Max Kendrick’s moment of clarity about the inequities of the art market came during college, when a friend of his was interning at a global bank and placed on the “lobby beautification committee.”
That moment stuck with Max through eight years as a diplomat in the foreign service before he wound up in a business program at Stanford University in 2019. There, he met Charlie Jarvis, who was working on an undergraduate degree in computer science and studio art. The two bonded over a shared interest in how technology could disrupt some of the art market’s archaic models. In 2021,Once upon a time, flipping an artwork—that is, buying low and selling high—was considered an art-world sin.
The duo describes the concept as “deliberately unsexy.” Over the past few months, however, Fairchain has ginned up a good deal of cachet: The company hosted star-studded dinners in Miami and Los Angeles, and their branding—by the revered design firm Pentagram—was ubiquitous . Advisors to Fairchain include big names in art, such as Hank Willis Thomas and Laurie Simmons, while investors include Carroll Dunham, Ludovic Nkoth, and Alteronce Gumby.
by a federal appeals court in 2018. There are also stories of artists adding an ad-hoc clause into their sales contracts that would entitle them to a royalty, though there is no infrastructure in place to enforce it.. The artist pushed back at the Chicago Public Library, which had planned to auction its mural at Christie’s in 2018, saying the library was “exploiting the work of artists in the city for short-term gain.” Photo courtesy of Christie’s.
“There’s a freedom of movement in the art world that I’ve always appreciated, that you can [make a deal] on a handshake,” Simmons told me. “However, as more and more money comes into the art world—more and more international money, and I’ll throw in the word oligarchic money, why not—a lot of people don’t know if their artworks are real.”