Interview
‘Natasha Arselan: AucArt’
Saatchi Art & Music Magazine, London
An interview with Natasha Arselan, Founder of AucArt, an online auction house specialising in emerging art from recent graduates, published in the 2018 spring and tenth anniversary edition of Saatchi Art & Music Magazine.
Launched in December 2017, the interview focused on Arselan’s philosophy and ambition for the new venture, her passion for championing early career artists, and the need for a platform to help shape the art world of tomorrow by connecting collectors directly with up-and-coming creatives.
Printed in London, 2018︎︎︎Publication PDF
Extract —
“Being a young artist isn’t easy. If you’re not occupied building a DIY mezzanine at your live-in studio down in Deptford, you’re probably busy queuing down 5 back streets just to get into CassArt’s annual Student Sale. One major fault line in the student-come-artist trajectory of many young creatives is the ability to simply show and sell their works. The art market is a notoriously opaque world, full of hyper-minimal white lobbies, undisclosed sales figures and a whole host of art-historical specialists all sporting their latest Pince-nez.
For young artists and nascent collectors both, it’s a hard nut to crack. Hoping to resolve some of these issues is Natasha Arselan, who this December launched her new online auction house AucArt. The platform will be the first ever auction house to specialise in early career contemporary art—working exclusively with BA/MFA students up to three years after graduation. Directly engaged with both the artists and their clients, AucArt looks to establish itself as beacon of transparency in an otherwise nebulous territory of tradition and mystique; part of a new wave of digital initiatives looking to disrupt the ossification of art and its ownership, the platform aims at “converting art lovers into art collectors.”
AucArt prides itself on its curation of up-and-coming talent. Natasha herself spent the last year nomadic across the UK, visiting degree shows and artist-run projects, hand-selecting her first batch of represented artists. “It was an organic process, there was a lot of experimental work that really stood out to me.” Each month, backed up by her in-house curatorial team and star-studded advisory board, one established artist will join the curatorial process, giving a unique vision to the collection on sale. A range of studio visits, 1-2-1 meetings and E-catalogues will create an intimate relationship between collector and artist, one of AucArt’s flagship policies.”