Artforums.co.uk on Knol

Link: http://knol.google.com/k/bruce-everiss/artforumscouk/2l81m4yln1pbt/32#


After nearly 20 years of running All Formats Compter Fairs the business model broke because the interweb did the same job better. Looking for alternatives I started running Arts Markets at Warwick Racecourse. Artforums.co.uk was started in November 2006 as marketing support for the Markets. The Arts Markets failed as a business but Artforums seemed to be working. So a Google adword campaign and a series of press releases to recruit new members were invested in. And the idea was to monetise the whole thing with Google adsense.

After a while I split it into three forums. The biggest and most successful is the forum for practicing artists. This has over 1,100 members and over 45,000 posts. The main property of the forum is that it is very friendly and supportive of practicing artist. It is a broad church with active members who are at school through to well known full time professional artists. Also all media are supported including a section for unconventional media such as chainsaw sculpture. The forum has a zero tolerance policy towards people who join solely to promote their businesses. However once members are established there are a number of mechanisms they can use to promote themselves and their work.

The Art Lover's forum, obviously, is for a different audience. This has been slower to take off with just 165 members and 745 posts. However it is far from dead with some excellent content that is frequently added to.

The Art for Sale forum brings together the members of the two other forums. Artists can sell their work to Art Lovers. This is a gallery in the form of a forum and some galleries in there have has thousands of viewers. All for free.