A letter to painters- How to sell paintings (2790 words)
"Art is not purity it is purification, it is not liberty it is liberation"
CLARICE LIPECTOR
Since my parents are/were painters, we never lived in one place long & I have travelled a lot since, I think I have known more artists & artist's communities than most (by communities I mean those working in the same place & so, whether friends or bitter enemies, mingle in the same art events, share models or discuss art.)
I have also seen a more rare but delightful sight: actual art communities like one in an abandoned industrial estate taken over by painters & sculptors outside Madrid or a coal town near Leeds where artists will share anything from materials & opinions, to publication or promotion costs as well as the power to attract buyers a group of artist workshops has.
All this without mentioning the most important bit: the communal inspiration & support that eggs each member to better work. But the point of this letter is not about being better painters but about selling paintings.
This familiarity has shown me many artist stereotypes are often enough true, just as, speaking generally, one might say are of computer programmers, scientists or athletes.
A painter’s job is a solitary one even, in a sense, when he paints a model; the painter while painting, communes more with his canvas than the other person in the room. This makes us introspective & sometimes awkward in general society.
There are jealousies, arrogance, poor work ethics, backstabbing (for instance: painters who turn up at each other's openings to sneakily hand out their business cards to the other’s clients!) In fact this is so common an example, that there are times a painter is trying to charm someone else’s buyer only to discover upon offering a business card that they are both painters at the same game!
We are an unruly, eccentric & cranky lot, the only community of its sort: defined by the very fact the members are not like each other.
But having been among the first painters (at least here in Europe) to embrace the Web (I still have a copy of my first Web-site somewhere- designed in PERL which looks positively Neolithic! I also remember when I switched from handing out business cards to CDRoms with printed covers & those thick stickers for the disc we used to use; it was long enough ago that people's jaws used to drop!) Since then I have been aware of an evolution in this particular sector of the Web which I think is reaching an important turning point.
Let’s define ‘sector’ to start, I am not talking of the boon the Internet has been for big auction houses selling expensive Renaissance or Impressionist work, nor either of the aid to established brick-and-mortar galleries Web-sites & Web-promotion, has been for them; Nor even the many virtual galleries & agents that exploit the medium but rather the rest of the pyramid, the large base made up of painters themselves through whose Web-sites so few paintings sell.
Let us also be honest about our Internet presence, of all the interaction between us which I’m about to talk about, & despite a number of the starry-eyed in search of applause or the few among us with dreams of immortal fame, we are all on the Net for one & the same reason: to sell our product.
There are plenty of stereotypically bitter painters who moan about their misunderstood & underappreciated genius, but it is a far more common & simple feeling the majority of painters share: They feel they are involved in a vocation with an extremely long learning arc to reach maturity, at which they work with discipline but are still not remunerated.
Attempts at Internet art sales by painters is not a very with-it or Web-fashionable corner of the Internet, without mentioning one that generates little money. And since actual direct sales of paintings to clients who find them through our personal Sites are still rare, most painters’ Sites haven’t become sophisticated enough in design or 'findabilty' to compare to the slick sector of say, real estate sales which generates a great deal of money & has multiplied its number of potential clients compared to prior to the Web.
For those who haven’t taken the years necessary to learn to handle computers or even (like so many painter Sites out there) to understand the Internet well enough to know what they need to make their own Site, attractive, navigable, Internet-fashionable & ‘findable’ through search engine query (have you ever noticed, for instance, how many artists Sites are called ‘Home’?! Or how many size their thumbnails by width instead of height? Or use maddening horizontal scroll bars? Or 6 types of Font? Or even many successful Sites that sell workshops or how-to-paint videos that have no focal point- somehow these same artists who spend their lives designing beautiful compositions forget it is important for their screen presence also…
Or understand nothing of the psychology of colour? (specific to the Web & evolving constantly). No keywords, no text content- how in the world can the Google God decide if these Sites are relevant to searches looking for paintings?)
For those painters who are Internet-innocents, instead of buying ready-made formats or using cheesy ones that oblige you to exhibit their advertising, or exist under an umbrella which is what the umbrella Site’s owners really promote instead of your being able to promote your Site independently (just as restaurants get free decorating in exchange of painters who hope to sell to their diners)- we can share Web-site templates designed by ourselves for free.
The templates designed by those artists who handle computers will, as a group of minds, come up with a ‘look’ that gives us creative choices computer programmers won’t think of, while also accomplishing something which many artists don’t realize is just as important: homogeneity. We are so accustomed to wanting to be original that we forget the reason the yellow pages worked so well in the past is because of their sensible organisation. Personal art Sites exist for the same reason as the Yellow Pages but our version is not even in alphabetical order!
As you all know, there are a gazillion Sites, e-mails, & ‘artist representation’ of all sorts offered whose claims to work for artists is a lie in the converse, they are opportunistic parasites who earn their living from gullible painters who think the exposure they buy will lead to sales- though it seldom actually does & artists who work day-jobs to pay for it seldom see their investment returned. In-fact, these hub Sites built ostensibly to market paintings to buyers are marketed strictly to painters themselves, & are far more likely to be visited by other painters than collectors of art.
I have been noticing over these last couple of years, however, that painters are becoming more Internet savvy & many of the early blood-sucking Sites that used to convince painters to spend money without any return have now folded. A few, however, directed by people with the business skills most painters lack (even if we did have time to run two concurrent careers: painting & selling paintings) are folding money back into the member community in order to keep growing themselves.
Prizes are juicier, competitions more frequent & submitting to them just a few clicks of a mouse instead of those expensive, tedious & inconvenient transparencies galleries required. There are now even art-hub Sites that have started offering grants. Then there are those like Saatchi’s with important connections to television & the papers where genuine introductions between galleries & artists, press & artist or collector & artist do happen.
Someone, a painter, sent out a large mailing to artists with Web-sites one of which reached me with an idea about trying to get together as a community to influence someone like Oprah Winfrey to buy a painting over the Net- or talk about it on her show (no question there are plenty of good & cheap paintings available to someone with good taste & a little money; now that I think of it: I buy paintings on the Net myself!) & how something like that could significantly influence a world of Web users to consider the idea for the first time themselves... & I thought to myself: "You're smart!"
I'm finding this new global dialogue among artists as bad in its negative aspects as those of the real world (I've seen art forums where the differences of opinion over painting could only be called 'discussions' because the members were too far from each other to actually draw blood!) but also a far bigger phenomenon- a deep sense of solidarity, courtesy, mutual support & generosity (sharing art opportunities with each other, for example) & even the sporting attitude to congratulate the winner of an exhibit one hoped to win one's self. Why? Well, I think it is because now we can. It is simply so much easier to talk to each other.
Friendships form, painters (by definition: art lovers) find each other’s good work & take the trouble to write sincere, congratulatory & admiring notes, often, in turn, returned with warm gratitude or reciprocity of opinion; groups that share lessons or critique each other's work crop up & grow with ease. There are successful art-social-networking with lively & sustained exchange as well as serious art networks within the few big social networking Sites.
I regularly receive mail as part of automated mass mailings within these social networking Sites from other artists promoting their new work or announcing an exhibit, & I wonder: aside from pleasant ‘art talk’ between us, why are they telling me instead of promoting to the same buyers I'm looking for?
I was thinking of the death of the artist’s guild which, in one form or another, survived from the Gothic when artists were still artisans to Picasso & the First World War. There are successful art unions like the one that works for Hollywood’s film industry: good pay, good hours, sometimes working in their own studios instead of on-set & with a built-in market for their work: all the other well-paid people who work on sets. Among these painters of matte backdrops, trompe l’oeil cracks in walls, faux ancestral portraits & sculptors of Styrofoam (painted to look like stone, metal or wood) are well-trained, talented & serious artists.
The difference between them being able to form a union while the artist-at-large cannot is because the skills necessary to work on-set are quasi-measurable just as art in general was prior to cubism, but which of us today would trust another to separate the bricks* from the Freuds?
Unions, apprenticeships or guilds are not the answer for today’s anarchic painter anyway, what I see instead is simply the incipient potential for collaboration. We don’t even need the Ché to unite us, we are already united, we do most of us, belong to the same fifty Web-sites after all.
What we need to do is take all this internal dialogue among us & direct it outward to our audience: the buyer of paintings.
How do we turn the energy & effort we put into our virtual community into something that appeals to our audience? Well, that’s a silly question! Which other group of all in the world has more creative resource? We are a group of people trained to make images, among us visual artists- painters, photographers, graphic artists, comic artists, sculptors, CGI programmers, origami architects, you name it! And among them are a few who know a thing or two about computers or video & animation- together our talents should make an effort to catch the public eye & interest, easy. Who better to make whatever the endeavour- original, good looking, well-crafted, entertaining...? These are the very reasons people hire us to start with.
What about money? Yes, I admit, an effort of this sort in whichever form it took, would require some kind of cash investment somewhere along the way. But I say the founding tenet of such a theoretical society as I describe, should be that we collaborate, we volunteer our work & time but never ever make money, or ask for money, from painters. The purpose is to make money for artists, not from them; & not as agents or galleries but by influencing the buyer by being loud as a group, in a way we cannot alone… perhaps our motto should be: Only art materials makers make money from painters!
If an expense to promoting ourselves as a loose global union of artists is for example, a slick & expensive Web-site along with its promotion, the answer is easy: as a huge group with nothing more than the power of their number, instead of using our Internet time visiting art Sites to chat with other artists, we visit the Site it is our objective to see succeed. Our own presence, our number of visits, is enough to sell advertising to, for instance- art materials sellers for a friendly, symbiotic & dignified collaboration of money & creativity.
Once we make a certain amount of noise it is only a question of time before the London Times or the Village Voice pick up on the phenomenon & monies can come in the form of anything from grants to public commissions competed for within an easily accessible pool of talent.
Another present advantage to this idea is the Obama administration which might not only raise the measly $125 million spent annually on the endowment to the arts to what Holland, a country of fourteen million, spend, but also has interesting ideas about cultural outreach programs to teach the educationally underprivileged the importance of art in society & tap into the huge potential for this means of expression often practiced informally in urban centres in forms such as painting beautiful & imaginative murals on the walls of subway stations.
Committees are being formed, successful artists & big museum directors are already part of the effort but from what I can see on the Internet they have no concrete plan yet & are wide open & interested in listening to anyone with good ideas. I think an attempt by artists to represent themselves as a group, (in a way they can't do by competing with each other while trying to represent themselves individually) would perk their ears.
Over the Internet & through no greater avenue than the art-networks that already exist one might, for instance, organize a national or even international ‘mural day’ where volunteer artists are mobilized in every city possible & charged with finding permission to paint a parking lot wall or one offered by a local business owner. If their numbers were such that a large wall could be transformed overnight & this happened simultaneously around the world or at least across a nation- it would be a sensation that would earn the world’s attention & only cost each of us a day’s work.
Don’t think, please I am suggesting this as a course of action or part of a plan, I am just trying to think of examples & am succeeding so well I will restrain myself from a boring list, ehem! I only mean to suggest that if I can think of a hundred ideas & probably one of them is good, & there are a million of us out there, don’t you agree that once our efforts were synchronised we could take a greater control of our market & our perceived rôle in society?
Aside from the power our unity gave us, what would be its purpose? Again- to sell the product we so expertly fabricate. Why this instead of say: brick-and-mortar galleries? I am not saying 'instead', there's nothing wrong with a gallery or two who sell your work reliably, I am only talking of redirecting the Internet energies we expend anyway with greater efficiency & purpose.
We might try an alternative to reaching the same dozen art lovers already served by the same three serious galleries &, for example, target the large market slice who haven’t the connoisseur’s money or the faith in their own judgement to search out & buy from unknowns on the Net but do, never-the-less each spend on, & hang, a certain number of framed things on their walls all the same.
As the peacock said: What do we have to lose but our feathers?
footnote:
You remember the bricks, right? Bought by the Tate for half a million if I remember correctly, & were delivered to the museum in a crate with a single sheet of instructions how to pile them on the floor. |
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