Art Of Money

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I came very close to titling this post “Money of Art” but since every post that makes it on to the top of a social bookmarking site starts with “how to” I just couldn’t do it.

In my last post I mentioned that I used to own a woodworking business. I made hand crafted photo frames, but what I didn’t mention was that I actually started as an artist and, tired of starving, turned to making “commercial” products. Yes I was going to be an artist…I even attended the Emily Carr College in Vancouver [while their I donated my 15 minute of fame to this guy].

It was a good school. Learned lots. I read a statistic about art school students a while ago: 5 years after leaving school, 95% were not involved in creating art of any kind. I wonder how much of that has to do with economic reality? Not a word about it in the curriculum when I was there…unless you wimped out and went into graphic design. How long does a person really want to go on living below the poverty line?

This weekend in my city they had the annual “Art Walk.” Artists lined a busy street in front of shop windows and restaurants while streams of people combed the avenue. I can remember what these types of event were like as an artist.

To sum it up: mostly painful.

Even if you had really high quality work 10% will say something positive, 50% will ignore you, 20% will say it’s too expensive and 20% will either be blatantly rude or say they could do better.

As I walked down the Art Walk this year my Internet business training began to leak into my experience. I thought, why are most of these people not selling stuff? In my city there is a ton of disposable income [even though in winter it routinely reaches -30 Celsius , house prices have risen > 20% in each of the last 3 years]. A lot of the work was high enough quality to be sold.

It was clear to me…these people have no business sense. It would have taken about 40 hours of instruction for their schools to give them the fundamentals to know how to sell and market their work.

I walked past over 100 artists and not one was collecting names and addresses of the folks that expressed an interest in their work. The only marketing I saw was some business cards or postcards that the artists gave out.

They should have been list building. It is really tough to expect someone to just buy a $500 painting while they are on their way to lunch with friends in a café, but that doesn’t mean that the same person wouldn’t buy if you sent them a personalized invitation to your next showing, or to the one after that.

The takeaway for me was that business is about commitment. Partly what attracts people to becoming artists is a desire for “freedom” which is falsely seen as a lack of restrictions or commitments, so the idea of creating relationships with customers and potential customers is not too attractive to that mindset.

I guess the way to not be a starving artist, or anything else for that matter, is to realize that entering into commitments rather than running away from them is where the treasure [and even the freedom] is.