Making versus Marketing

There have always been more artists than galleries and avenues for exhibiting art. But the internet is now changing this. Artists can find and foster an audience that galleries never even knew existed.

In light of this new freedom of outreach, there are many businesses marketing to artists to help them market and sell their work online. I have been using one such business, Art Storefronts, and I am enjoying many of the features and benefits of such a program. I see some of my other artist friends using other programs, but they all focus on building your audience and marketing to that audience. The platform I joined has a lot of marketing and social-media advice that is good and I have been following through on some of these suggestions while testing the water on others.

I find this type of work to be a curse, anathema, an abomination. Alright, the fact that I like writing this newsletter and having y’all read it tells you that I don’t think marketing is a complete abomination. But it is not natural to me nor convenient. These platforms suggest that an artist’s time should be divided between art making (80%) and marketing (20%). For the course of 2018, until I took the last two weeks off of social-media and updating my website, I have been consistently promoting my work and doing many of the things I “should” be doing.  But I needed a break.

Artists like to make things. I think that is pretty obvious. In general, artists prefer that the objects they make are out front in the public eye and their personal life stays behind the scenes. It is hard for artists to remember that they are not marketing themselves. They want to stay in the background while marketing seems about placing yourself out there in the rough currents of society. Yet, my work has a commentary aspect to it. It talks about who we are as a society and I would love to have people respond to it, value it and take it home. That is part of the thinking behind the work. Unfortunately, to engage an audience I can’t sit in the shadows and throw out wry observations.

So, I am getting back on that horse and will continue with the marketing, and even ramping it up some, over the course of the year. But I don’t want to have my marketing activities diminish my studio experience. My work doesn’t fit neatly in the online scene of art marketing. I don’t make images. Much of the art online is just an image to be placed on a piece of paper, a piece of canvas, a coffee cup, a keychain. It is not art meant to be its own object and have its own presence in someone’s life. Often the final product someone receives from an online artist’s website was not made by an artist’s hand but by a printer. I’m only willing to go down that path so far. So, I struggle with the contemporary art marketing world that I have to live in.  It is at odds with the ultimate purpose and value of my work which is forging a worldview into an object - developing a language of material that expresses thought.