MAP - the best global arts and crafts community and movement

Posted on May 11, 2008
Filed Under Startups

An interesting BETA has come up recently: MAP. Minh Nguyen, Todd Lipcon, and Kim Jackson have devoted 2 years to building MAP and it is now ready. MyArtPlot.com (MAP) is a global arts and crafts community and movement. Fighting elitism, it is an empowerment platform that offers functional tools to re-design the industry’s archaic social, professional, and commercial dynamics. On MAP, any one participant is a crucial element of the global movement.

By providing functional social, professional and commercial tools, MAP allows disconnected artists, crafters, artisans and buyers worldwide to connect socially while interacting professionally and commercially. On MAP, you can showcase, critique, rate, review, favorite, buy, and sell original arts and crafts while interacting with people from around the world and across all experience levels.

MAP attempts to solve a problem that has plagued artists and art buyers worldwide since the emergence of the artisan profession some millennia ago. The problem states that social, professional, and commercial interactions between artists, artisans, crafters and buyers are inefficient, caused by technology deficiency, with all parties suffering from (1) information asymmetry, lacking equal distribution of information about each other, and (2) isolation, having no easy centralized channel to connect and interact globally. Therefore, those who create original arts and crafts are notoriously known for earning substandard incomes simply because they, as independent operators, lack easy access to a global concentration of each other and of buyers.

Similarly, buyers, lacking the same access to those who create goods, have trouble accessing original arts and crafts, which are thus only available to those who are well connected to the artistic communities and who can afford the high prices, driven up by the inability to sell in large quantities. This situation of inaccessibility from all sides and high prices results in a majority of the arts and crafts professions earning low incomes while original arts and crafts buyers become an extremely elitist group which excludes perhaps a majority potential buyers who, lacking social and financial resources, resolve to buying reprints. Facing this problem, MAP offers itself as a solution.