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| Samantha West, “Ava with Owls and Bears, Los Angeles” |
After a morning of flushing out some new business development ideas, we jet downtown for a meeting with our favorite photographer, Samantha West. We’ve known Sam for years and just recently started working together. The amazing scenery of Manhattan in the autumn will play backdrop to our first collaboration. We can’t give away too many secrets just yet but are counting down the days to when we will debut this fabulous November project. In the meantime we can reveal that Samantha will be teaming up with a London-based fashion house to make their New York launch a completely innovative experience. We also took advantage of our meeting with Sam to use her as a sounding board for new development ideas in the works for Blaise + Co. We can’t stress how important it is to ask the artist for their opinion – a very simple tactic that is somehow ignored by most gallerists or dealers. The success of Blaise + Co. is directly based on the success of our artists; if they think something will help to launch their careers, we want to know; if they think something would be a waste of their efforts, we want to know. It’s very important to shed any sense of righteousness, shut your mouth, and listen to the client. In our case it pays back ten-fold because we got a little market insight and confirmed our suspicion that a forthcoming Blaise + Co. roster of artist services is indeed useful, viable and wanted. That, too, is another little secret we can’t fully reveal to you quite yet, but you won’t be waiting too long – a new Blaise + Co. official website will be developed and designed from scratch to give you access to all these ideas and more.
After meeting with Samantha at one of our favorite coffee and treat stops on Union Square – 71 Irving (try the Gramercy Salad) – we had to pop back uptown to another one of our favorite haunts to meet with a potential collaborator. We talked with the lovely Ori Feinberg, whom we had only spoken to via email, at my high school haunt (I was just a little precocious) Via Quadrono on 73rd and Madison. Ori had contacted us because he too attended the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, albeit a few years after we did when it had expanded into the conglomerate that it is now. He’s been dabbling in exhibition planning for emerging Contemporary artists and wanted to get a sense of the Blaise + Co. program. With a pot of green tea between us we tried to navigate this sort of conversation – one between two competitors and potential collaborators. How do you have a conversation without saying much? Nobody wants to give away their secrets – where you find your artists, your creative collaboration ideas, how you find the alternative exhibition spaces… It was a rather vague but still lovely meeting and we were happy to meet Ori in person. We certainly admire his commitment to seeing as many gallery shows as possible, which is quite an exhausting task sometimes. Looking forward to perhaps working together in the future and to hearing about what sort of great projects come his way next.