Why Art Influencer JiaJia Fei Is Leaving the Museum World to Found the ‘First Digital Media Agency for Art’

Earlier this month, JiaJia Fei,
the bowl-cutted social media maven behind the Jewish Museum’s
various channels, announced that she was leaving her role at the
institution to launch her own
digital media agency.

“I accepted my role at the
Jewish Museum knowing that my next step would be to start my own
company,” Fei tells Artnet News, characterizing the gig as the
“first case study in how creative approaches to technology as a
design solution can be transformative and have a lasting impact on
an organization.” 

Now, she says, the time has come
to put what she had learned to the test. “After more than a decade
of working in museums as a problem solver, it was time to go out on
my own to find new problems to solve,” she explains. (Fei will stay
with the Jewish Museum as a consulting director of
digital.)

Through her agency, which brands itself as the first of its kind
in the art world, Fei will work with museums, galleries, and
artists to broaden their audiences through tech. She calls it
“cosmetic internet surgery.”

She’ll have no shortage of
potential clients in need of nips and tucks. For a visually driven
industry run by creatives, the art world is notoriously slow in its
adoption of digital trends. (Even buying art online has been slow
to catch on, and today, only the biggest
galleries can afford to experiment with splashy online-only
viewing rooms.) And like most things tech-related, the later you
are to embrace innovation, the harder it is to catch up.

“A decade ago, the question was
‘should we be on social media?’ and now it’s ‘should we start a
video or podcast series?’ Unless you are a mega gallery with
massive in-house resources, where do you even begin?” says Fei.
“There are very few digital agencies out there with the dual grasp
of both art and technology, and therein lies the gap—and
opportunity.”

Fei worked for six years in the
Digital Marketing department of the Guggenheim prior to signing on
to the Jewish Museum as its first director of digital in early
2016. By that time, she was well known throughout the art world for
her social media savvy and unmistakable hipster cat lady style,
counting some 60,000 followers on Instagram. 

Over the next four years, Fei helped transform
the Jewish Museum, one of New York’s more traditional institutions,
into an industry standard-bearer for all things digital. Among her
accomplishments were modernizing the museum’s UX, increasing its
social media following by 1000 percent, and introducing a series of
unique audio tours. 

For her, where the art world
tends to fail in is in thinking that its digital problems—and
solutions—are similar to those of other industries.

“If you look at every other
creative industry—from music to fashion or cinema—technology has
played an unprecedented role in transforming how they do business,”
says Fei, noting the impact of platforms like Spotify and Netflix
on the worlds of music and film. “There is no singular equivalent
for art. Art may be a commodity, but it is also experiential,
social, and takes on many forms. There is no direct, code-based
translation for this level of complexity. Perhaps we’ve been asking
the wrong question all along.” 

The post Why Art Influencer JiaJia Fei Is Leaving the Museum
World to Found the ‘First Digital Media Agency for Art’
appeared first on artnet News.