Ramtin Naimi

Even if something could be a great asset to hold, if we don't want to hang it up on our walls, we don't feel right about the concept of just buying art for the purpose of putting it in storage.

Two generations before me, it tends to be more heavily dominated white male artists, guys like Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, George Kondo.

A generation before me, it's guys like Mark Grote John and a lot of female artists like Jenny Saville, Laura Owens, Cecily Brown, Jacqueline Humphries.

And then my generation, it's more along the lines of Rashi Johnson, Christina Quarles, Avery Singer, Marina Reingant, Anna Wyant.

And all of these artists tend to be now represented by all of the blue chip galleries.

When I started dabbling into the art world is when I realized that there's

an overwhelming number of parallels between the venture world and the art world, primarily in the way blue chip galleries work and the way that the big platform venture capital firms work.

But if at any given time there is 50 important practicing artists in the world, or even the estates of the most iconic dead artists, they tend to be represented by the big four galleries, Hauser, Gagosian, Zwirner, Pace.

Once they're represented by those galleries, they are now deemed a blue chip artist and their prices are very, very high.

But

Their prices tend to sustain or even appreciate because those galleries are very large and they have very big clients and they represent a lot of institutions so they can control the markets for those artists.

So people tend to be more comfortable paying a premium to buy art from those galleries because of the inherent safety net you get when buying from them.

But then I started to realize that there is smaller galleries and even smaller galleries beyond that that tend to share a lot of artists with the larger galleries.

And it's because they were the ones who initially discovered them.

It's the same ones over and over again, similar to the venture capital world.

You have the four, five, six top venture capital firms in the world that tend to have exposure to every power law company, any generational company, any given vintage company.

And then more often than not, you'll see the same firms that finance those companies earlier and earlier and earlier.

And like the big venture capital firms try to maintain relationships with those firms that spot talent earlier and earlier, the big galleries tend to maintain relationships with a few of the mid-tier or smaller tier galleries early.

So then what I started to do after that was spend time with those galleries that I started noticing were the early spotters of talent areas.

And finding these artists early in their career that had a high graduation rate to getting picked up by the blue chip mega galleries.