Deviant Artists Descend on the Art World

An online community for artists by artists

Malcolm Levy interviews Angelo Sotira via telephone, May 19th, 2007

Angelo Sotira is one of the founders of Deviant Art, one of the largest online forums for printed art and culture. The community web site aspires to create the most powerful outlet in the world for known and unknown artists alike. They post their work, receive feedback and even sell prints at a sister Web site.

Malcolm Levy: On the web site you speak about the origins of Deviant Art, saying “We took the road less traveled and arrived a little later, but on our own pure and untainted terms. We're doing it our way." What did you mean?

Angelo Sotira: We started Deviant Art in the summer of 2000, and at that particular time, all the other Internet properties that were focused in any way on entertainment were going out of business. We have been able to remain entirely private; the only way that we would not remain private or fully in control of the property is if we found it greatly to the advantage of the community to alter that strategy. And we have had many opportunities, and many offers, but we have walked away from all of them because we didn’t want to lose control. The employees of the company, my partner and I are directly in charge of the operations of Deviant Art. So we have done it our way. There are no board seats available outside the organization. There is no money that would come with any strings attached; we are a no-strings organization.

Q: What motivates your contributors? How do you interact with your contributors? How has this been crucial in the success of Deviant Art?

A: I think it's changed a little bit since the beginning. In the very beginning, it was simply a place that recognized artists; it was not just a place that recognized art, and we were very responsive to our community as requests came in to open up new categories. We embraced the audience and listened to new communities. There was a time, I remember, where Scott and Matt and I would comment on every single deviation that was submitted. That was a point of pride: if you submit to Deviant Art, the administration will comment on it. We did that for as long as we possibly could.

We have now invested seven years into the culture of Deviant Art. And what it comes down to is culture, because our culture dictates what is and what isn’t okay. Our culture sort of decides who is and who isn’t a great artist. Our culture decides on some level if something does or doesn’t belong here. It's not very overt, but you will get a general sense of acceptance or rejection if you submit certain things.

Q: Would this philosophy also work in terms of merchandising?

A: The thing is, merchandising didn’t really enter the picture for quite some time. It really isn’t even there today. In the early days of Deviant Art there could be no corporate anything, at all. Even the Deviant Art print program, we felt incredibly nervous by launching this because we felt the community would reject the notion and be incredibly upset. I mean, the community was actually actively saying that they didn’t want that sort of thing. But we felt that if we didn’t figure out how to start monetizing these pages, the site was going to get out of control. There was no venture capitalist coming along, and we didn’t know if we wanted them to come along.

We launched it as DAPrints.com early, and there were no links from anything on our site. What happened is that more people started to use the program, and then began requesting that it be put on the site. Over time we watched as the community itself began to pull it in.

Q: Being in touch with your contributors is essential then?

A: That is what we have dedicated our time and lives to. If not for that there were a number of years where there wasn’t any other reason to do it. For the first four years of Deviant Art's life, we knew there was real interest there, the traffic on the site was consistently abnormally high, and we knew that it was going to be a very interesting property, but we were not going to do it that way. Frankly, I think many of the venture capitalist firms out there today are just ill equipped in the ways in which they are currently structured to have anything to do with Deviant Art, or any other site like a Deviant Art. It's not that I don’t think the value is going to be there, but it’s a value that’s going to be there over a 10-15 year period. What venture capitalists today are looking at and what the internet is looking at are these quick boom-bam, and quick boom-bam doesn’t work any more. It does for a lot of properties, you can pull together social networks quite fast if you want to, but it's different. And what does that mean? It means that Deviant Art is not a nightclub. I’m not certain of this, but I don’t know what’s to say that MySpace stays as the largest dominant networking player in the industry for the next 15 years.

Q: If you look at Facebook right now, it is certainly making incredible inroads on this.

A: I like Facebook as a property. I never understood MySpace, which is my own fault.

But I love MySpace from one perspective: social networks are very complicated for the average person, they’re actually quite tough to use. You take people off the street and some of them wouldn’t know how to use them. Google is now at a point where it simple for everybody. Social networks, wow that’s tough for some folks, and MySpace, that’s training wheels for social networks. And I love that. It’s a huge reaching, very widely appealing network that is pulling in millions and millions of people. It's training people. The conclusion of the MySpace experience is that ‘Hey maybe I need something that’s similar to this but more focused.' And if you’re an artist, that’s Deviant Art, if you’re a college student, that’s Facebook. I think they’ve done a great job of that.

Q: Does video art have a place on something like Deviant Art?

A: Oh, absolutely. We haven’t made any announcements about this yet, but we are months away from enabling video and film on the site. Ultimately, Deviant Art will be to YouTube what it is to Flickr and Photobucket.

Q: What do you think the next movement of crowdsourcing, or aggregating people, is going to look like?

A: I am specifically fascinated with the idea of group crowdsourcing. In other words, not just individuals being crowdsourced to perform something or do something. But, groups of individuals who are capable on a particular subject to come together and do something, and then have that meet the demand of one particular entity or opportunity.

Financial motivation has to come into play for the time spent on this sort of thing. There has to be a system and a mechanism to provide better opportunity. There is always going to be that place on the net for fun. We have that on Deviant Art. You’re an artist, and you want to spend that time in an art community with different artists. You want to get better, you want to evolve. Sourcing projects, contests.

But I like to see interesting, powerful opportunities that are attained by groups and not individuals. It’s a great way for a large number of people to see results, if you give them the opportunity to produce something great. I’m here in Hollywood, and I see a tremendous amount of opportunity here. Reality TV hasn’t only taken over the television screen but also your computer. I mean, it's all reality.

At some point they’re going to turn, and say ‘I’m kind of sick of this stuff. I’m looking for some quality, I’m looking for some production again, because I kind of miss studios spending a bunch of money just to make sure I’m entertained.' I think we're going to evolve to that world again in a different sort of way this time, I think it's going to be a matter of seeing the great minds moving to the top. Content will always be king, and it will be the creators of that content that get their due. So I think this is an important time for artists. In terms of a lot of the issues with the music business right now, in film and other areas, I think that a lot of what is happening now will be truly positive in the long term. Specifically for artists, but maybe not as much for those people who are in between artists and consumers.

Q: It will almost fix what it started in a way?

A: Yeah, that’s exactly the situation we are seeing right now, and I believe this is what we will see moving forward…..

(Edited by Conor Friedersdorf)