Fine Art for All

This is our motto and our mission. Artiiste is working to build a more connected, more organized and more accessible art world.



Our idea was born from personal experience. How can aspiring artists break into an amorphous industry that doesn’t have a front door? (We’ve looked - it’s actually located down the alley, on the side of the building, and opens only if you know the secret password). On the flip side, how can art enthusiasts find new talent once galleries and art fairs shutter for the season?

We started Artiiste to help solve these issues. Our platform isn’t limited by weather or location, and the only secret password is the one you create for yourself. It’s free to join and easy to use. So whether you’re looking to share your work, fuel your creativity, or hang a new piece above your mantle, we hope you can find it all here.


Alex & Sarah Helfers, Founders

Check out Alex’s work

How it all works

Artiiste features a variety of art-related activities all contained in one easy-to-use interface. Regardless of whether you are an art enthusiast, collector, artist or gallery owner, you’ll find powerful tools available nowhere else to help you connect with other Artiiste members. Your Artiiste account is organized according to a set of logically organized categories, including a main dashboard, an infinite art gallery, your own art collection, an art map, and a forum for art sales. As a standard Artiiste member, you’ll be able to connect with other members, find new artists, and save your favorites to your account. Create an Art Page if you would like to upload your own work and share with the Artiiste community, or create a salon account if you are interested in buying or selling work within our community.

Artists

If you are an artist looking to promote yourself on our network, you’ll just need to create a standard account and then create your own page. Creating a page is easy, you’ll just need to provide a few additional details so your art and profile appears correctly within our network.

Galleries

If you are a gallery owner, you can easily create a page on our network to represent your business. Just create a standard account, then you’ll need to supply a few additional details about your gallery to create a page to represent it. With a gallery page, you can connect with new artists and share your gallery’s talent with the entire Artiiste community.

Collectors

If you are interested in finding new artists and purchasing work, you’ll have plenty of tools available to help you do just that. Create a standard account and you’ll be able to find and save art, and with just a few more account details you’ll be able to buy artwork in our Art Salon.

Museums

If you represent a museum, you can easily create a presence on Artiiste. Just sign up for a standard account and create a Museum page, which you can use to connect with local artists and help share upcoming events with your local and nationwide supporters.

Art Fairs

If you represent an art fair, it’s easy to create a page on Artiiste to represent your upcoming event. Just create a standard account and then create a page to represent your fair within the network. It’s a great way to keep users excited about your event all year long and help make sure that they mark their calendars!

Love what you love

For those new to the art scene, a common question is “how do I know what art is “good” and what isn’t? At Artiiste, we don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to that question, because visual art is highly subjective and each person’s definition of “good” is very different from the next. So our best recommendation when developing your artistic taste is simple: love what you love. If you are interested to hear what art professionals think, we’ll be bringing in curators and art writers to provide their thoughts and comments about the art world today, but remember that even art professionals disagree sometimes. When it comes to your own art tastes, the only right person is you!

Making a purchase

So you’ve spent some time researching the current art scene and finding some artists on Artiiste that you really like. How do you know what to buy? Well, similar to our “love what you love” philosophy, we also think you should buy what you want to buy. Be sure to think about the environment where you might place your new piece, and read up or inquire about your seller’s transaction history to ensure that you are dealing with an experienced Artiiste seller. Otherwise, we think the art you buy should be be dictated by the enjoyment you think you’ll get out of it. Certain art buyers, and most art dealers, are interested in buying artwork for the purposes of investment and profit. However, doing this successfully requires a vast knowledge of the artistic marketplace and a good instinct for predicting what art and artists will be “hot” in the coming years. As a new buyer, we think our advice to buy what you love makes a lot more sense. Don’t you?

Who's who in the art world

There are millions of artists in the world, at all different skill levels and prominence within the artistic community. In addition, there doesn’t seem to be a single, universal resource to identify all of the top professionals in the field. How do you know who is who? Well, with Artiiste, our goal isn’t just to connect artists and help them make sales. We’re hoping to educate our community (and ourselves) a little bit in the process. We’re planning to bring in some respected art professionals to weigh in and contribute their art world thoughts so our users can really get a sense for the work they are seeing on our network. Because as fun as it is to look at great art, it’s also fun to learn while you are doing it.

The digital world vs. the real world

One common criticism of today’s myriad social networks is that as large and powerful as they become, they can (and should) never be a substitute for the real world. At Artiiste, we agree with this criticism, which is why we are hoping that our tool becomes a complement, rather than a competitor, to the real world art scene. Artiiste offers powerful tools for art novices and experienced professionals alike, and it aims to present all of these tools in a manner and style consistent with the aesthetic principles of the art world. From a business perspective, it’s true that we’re hoping to take a slice of the pie, but we’re also hoping to help grow the art community so there’s much more pie to go around. You see, we’re not just doing this because we thought it would be a good business opportunity. We are doing this because we love art and we want to help spread that notion to as many other people as possible.

Regarding unauthorized reproduction

Represented or well-known artists may be concerned about unauthorized reproduction of their art from digital images posted within the network. Rest assured that the images and image quality displayed within our network, while good enough for a computer monitor, will not be high enough to be re-produced in any sort of acceptable physical format.