__Artland.com's James Danziger and David Adamson aim to give high-end reprographics mass appeal. __
About three years ago, an assistant to photographer Joel Meyerowitz screwed up big-time. "She lost three negatives," recalls Meyerowitz, whose work hangs in museums like New York's MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. "Major negatives. Pictures that sell all the time."
Fortunately, Meyerowitz still had his master prints; although nothing can beat the graphic subtlety and tonal quality of a photograph pulled directly from a negative, it's possible to produce a decent copy from the master. A colleague of Meyerowitz's, platinum printmaker Martin Axon, suggested that if he wanted negative-quality reproductions, David Adamson could help. Adamson was a whiz at making Iris reproductions, computer-generated archival images scanned from originals or prints, then manipulated in Photoshop and output on an inkjet-like Iris printer. Meyerowitz decided to give it a shot and was pleasantly surprised. "The stuff was exciting," he says.
Meyerowitz took the Iris prints to James Danziger, his dealer at the time. Coincidentally, Danziger himself was confronting a similar problem. He represented the estate of Life magazine photographer Mark Shaw and wanted to replicate a shot of Audrey Hepburn from a series Shaw took on the set of Sabrina. "The negatives were lost," Danziger says. "His son had wonderful vintage prints, but no negatives."
Axon had also recommended Adamson to Danziger, who became intrigued with the concept of the Iris. "The traditional way to make a print, if you've lost the negative, is by photographing a picture, which gives you a new negative, and you print it. It's what is referred to as a second-generation print," Danziger explains. "With Iris printing, you're able to use the print as the negative. You get something that is closer to a first-generation print." And unlike new prints from the negative, Iris prints re-create exactly the composition and resolution the artist produced - every time.
The quality of reproduction in the prints Adamson made for Danziger turned out to be first-rate - good enough for the dealer to sell, at least. He later showed some Iris prints to associates from the photo department of New York's Metropolitan Museum.
"I said, 'OK, guys, which one of these prints is not an original?'" Danziger recalls. "No one could tell."
Meyerowitz and Danziger had stumbled onto a method of fine-art reproduction that is becoming as accepted as lithography. And unlike the 18th-century process - which relies on a grease pencil, a smooth stone, and weeks of intensive labor - the Iris uses technology that can duplicate originals with stunning accuracy in a few hours. Iris prints are now a part of the permanent collections at the Met, MoMA, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. "Iris printing has become the Cadillac of digital reproduction," says Jeff Rosenheim, an assistant curator at the Met.
To Danziger, the Iris printer also presents the opportunity, with the advent of ecommerce, to make works of fine art affordable and available to a wider audience - it's the same kind of mass-marketing that lithography ushered in at the start of the 19th century. Last year, he shuttered his Madison Avenue gallery - where he featured the works of Annie Leibovitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Riger, and the like - and teamed up with Adamson plus several others to form Artland.com. The site, which launches in late November, will sell limited-edition Iris reproductions at prices ranging from $150 to $1,000.
With this pricing, Artland has staked out the barren terrain between the high and low segments of the online art market. At one end are poster shops like Art.com and Barewalls.com; on the other, the blue chips like Sothebys.com and Onview.com, which serve a very pricey secondary market, selling original paintings and prints for a commission. While Artland faces some competition from Britain's eyestorm, which offers licensed prints from major-league artists, there are virtually no other sites, for now at least, that offer the tag-team slam of a master curator and a master printmaker creating affordable art.
"Ever since I started selecting photos for London'sSunday Times Magazine, I've been interested in the nexus of quality and accessibility," says Danziger, seated on a sofa in the modest Artland.com loft. The company is housed in a building next to one of the many cafés that are popping up in lower Manhattan's trendy meatpacking district. The 47-year-old Danziger has an enigmatic Anglo-American accent that reflects some athletic pond-hopping. ("I have to tell people that I don't have a fake English accent," he says.) Danziger grew up in England with his American parents but was educated in the US before returning to London, where he worked at the Times. In the mid-'80s, he moved to New York to work as an editor at Vanity Fair, then quit to start a SoHo gallery that he eventually moved uptown to Madison Avenue. After 10 years, he closed shop. "It was the happiest day of my life," he asserts. "As the operation evolved, it became more about business and less about curating."
Danziger came up with his idea for the business in the spring of 1999. "I was reading about Diane Keaton's Southwest art collection in Architectural Digest and thinking, 'How do you make these paintings accessible to more people?'" At first, he imagined high-quality prints endorsed by a celebrity like Keaton, but then broadened the notion. "I realized that if you marry digital-print technology to the licensing agreements with what are essentially the top brands in art, you could curate it and have a product that is accessible to your target audience."
Though the online art market is heating up, Danziger doesn't aspire to take Artland public, for now. "We have a post-bubble mentality. That's what our investors said they liked about us." Those investors include Allen & Company (backer of Priceline.com) and Chanel CEO Charles Heilbrun.
Danziger acknowledges that some in the art world look askance at reproductions. "They think they're kind of tacky," he admits. "But I genuinely believe in them." He cites the example of painter Maxfield Parrish, who mass-marketed lithographic reproductions of his work in the '20s: "At the height of his popularity, there was a Maxfield Parrish print in one out of every four American homes."
Painter and photographer Chuck Close works with Adamson and is a fan of Iris prints; nevertheless, he has reservations about selling them online. "If you buy something over the Internet, you're just buying iconography," he says. "You have no idea what the piece is like: its physicality, its scale. I think that's fine if you want to buy a picture of Marilyn Monroe. It's probably elitist of me, but I like to make a small quantity of beautifully printed things that people see and have some kind of relationship with. And if they see that relationship as significant enough, and they've got the money, they might buy one." (In Close's case, that typically runs $3,500 to $25,000.)
Some artists may sniff at Artland.com's middle-market grab, but to Danziger's credit, he has signed on some of the biggest brand-name artists, museums, and estates in the country. Along with Joel Meyerowitz's photographs, Artland will feature the works of contemporary painters and photographers like Joan Nelson, Alex Katz, and Jamie Wyeth, as well as photographs by legends Ansel Adams, Man Ray, Walker Evans, and Edward Curtis. The site will also offer reproductions of paintings by Picasso, van Gogh, Rothko, Hopper, and Warhol. In addition, the Whitney, the Met, the National Gallery, the Louvre, and the Hermitage have struck licensing deals with Artland.
Other curators with Danziger's skill and connections could arguably set up a comparable site, but David Adamson's mastery of the Iris undoubtedly gives the startup a significant advantage. "I don't think the business would stand up without him," Danziger says.
To achieve its current status, the Iris printer transcended a rather blue-collar upbringing. Created in 1988 by the Bedford, Massachusetts-based Iris Graphics, the washer-dryer-sized printer was initially used to make color proofs of magazine pages as a final check before an issue was printed. Artists, intrigued at the prospect of multiple reproductions without any loss in resolution, began to experiment with the Iris printer. For the most part, they were disappointed. Because the Iris had been designed as a production tool, the inks and papers it used were far from archival quality. Meyerowitz tried out the machine back in 1992 and didn't like it much. "The papers were too crude," he recalls. "The picture looked like a hybrid between a watercolor and a photograph."
One of the early lobbyists for an Iris makeover was Mac Holbert, an ex-tour manager for Crosby, Stills & Nash. In 1989, he and Graham Nash founded Nash Editions, which makes and sells high-end photographic prints. Holbert constantly tried to push the Iris beyond its limits. "People in the production business then didn't give a damn about permanence," he says. "But the people at Iris started to realize that there was a growing market out there - all sorts of people doing what we were doing."
The feedback from artists and printers must have made an impression on Scitex, the company that took over Iris soon after the machine was developed. "We saw an opportunity to expand into a whole new category," says Mark Vanover, who was a Scitex marketing manager at the time. The most recent models now use a heavier, 100 percent cotton rag paper that is smoother and more absorbent, improving the print's texture. And the inks, made by Lyson and Equipoise, have better consistency. They will last up to 75 years before starting to fade, according to Henry Wilhelm, author of The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs and an authority on digital-print conservation (www.wilhelm-research.com).
As the technology behind the Iris has leaped forward in recent years, so has David Adamson's reputation as a bleeding-edge printmaker. If Danziger has paved the way for the fledgling company with licensing deals, then Adamson, with his mastery of printmaking, is its vehicle. "David is recognized as the most accomplished fine-art digital printer in the world," says Wilhelm. "He has brought to the field an enormous expertise - not only in the making of prints, but in discussing them." Adamson's roster of clients is a testament to his ability to work with some of the art world's biggest - and undoubtedly most demanding - figures, people like Chuck Close, Jim Dine, and Kiki Smith.
Adamson's studio is housed in an unpretentious walk-up space neighboring the galleries and bookstores of downtown Washington, DC. The 4,500-square-foot loft is a lesson in spartan aesthetics; the exhibition space features several Iris prints - Donald Sultan photos of smoke rings - mounted on a large white wall, and toward the back are two chairs: leather-and-chrome Le Corbusier reproductions. A nondescript door leads into another room as equally spare as the gallery space. This is the humble abode of Adamson's Iris printers: two $60,000 Ixias. All of Artland's creations will be produced here.
In many respects, Adamson's expertise is the logical culmination of a double life in traditional printmaking and fine-art technology. Adamson produced hand-lithography in his studio for more than 10 years and was once the chair of the computer department at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. "I got interested in computers right at the very birth of the PC, and I always felt that the machine would enable artists to make prints," says Adamson, a soft-spoken, affable Brit with a light Border Country accent and a Dudley Moore haircut. "It was a kind of laughable concept then, because you had four colors with pixels this big," he gestures, "and you could make a stick figure. My wife used to laugh at me."
Adamson sees a historical parallel between the introductions of lithographic and digital printing: the idea that the artist may be making his work too accessible by providing it at a cheaper price. "When lithography came out in the late 18th century, it was considered quite radical," he says. "We heard the same sort of cries when we started to adapt the Iris technology - that this is the death of fine-art printing."
Developed in 1798 by a German inventor named Alois Senefelder, conventional lithography is a method of preparing stone for hand printing. Using a grease pencil, an artist makes a picture on a flat, smooth surface such as limestone. The process creates an image resilient enough to produce a virtually unlimited number of prints. It demands extreme precision, and can be painstaking. If an artist doesn't like what he has done, he has to start over. From initial design to final production, lithos can take months - unlike Iris prints, which emerge after a few hours. "The drawing matrix of lithography has been replaced by the matrix of the pixel," Adamson explains. "The printmaker or the artist pushes the pixels around."
As he sees it, the Iris printing process is essentially an accelerated version of lithography, requiring the same fluent communication between artist and printmaker that the traditional method demands. "One of the reasons artists like Chuck and Jim are very comfortable working with me is because we're speaking on the same terms," Adamson says. "They don't have to talk to me about color balancing, or magenta shifts. We're using printmaking vocabulary."
In a darkened loft that overlooks the gallery, Adamson begins the printing process with a transparency, a negative, or an original image supplied either by the artist or the licensee. He places it on a $60,000 Scitex EverSmart Supreme scanner, downloads the image in maximum resolution, and manipulates it in Adobe Photoshop.
Adamson first cleans up the image by removing blemishes with a cloning tool - a set of virtual brushes that can copy an area of the original image and paste it over a defect or scratch. Next, he delves into color balancing, bringing out crucial nuances that can get lost in the translation. "That's where there's still some judgment involved."
He then employs a combination of profiling software programs, including Color Blind and Monaco, to calibrate each color. "The ability to match the color in a print is probably the single greatest advance in printing," Adamson says. A cross-platform format was standardized three years ago by the International Color Consortium, a group of some 50 companies - including Apple and Adobe - in the color imaging technology sector. Formally known as the color management profile format, the standard allows printing machines to speak the same language of color even if they use different software.
Once the colors are matched up, the Iris Ixia takes over. The printer contains a large carriage; four ink bottles - cyan, magenta, yellow, and black - sit atop a row of pumps. These feed the ink into four nozzles, which in turn apply up to 300 dots of ink to every square inch of paper. That's not a lot compared to the Iris' biggest competitor, the Epson 9500, which boasts a dpi of 1,440. But the discrepancy in raw numbers is misleading. The Iris has a continuous inkjet that varies the size of the dots so that they're never really standardized over an entire print, providing a replicable fluidity that in effect approximates 2,000 dpi.
Before ink reaches the nozzle, the computer sends signals for the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to a mainframe-like pixel board below the carriage. The board acts as the brain, receiving and processing the information: It sizes up the image, sorts and positions the ink, and monitors pump pressure. The nozzle is a glass capillary tube which holds an oscillating crystal that shakes ink into beads the size of blood cells and configures them like a string of pearls. "They are perfectly spaced, perfect droplets shooting through space," Adamson says.
The result can give a texture to the surface of a print that approximates the thickness of a brushstroke. "Because of the inkjet pressure, the nozzles saturate the paper with ink," he says. "You can't get the same variety of texture with the Epson." He adds that there's a race going on now among manufacturers - Archer's of France, Somerset of Britain, and Crane & Co. in the US - to create the best paper for digital prints. "They take beautiful handmade paper and apply a coating that makes it more receptive to the ink."
To keep an Iris happy, its owners must have deep pockets. "It's like a supertuned Ferrari - everything that can go wrong with it will," says Adamson, who once attended a two-week Iris training seminar at which Scitex showed high-speed videos of the nozzles spraying ink. The four nozzles in the Iris' arsenal need frequent cleaning and replacement, at a cost of $750 apiece.
Adamson says he averages three tries before getting an image exactly right. Once he's satisfied with the final reproduction, he "locks up" the file, fixing the image by burning it into a DVD. From that point on, every print of the image will remain consistent. Each reproduction Adamson produces for Artland will be blind-stamped with the company logo. To further differentiate its product, Artland will not print works in their original size.
Even the untrained eye can tell the difference between a museum-shop poster and a finished Iris print. "Next to the Iris, the poster would look dull and lifeless - it would not have the depth, the lushness," Adamson says. "When we were showing our stuff to museums, the curators would be trembling as they were holding the prints. They were asking us what we could do to let people know that these were not the originals."
Artland.com intends to launch with 100 images and quickly build to 2,000 - about 60 percent of them paintings, 40 percent photographs - reproduced on the site from Adamson's final version of the Photoshop file. Danziger has curated an unusual range of images: a photograph of Muhammad Ali shadowboxing underwater, taken by photojournalist Flip Schulke; paintings of orchids and birds by the 19th-century artist Martin Johnson Heade; Ansel Adams' photo of the Snake River and the Grand Teton. Artland will also offer perennial favorites by artists like van Gogh and Matisse, but Danziger hopes his company will be able to nudge customers toward less familiar names. "We're hoping that Winslow Homer will become a popular artist for us," he says. "We're giving people the opportunity to have stuff that's not necessarily well-known, that looks beautiful. Put the Mona Lisa on your wall, and it better be tongue in cheek. You're not going to fool people: 'What, Joe? You own this painting?'"
Danziger won't say much about his budget, but insists the company is starting modestly. "We were never looking at $25 million to $50 million in funding," he says. Artland has a staff of only five, which includes COO Peter Cohen, former president of the upscale furniture company KnollInternational. Danziger is also putting the finishing touches on a crucial deal with Art.com, a leading online print and poster shop. The Chicago-based company, a subsidiary of Getty Images, will frame and ship Artland orders from its Lake Forest, Illinois, warehouse. Danziger emphasizes, however, that Artland will not take advantage of Getty's library of 70 million licensed images. "They're interested in us because we're doing things that they're not doing." One can safely assume that in return for providing fulfillment services, Art.com will receive equity in Artland.
The site's largest and most expensive product - a 30- by 40-inch print that will sell for $1,000 - should yield a healthy profit. Artland pays around $10 to $16 per sheet of paper; ink costs around $4. Framing and glass will likely set the company back $35 to $100, then there's $5 to $30 for shipping. In addition, Artland will pay a royalty or licensing fee for each print it sells. In the end, Danziger could achieve more than a 60 percent markup per print - far ahead of the 5 to 15 percent margins of other online vendors.
Under the guidance of advertising veteran Peter Arnell, Artland will launch a print and Web campaign costing in the low millions. Arnell's company, AG Worldwide, and its subsidiary, Surge Interactive, will design the front- and some back-end aspects of the site.
It remains to be seen, though, how much of a market there is for high-end digital reproductions. Art.com, which sells posters for about a quarter of the cost of an Iris print, brought in 313,000 unique viewers in July, according to Media Metrix. "The challenge of selling art online is that art is a considered purchase," says John Hallberg, the president of Art.com. "We can spend millions in marketing or advertising, and we may not change human behavior. You're going to buy when you're ready to buy. This category is more about efficiently targeting people who are in the market to buy art, like new-movers and newly marrieds."
"We're aiming at the millions of American households with incomes above $75,000," says Artland COO Cohen, who hopes the company can capture 1 to 2 percent of that market. "In our first few years, we'd be very happy with those numbers." Using $300 as an average purchase, 210,000 customers - or 1 percent of the 21 million households with incomes of more than $75,000 - would make Artland a $63 million company with a low overhead and a comfortable profit margin. Danziger predicts that a third of his business will eventually come from deals with hotel chains and museum shops - where Artland hopes to install digital kiosks so visitors can view its inventory.
Despite its high tech nozzles and art-world know-how, Artland may soon face serious competition. "I think eyestorm has a very strong presence, and Artnet is strong, too," says Sarah Rogers, an expert on art ecommerce at Resource Marketing in Columbus, Ohio. The edgy, UK-based eyestorm.com, which claims a unique viewership of roughly 70,000, has been online for 11 months and boasts a seven-figure revenue. It offers limited-edition prints of about 500 images, licensed by marquee names like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons - but eyestorm sells at prices higher than Artland's and doesn't make Iris prints. Artnet.com, an aggregator of gallery sites, deals mostly in works sold at auction and on the secondary market. Yet another site, Barewalls.com, is planning to add a selection of about 2,000 photographic images, including some Iris prints, to its current offering of posters.
As it launches, Artland will have to convey the qualitative difference that makes its product much more expensive than a poster. "The Iris print falls somewhere between self-betterment and decoration," says Peter Arnell. But to the discerning fine-art customer in the market for quality reproductions, the Iris may seem like a bargain. "I mean, what's the difference between an Iris print and a platinum print?" he asks. "About $2,000." Mike May, an analyst who covers art and ecommerce for Jupiter Communications, thinks that Artland has come up with an attractive price point. "For someone who's graduated beyond dorm-room posters but who's not willing to shell out thousands for an unknown artist, $400 is at the sweet spot of what consumers may be willing to pay."
Danziger is convinced Artland has found its own niche. "I've been looking over my shoulder for the past nine months, and no one is doing this," he says. If he's right, customers won't have to suffer as much for their art.
