Internet entrepreneur sells stocks as art

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This bug-covered design by Mary Bellis is one of the unique stock certificates created by artists to fund Webbittown

by Colin Moynihan

(IDG) -- These days, stock in many companies isn't worth the paper it's printed on. But there's one startup that's worth only the paper it's printed on.

Call it stock art: A group of New York artists are crafting what may be the most beautiful and speculative shares on the market. Entrepreneur Carol Braddock plans to sell the documents as art objects to fund Webbittown, a commerce-cum-community Web site.

Over the past few months Braddock has assembled a roster of artists that reads like a who's who of the downtown New York art scene. So far, the stocks have been embellished with everything from simple sketches to elaborate collages. Peter Missing of the Missing Foundation, an East Village noise band, scrawled a graffiti-style upside-down martini glass on his certificate; Gallery owner Cynthia Broan drew a simple sketch; and Lower East Side photographer and videographer Clayton Patterson painted a primitivist dragon-bird. The collection will soon include works by billboard-modification artist Ron English and '80s art star Mark Kostabi.

With talents like these contributing work, Braddock hopes an art sale will raise enough capital to take him to a traditional IPO. In the meantime, Braddock is negotiating with several downtown galleries to sell 3,000 shares made up of 30 serigraph reproductions each of 100 illustrated certificates. For $20, investors will receive randomly selected shares and equity in the company. Collectors who request specific serigraphs will be charged $50 at first, though the price of some serigraphs may rise with demand. Of the money raised, 50.1 percent will go to Webbittown and 49.9 percent will go to the artists.

Braddock insists the stock represents real equity in a real company. His idea for the site combines community and commerce in a virtual city with 20,000 three-dimensional lots, including parks, shops, a police station and a jailhouse, all populated by animated avatars. Braddock says interactions on the screen will have results in real life. For instance, if a visitor, represented by an icon, buys a hat from another visitor, the purchaser will receive an actual hat in the mail.

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If it all sounds a little far-fetched, one need only look at Braddock's r?sum? to confirm the conceptual smirk behind all of this. Art and technology first intersected for Braddock in 1977, while he was taking a computer class at the University of Minnesota. There, he designed the Minneapolis Message Mill, a prototype community bulletin board on the university computer system that listed local exhibitions. But at the same time, Braddock was spending his Fridays engaged in an art project, phoning friends and asking them to say just one sentence. He would then transcribe the sentences he'd gathered and string them together into one long prose poem that he would distribute to everyone he'd phoned.

Then, while living in the East Village during the late 1980s and early 1990s, he circulated a self-published newsletter, which consisted of news from the art world along with opening invitations, postcards, tapes and other flotsam gathered during regular visits to downtown galleries. It was the contacts he made on the gallery scene that allowed Braddock to recruit so many art figures to assist him in getting Webbittown off the ground.

If all goes according to plan, Braddock expects the site to be up by 2005. By that far-off date, the art stocks may be all that's left of Webbittown. Or technology IPOs just may be hot again.

But 2005 is a long way off. Right now all the site contains is an appeal to artists to contribute more stock designs and a cryptic mission statement that reads "We at Webbittown are about furthering 3-D. There are 3 ways to achieve this aim. They are: Technology. Content. Branding." Braddock doesn't yet own the computer he needs to do to the complex 3-D modeling for the site.

"The technology that I need to start Webbittown isn't available yet," Braddock demurs. "But it's evolving rapidly, and pretty soon we'll have a decent working model." So for the time being, Webbittown's worth rests mainly upon the certificates' value on the art market.

Braddock isn't the first person to blur the lines between art and commerce. In the 1980s, artist J.S.G. Boggs made a name and small fortune for himself when he meticulously drew near-perfect replicas of U.S. currency that, because of their popularity among collectors, became more valuable than the denominations they represented. But while Boggs's bills became valuable accidentally, Braddock is actively promoting his stock certificates.

Another historical precedent can be found in the 1800s. Long before the rash of overvalued Net IPOs, 19th-century speculators were so infatuated with the money to be made in the Western United States that they were willing to buy stock in railroad companies, even with no proof of their existence. But when the railroad companies failed to materialize, the stock was worthless; unlike fizzled-out Net firms and fictional railroad companies, this stock will still retain value even if Webbittown doesn't come to fruition, Braddock says. "This plan incorporates the best of art and the best of finance," he says. "These will hold value even if we go bankrupt."

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Selling out for art
(The Industry Standard)
Want to buy a Renoir? Click here
(The Industry Standard)
Germany wants to feed its starving artists
(The Industry Standard)
Turn your PC into an art gallery
(PCWorld.com)
Can you protect your images online?
(PCWorld.com)
A world art gallery
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Webbittown Corporation

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