“We are identifying excellent artists who have not as yet received the full recognition they deserve.”
— Peter Selz [1919–2019] served as our Senior Curator starting in 2012. Peter was Chief Curator of MoMA and founder of the Berkeley Art Museum.
We’re anti-ageism.
We’re pro-innovative vision and historical significance.
Welcome to a unique art magazine. DIAA is the only art publication largely focusing on bringing greater recognition to the lives and works of artists — regardless of their age — whether they are emerging, mid-career, late-career, or deceased. Too many artists were marginalized or slipped through the cracks of art history — always for fascinating reasons. Our mission is to reduce that number with the help of our Curatorial Board who sees those who are shining brightly. Along with strategic partners, we are trying to increase the number of significant legacies that are preserved and promoted. Our organization is unique in three basic ways. First, it is the only art magazine to utilize a Curatorial Board of distinguished art historians as a key part of its vetting process. Second, its revenue comes only from sales of its elected artists’ works. Third, social responsibility is embedded in our DNA. Ours is the art world’s first for-benefit business, dedicating a significant percentage of profits from sales made by our affinity partner galleries to help finance promotional expenses for the neediest of its elected artists.
A strict vetting process
DIAA is the only publication whose featured artists have been identified and submitted by members of our Curatorial Board. This growing group of art historians conducts a strict vetting process. Their eyes are focused on quality, innovation, and historical significance.
Our promise: No hype, no fluff
DIAA joins the ranks of scholarly art journals, not popular art magazines that depend upon paid display advertising and subscribers. In an art world too often filled with hype and fluff, here are artists validated for inclusion as significant chapters in our art history. You’ll also discover back-stories are as compelling as the art.
How we champion artists
Our job is to marry artists with galleries — our affinity partners — who we feel will be most effective at promoting and selling their work. That’s our management role.
Our scholarly role is to provide every elected artist with a curated online exhibition and a brief introductory essay. With subvention funding we can go beyond that and produce a more substantial critical/biographical essay that fully shows why an artist’s work stands out as truly innovative. Our authors are drawn from a large network of peers — each with significant expertise relating to styles, movements, periods, media, and regions most pertinent to the artist. But we can’t expect them to work for free. The Catch-22 is that many artists can’t afford the expense. So, to help those artists in need we’ve pledged to set aside 20% of profits from our total sales commissions in order to secure for them a top historian to tell their story and critically assess their work. The more works our gallery partners sell the greater the financial support we can provide to our artists.
How you can acquire the work you love
DIAA’s online exhibitions and essays serve as a communications platform in our efforts to secure gallery and, hopefully, museum exhibitions. This is a central function of our role as liaison and guest curator. Many of the works exhibited here are for sale through our affinity gallery partners. Some show prices. Just click on the “Inquire” button and we’ll tell you if that work is available, has been sold, or is in a museum collection. If it’s available, we’ll give you the details and connect you with their exclusive representatives.
The galleries we choose
We approach gallery owners who share the maxim that scholarship — with an eye for quality as its corollary — provides the smartest guide for collectors. We define quality as work that is innovative in comparison with that of predecessors as well as contemporaries — thus validating its significance along the historical timeline. The direct benefit of this maxim is that there is simply no greater value proposition in the art market. Just compare our artists’ works with those by their more famous peers fetching huge prices and you’ll discover these prices are on the ground floor — with nowhere to go but up.
Compare our artists’ works with the hundreds of commercial websites enticing artists to consign and display their art. The biggest of these platforms posts hundreds of thousands of works. None of those websites are curated. So, when it comes to quality don’t be surprised when you’re disappointed by art that is derivative, inept, or simply boring. That’s to be expected with any “pay to play” business. Instead, our Curatorial Board has solved that problem. Owing to our vetting process you will discover real collecting opportunities.
Enjoying art that matters
DIAA is the only publication opening doors to discoveries that encourage everyone interested in art to think and see out of the box. You will learn about artists whose lives and works matter. We’re reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929) in which he explained beautifully that before nosey historians like us discovered the significance of certain artists, their works were resting quietly, maturing for decades, waiting for us:
“In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!”
Summer does come.
Here is art that matters.
Enjoy these discoveries!
