Art and Economics: Trust Art

From installing a perfume-filled Humanity Fountain in McGolrick Park to turning a dilapidated street in Brooklyn into a park in Bushwick, healing Newtown Creek spiritually, creating a pop-up art school in Sergeant Dougherty Park, creating a self-sufficient house in the Dominican Republic out of New York Waste, setting up a bamboo bicycle building business in sub-Saharan Africa, creating giant pre-historic monuments off the coast of Maine, and finding dreamers in Berlin, Tokyo, New Mexico, and Johannesburg, the Trust Art organization’s projects aren’t lacking in ambition.

But with resumes boasting serious experience in art and economics, financial and in-kind support streaming in, and a nod from TED, which asked them to present at the annual conference in February, Trust Art founders Jose Serrano-Reyes, 30 and Seth Aylmer, 27 seem up to the challenge.

Trust Art takes the Kiva model of micro financing and the gift economy, and applies it to funding large-scale collaborative public art projects. Shareholders donate money, time, materials, and connections to the Trust Art projects, and as the projects are completed, they receive their donations back from other members of the Trust Art community.

“The basic premise is that creative projects have the potential to create community,” Serrano-Reyes said. “Especially given the scope of the projects that we’re working with, they’re meant to be projects that the artist or creator cannot do by his or herself, so they’re inherently inviting participation. But we have the potential of creating a community that can also take care of its members. More than money, Trust Art is proudly about valuing different forms of contributions. We’re tracking every hour contributed to the project, and those hours can be redeemed when someone has their own things they can invite the community to. It’s a virtuous economy that’s aligned to create the most inspiring art. Our biggest asset is that we have a community of people that are helping each other with their creative projects.”

The organization hopes to create revenue from the projects by documenting the stories of their projects along the way and creating related-art, which can be sold and auctioned once the projects have been completed.

“If you’re familiar with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, artists who create big public installations, the way that they monetize their large projects is by selling the artifacts of the production,” Serrano-Reyes explained. “They essentially make a lot of art leading up to the actual big public projects, and once that project is complete, all that artwork is a million times more valuable because the fame of the project and the social victory that the project represents essentially flows back into all the little artifacts that put it together.”

Aylmer and Serrano-Reyes, who majored in economics at the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a market analyst for the Federal Reserve for five years, have been interested in the idea of alternative economies and types of currencies for several years. Their last project, The Fame Game, used online algorithms to track celebrity connections, converting their fame into social capital, media currency which could then ideally be invested into creating momentum for creative projects.

“I’ve been trying to understand the connection between economics and social system design,” Serrano-Reyes said. “In fact, the Nobel Prize in economics that was given before this year was given to a team of economists that developed social mechanism design. If we can understand incentive structures in society, then we can actually reverse engineer them to produce good, positive things for the world. It’s kind of a signal that it’s time for economists to be actually trying to fix the world, not just observing it and describing it to politicians.”

So far, Trust Art has approximately 900 shareholders, about half of whom have actually contributed money. Donations have come globally, but a large portion of the shareholders are Brooklyn and New York-based artists. The organization is in the process of creating a new website which will visibly track all forms of contributions, as well as allow for individual shareholder profiles to share their own creative projects.

There are currently ten, carefully selected Trust Art projects, each at different stages of completion. The organization has tried to avoid deadline-based fundraising, like the kickstarter.org model, believing instead in approaching each project as a story with chapters to be fundraised for and completed one at a time until the project is complete in some way. In the future, they hope to open the model up for project submissions, and ultimately have an open platform.

“In a way, this is year zero for Trust Art. We’re using this first cycle of projects to learn what we’re doing. We’re not coming out and saying we’ve figured out. We’re going to have a conference, hopefully next year, though a lot of the projects won’t be complete by then. We’re going to try and understand what Trust Art means, what works and what doesn’t, before we create an open platform, which is definitely where this is going.”

Though Trust Art is still in its first year, the project is gaining steam, interest, and shareholders, especially in North Brooklyn, where many of the ten projects are based. Visit trustart.org for more information, and look out for their new website in February 2010.

“It’s important that people understand the spirit of this: this is a gift economy,” Serrano-Reyes said. “When you give this gift, we’re going to do our best to return that gift. It’s not about the return, it’s about sending the signal that we can create value by creating community. And art has the potential to create community, and the potential to create an inspired economy. That macro return is more important than the micro return. The micro return is the icing on the cake for us to show that art doesn’t need charity. That art can be inspiring and it can be famous.”