak this the benefitial part got added.

also the founder is not under priviliged and from the looks of it hes like in his early 20s max yet he is saying its too late for him to do art himself. wonder why - maybe because itll be hard to gain money in the learning process? guess what - that goes for every artist to ever exist and is cruicible for my dislike of this whole "venture".

if you want to help and quite frankly you and your team have at least 150$ per month to spare according to the plugins you could use this 150$ to provide one children access to the workshop. then make a wordpress page for no money with a donation button where you describe with pictures how your 150$ bucks turn all the way to the workshop event. then use the privilege the founder has ( lots of fb friends, seems to travel alot ) and tell your story. instead you try to built a company that sells art.

look at other pages that try to aid children in need like http://borgenproject.org/ - granted its quite huge comparing to what you got there but exegarate to prove a point right? they dont have marketing apps and rely on other peoples work. they inform and put effort into their cause. they didnt build a virtual machine that automatically makes money with the process of helping children.

Tell it like it is abt2k15.