Mike Steib: Meet The Man Changing The World of Art
The CEO of Artsy has created a bridge between technology and art... and tells us all about it
There are acquaintances. There are social friends. And then, there are real friends.
Mike Steib falls into that third category of people I really care about.
Mike Steib, CEO of Artsy
I’ve watched in wonder over the years as Mike has swiftly — strategically — climbed the corporate ladder.
What amazes me the most is his ability to be agile. I’ve never seen anyone move so seamlessly from industry to industry with so much success.
He’s tackled technology… media… fashion… weddings… and now, art.
As CEO of Artsy — the leading global online marketplace for art — my friend, Mike, has a plan to grow not just his business but the greater art market.
Hint, hint — technology is key.
I spoke to Mike this week just hours before he boarded a flight for Frieze London, which opened Wednesday and runs through this weekend.
“ALL THE VALUE SIGNALS THAT INSIDERS KNOW... WE’RE MAKING AVAILABLE AT ARTSY”
ALINA CHO: The art world in general has a bad rap of being incredibly intimidating.
MIKE STEIB: If you're not inside the art market, it can be intimidating. People who are perfectly comfortable spending substantial sums of money on homes and cars and fashion and jewelry and watches and more, find themselves not knowing where to start in the art world.
ALINA CHO: Why do you think that is?
MIKE STEIB: Well, the art world historically has not been transparent with availability of artworks, with the prices of those artworks. And very regularly you will run into artworks you like in the art world [only] to find out that it's not available or, perhaps, not available to you.
ALINA CHO: There's this feeling that [fine art is] available only to a precious few.
MIKE STEIB: And there's another thing which is, certain artists are on a path to being important and impactful to our culture, whose names are going to have a legacy many, many, many years from now. And people on the inside of the art world have a good sense of who those artists are. And people on the outside of the art world just don't have access to the information and the data that would tell them who those artists might be.
ALINA CHO: Right.
MIKE STEIB: Alina, you and I could stand in front of two beautiful canvases, one painted by a hardworking artist who doesn't have gallery representation, whose work may never hang in a museum. And another, an artist working with the right galleries, collected by important collectors, with solo shows and museum acquisition. And if we just looked at the paintings, we wouldn't necessarily know which is which.
ALINA CHO: You’re right.
MIKE STEIB: All that information that sits behind the painting, all the value signals that the insiders know, at Artsy, we are making available to everyone.
ALINA CHO: What about this notion that some people have that Artsy is where you buy works of art that are worth $1000, $5,000, maybe $10,000, but that you're not going to find fine art here.
MIKE STEIB: Oh, well, they should have come by for our Julie Mehretu sale.
Credit: Courtesy the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, © Julie Mehertu;Photography: Tom Powel Imaging; Julie Mehretu, Dissident Score, 2019-2021, ink and acrylic on canvas sold for $6.5 Million on Artsy in June 2021, setting a new record for the artist at auction
We just sold a $6.5 million work by one of the most important living, working artists in the world. We do six-figure transactions every other day. We have virtually all of the most in-demand, top 100,000 artists around the world. Warhol.
$ (QUADRANT) FS II.284, 1982, Edition of 60, 40 x 32 in, $345,000, Courtesy: Artsy
[Yayoi] Kusama.
A Pumpkin (BY), 2004, Edition of 120, 15 1/10 x 17 9/10 in, Contact for Price, Courtesy: Artsy
Kehinde Wiley.
Easter Realness 6, 2004, Oil on canvas in artist's frame, 116 x 116 in, Contact for Price, Courtesy: Artsy
“LIFE IS SERENDIPITY”
ALINA CHO: You have not worked in the art world before. Walk me through your career and how you landed at Artsy.
MIKE STEIB: I've worked in media and technology. I worked at Google, NBC. I’ve been a CEO a few times. Most recently, I was the CEO of XO Group, the parent company of The Knot. I think a consistent trend in my work is that I've really enjoyed finding opportunities to use technology to level the playing field in an industry so that more people can get more value out of that industry.
ALINA CHO: Take XO Group.
MIKE STEIB: Yeah. So, XO Group owns a property called The Knot. The Knot was, at the time when we joined, an online wedding planning magazine. The team and I had this theory that the audience coming for that content needed more than just articles, that audience needed help planning their weddings. But 80% of Americans do not have the budget to hire a wedding planner. And so, we invested $100 million into developing these incredible apps and websites that you could use as your personal wedding planner.
ALINA CHO: My mom always says, "You have to spend money to make money."
MIKE STEIB: You have to spend money to make money.
ALINA CHO: Well, it worked. Because in 2018, you led the sale of XO Group for approximately $1 billion.
So, how did you go from wedding planning to art?
MIKE STEIB: Life is serendipity. My friend Carter [Cleveland] who founded Artsy, heard that we sold XO, and he called me and said, "Do you want to have dinner? Maybe you’d want to run Artsy." So, we just started kicking around the idea of building an app that can truly help anyone in the world discover and fall in love with and buy art. So, here I am.
WHAT ABOUT THE ART GALLERIES?
ALINA CHO: Let me ask you about your relationship with the art galleries, because essentially, you're a gallery yourself. You're an online gallery. So, what is your relationship with the galleries? Because that can create some tension.
MIKE STEIB: We're not an online gallery because we never work directly with the artists. The galleries meet the artists. The galleries develop the artist's career. The galleries are the ones who help to make the artist culturally relevant. We connect those galleries and our audience in online transactions.
ALINA CHO: Okay, okay. So, you're an online marketplace.
MIKE STEIB: [Artsy is] an online marketplace. We're an aggregator of those galleries. We're allies to those galleries. And what they do, I cannot do. There's no one in my company who could meet a young artist, who just graduated with her Yale MFA and look at her work and say, "This is an artist who is going to be a huge success." Galleries can do that. We can't do that. We trust the galleries to do that, then the galleries bring their works on Artsy and we help connect those works with people who will love to own them.
GROWING THE ART MARKET, ONE CLICK AT A TIME
MIKE STEIB: People spend a trillion-and-a-half dollars a year on fashion. People spend a half-trillion dollars a year on luxury cars. People spend almost a trillion dollars on watches and jewelry, and they only spend $50 billion a year on art. Art is 5% the size of those other categories. Yet, we all love art. Every one of us in kindergarten came to believe that we were an artist. Every one of us, when we go on vacation, what are the two things we do? We go shopping for those first set of things I described, we go to museums and look at art. And the fact that more people haven't gotten over the hump to also bring art into their lives is a tragedy.
ALINA CHO: But that goes back to the intimidation factor.
MIKE STEIB: Because it's intimidating. But I know that we can fix this, because I know that good software that brings data forward that helps people make informed decisions, that gives them confidence in a purchase. I know we’re going to significantly grow the size of the art market. We’re not just going to move the art world from offline to online, we're going to grow the art world. Companies that do that are companies like Airbnb. You’re creating a bigger world and bringing more demand into it. That's exciting.
WHAT KIND OF ART DOES HE BUY?
ALINA CHO: You and your lovely wife, Kemp, have been acquiring a lot of art lately. What’s your criteria for buying art?
Henni Alftan, Reminder, 2017, Mike and Kemp Steib Collection
MIKE STEIB: When we buy art, we like to buy in the primary market and support artists who are still in the more formative stages. There are artists we've acquired who have reached the Frieze London and Art Basel stage of their careers, who have been acquired by museums and are represented by the right galleries. But these are all artists who are very actively creating art. And when you collect one of their works, you're ensuring that they can continue to do this work. So, first, we like to collect artists who are early in their careers.
ALINA CHO: Who show promise.
MIKE STEIB: And who show promise. Secondly, we enjoy supporting female artists and artists of color. You can be an activist collector these days by being more thoughtful with the kinds of artists you want to support. There are artists in our collection, who make all their works through recycled materials, and they are speaking through their art about the importance of focusing on climate.
Sojourner Truth Parsons, Mother of Citrus, 2017, Mike and Kemp Steib Collection
ALINA CHO: And sustainability.
MIKE STEIB: But there are a million paintings on Artsy that you could acquire today. We like to focus on the kinds of artists and artworks that send messages that align with our values. But you also want to buy what you think looks super cool.
ALINA CHO: Absolutely.
MIKE STEIB: But no matter how much I like the art in person, we don't buy it until I've done the research through Artsy. I've looked at the value signals, if there's a secondary market, I've analyzed the secondary market. Because there's an old saying in the South,
“You can love a rich one as well as you can love a poor one.”
You can fall in love with a work of art that has a huge future market, and it's going to have a big impact on our culture and be a name that resonates for years to come. And you can buy a work of art that doesn't. I want to buy the work of art that does.