Start-up art

Start-up art is a curatorial, art historical term designating art that appropriates, adopts and repurposes the discourses, operation modes, strategies and look-and-feel of the entrepreneurial start-up culture, including but not limited to product design, business operations, financing, PR activities, advertising, marketing and sales.

Works are presented often in the form of a fictional company, or actual registered company, and its various attributed activities, ranging from a webpage or a crowdfunding campaign, through outdoor advertising to actual business transactions and financial operations.

The term does not apply to artists working in traditional media, who simply turned their production into a business operation, but the operation per se is not part of the artworks presented.

Examples

• Pure Human by Tina Gorjanc, 2016 - a multifaceted project involving a UK patent application, company logo and visual standards, laboratory work with cloned human tissue, product design, product samples and advertising copy

• Mindbending Software Inc. by codenerror (Florian Berger, Robert Praxmarer), 2005 - a company developing and selling software, that inserts subliminal messages into games running on a PC, and enables parents to psychologically condition their children, while they are playing "mindless" computer games. The project includes a fully functioning system-level driver that intercepts the OpenGL 3D rendering process on a PC and superimposes custom designed imagery, in subliminal fashion, over popular games like Unreal Tournament 2004. The presentation comprises of the company webpage, a range of specific products, their trademarks, descriptions and advertising visuals, and a working internet shopping cart.

Pages

No pages meet these criteria.

The term has been first coined by this entry on monoskop.org on 17th August 2016.