As the most requested magazine in the industry, Art Business News stays true to its mission of reporting the latest industry news and emerging trends driving the fine art market. ABN: The art industry's news leader since 1977.
Issue link: http://artbusinessnews.epubxp.com/i/95409
ABN THE PENTHOUSE IS THE LIMIT GAVRIEL WOLF AND ARI GRAZI HAVE CREATED A COMPANY THAT IS POISED TO RESHAPE THE AFFORDABLE ART MARKET BY ZACHARY WIGON able art market," the young entrepreneur tells me as he strokes his fi ve-o'clock shadow with a thoughtful air. "My older brother is a fi ne artist, and aſt er he graduated from SVA he was selling work for $500 to $1,000. But the only people who came to see his stuff at a show were friends and family. T ere's a product being manufactured, and there's a mar- ket for it, but the two aren't meeting." We're in the lounge of Dream Down- "Y 38 town, a hotel in Manhattan's Meatpack- ing District; suff used with the careful touches of a boutique hotel (dark wood walls, semi-circular club couches) yet boasting an enormous amount of real estate, it's a perfect metaphor for the company we're here to discuss: In- ou know, we feel like there's an ineffi cient component in the aff ord- diewalls, a start-up providing a specifi c- ity-based service on a wide scale. "We" is myself and Indiewalls' co- founders, 25-year-olds Gavriel Wolf and Ari Grazi. T e two may as well be "THERE'S A PRODUCT BEING MANUFACTURED, AND THERE'S A MARKET FOR IT, BUT THE TWO AREN'T MEETING. " poster boys for a certain post-Web-2.0 kind of Internet startup, one in which intimate familiarity with an industry comes second to exposing and capital- izing upon an ineffi ciency in a market, as Grazi explains. Grazi studied international relations at NYU while Wolf focused on science and economics at Cornell. T e two met while studying in Israel during a gap year they both happened to take be- tween high school and college. Six years later, a chance occurrence in a cafe led to a phone call by Wolf that initiated their partnership. "I was in a cafe at Cornell and I saw this artwork on one of the walls, with a piece of paper next to it with the artist's contact information," Wolf explains. "I liked the work, but I thought, 'Why not try to make it easier to purchase it?' So I called Ari." Grazi's brother is Joseph Grazi, a Brooklyn-based artist whose work is actually among those Indiewalls has in Dream Downtown (though it was Dream Downtown, not Indiewalls itself, that actually selected Joseph's work). Between Ari's familiarity with the New York art world and Wolf 's WINTER 2012