The Thing’s the Thing in San Francisco

This morning I heard on the radio about a new art group in San Francisco with a radical business model: selling “subscriptions” to new works by contemporary artists. From their website:

THE THING is an object based quarterly publication. Each issue of THE THING is conceived of by an individual artist, reproduced and wrapped by the editors (Jonn Hershend and Will Rogan) and sent to the subscribers.

Apparently they’ve got around 850 subscribers around the world who pay $120/year for a subscription, which is impressive considering they’ve only actually produced one “issue” so far. For subscribers, it’s an opportunity to get 4 new works from contemporary artists each year for $30 per piece.

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out. My hunch is that there’s a viable, creative new business model here, but a lot depends on the group’s ability to manage their own growth. Under the current approach, the larger the subscriber base grows, the less valuable each issue becomes (since each object is less rare). There are ways around that challenge (e.g. have the artists produce variations, recruit multiple artists per issue, etc.) but it’s tricky regardless. Either way, probably worth keeping an eye on.