An Introduction
Welcome to the ArtAreas.io blog! We hope you’ll follow here as well as on social media. My name is Chris Bodenmiller, and I along with my business partners, James Pongrass and Ajay Sharma, hope you’ll join us. We plan to keep you informed about things we find interesting in the art world, and in the digital space.
When Jim and I met in the 1990s, I had a background in IT, and he had many years of experience in art, and as a world traveller, and as an entrepreneur. Together, in 1996, we created a website OceanicArts.com. On the website, we listed both his extensive tribal art collection, and his library of rare ethnographic books for sale. This was a full 2 years before Amazon.com even existed.
Art Areas
At the end of 1999, we expanded to all other forms of art, by launching the original Art Areas website. It and a series of other websites we launched, were dedicated to buying and selling fine art online. We would go to art shows in NYC and talk to artists, collectors, and galleries about our new internet business. At the time though, most of them were more than a little skeptical that the internet was any place for art.
On a trip to India, I later met Ajay Sharma, who became our Webmaster (a more common title in those days). I also met Samuel Paul, who became our graphics designer, and who created our new ArtAreas.io logo.
The original Art Areas website has been offline for about a decade now. Ajay went to work as a CRM consultant for several years. Jim moved to China for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, I consulted in IT for power generation, and eventually ended up in marketing technology. While the original websites were eventually disbanded, the experiences enriched our lives, and hold a fond place in our memories.
A New Beginning
Sometimes, bringing people together with different perspectives results in them seeing things in new ways. This is exactly what happened when our diverse skillsets came together again, around the changes we’re seeing today on the internet with blockchain, and in the art world with NFTs. We like to think we were ahead of our time when we started selling art online in the 90s, and we hope to share with you our vision of this new intersection of art and technology, from our combined unique perspectives.
We plan to post about all sort of things we find, as well as our opininions and thoughts. Topics will range from where things are, to where we think they might go! We hope you’ll find it interesting, informative, and maybe even a little bit entertaining.