Talk

MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by Amy Whitaker, an assistant professor at NYU Steinhardt in Visual Arts Administration and most recently author of Art Thinking (Harper Business, 2016). In this talk, Whitaker will introduce some of the ideas of "art thinking" which is a framework for moving forward experimentally and without a template, while also designing skillfully with markets. She will also share her work on artists-as-investors and how the blockchain democratizes and upends the current state of art markets. 

Holding both an MBA and an MFA, Whitaker approaches economics and finance as creative design mediums themselves and teaches business to artists and arts administrators. Her research concerns art and the blockchain, and how artists can hold onto equity in their own work, becoming investors as well as creators. Her first academic love was political science; she believes that anytime you put art and the market together, you are also talking about your own political decisions around how the two come together. Whitaker has served as a business strategy mentor to the TED fellows and to grantees of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She is also author of Museum Legs (2009) and co-author of The Social Life of Artistic Property (2014) with Pablo Helguera, Michael Mandiberg, Bill Powhida and Caroline Woolard.