Investing in Culture: An Interview With Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Founder of Otis

By encouraging contemporary art museums to experiment with similar value flow curation, we hope to initiate a friendly, positive-sum competition among cultural institutions to connect in deeper ways with the material conditions of art workers and audiences.

For example, a company like Masterworks does the art research for you. When it comes to investing, you can purchase a piece of blue-chip art in their portfolio, including works by Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko, in exchange for a small fee.

Barriers to entry for his peers, Palley explained, include a sense of ignorance. “We’re used to seeing everything online — click to browse and click to buy — and there is huge transparency and the commercial art world is very opaque and hard to navigate.”

“That doesn’t work for us,” Palley continued. “My generation, we want to see numbers, we want t... See more