This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube excerpt titled "The Future of African Art Fintech" (created 2023-03-15). It contains a monologue by a single speaker (labelled SPEAKER A) describing an art-tech platform aimed at empowering and celebrating artists and collectors previously excluded from the art ecosystem. The speaker discusses product iterations driven by user feedback — e.g., a free account that lets aspiring collectors save up to three artworks, the addition of featured collections to help newcomers decide what to collect, and efforts to showcase the diversity and affordability of collecting (citing an example of an artwork around R500). The overall topic is widening access to collecting and supporting emerging artists.
Chapters
It's an interesting kind of point around where to from here. And I know, you know, we've spoken before about kind of the ways in which to empower and celebrate artists and collectors who have previously been left out of the art ecosystem. And I think that's kind of what the platform is really there to do, you know. It's been an interesting road as a startup, going through the ebbs and flows of that. But the platform, I think it's been great to kind of listen to what you're what users have been giving me feedback about, and I'm really iterating in that way. So now the platform, for example, has a free account. It enables aspiring collectors to sign up, and, you know, they also gave feedback around, you know, people would sign up and you can save up to 3 artworks for free, and they were like, you know, but I don't know what to collect. And so a new feature that was launched towards the back end of last year was kind of having featured collections and also showing basically the artists that are being collected by a variety of different art collectors and trying to get a variety around that as well. And I guess I was also inspired by— I was on an art talk at Art Joburg, and one of the other collectors who was on the panel was talking about how she collected an artwork which is, you know, basically R500, which is, I think, the equivalent of like, you know, $50 type thing or $25. And, you know, it's also just showing the breadth of kind of collecting because I think a lot of people do have preconceived notions of what is collecting, you know, and what is art. And it's great to kind of dispel those notions by showing what, you know, people who are patrons are collecting and showing the diversity of that. The fact that they're not all collecting these kind of super expensive pieces of art, they're also collecting the things which— and trying to kind of support emerging artists early on in their careers as well.
