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08/31/2005: "Art World Economics Part Three"
I’m heading into quicksand. A few of you readers have already expressed your ire at all this talk about money on an art site. So this one isn’t for everyone, and if you’re so rich you can afford not to sell, you can stop reading right now. In another blog, I’ll talk about creativity, where my inspiration comes from, and my own color theories. So close your eyes, click your mouse, and go away until then.
On this site, what gets readers to respond? Is there a formula to get people to write in and comment on a blog you’ve written? Are there buttons you can push to provoke responses, and things you shouldn’t write about that will deny you responses?
I think there are. One of the things writers can and often do, is to avoid difficult concepts, which require careful analysis before responding, rather than just knee jerk approval or contestation. Another tried and true provocation technique is to verbalize what you know many people already feel, and wish to express, but maybe aren’t eloquent enough to put into words. Give a few examples that will provide people with the opportunity, and they’ll add their own examples to a growing list of what everybody already agrees on.
Why am I bringing this up? Because the creation of a message of any type, verbal or visual, is better received and understood if the writer, or artist, has a clear idea of how his audience is going to react to his message, and tailors it to suit their needs. Walter, in your blog about what motivated primitive wall paintings, I think you’ll agree that the artist wasn’t acting without knowing to some extent how his work fit into the communal life of the tribe, and how it would be received. If we have evolved away from that, it might just be why we’re in difficulty now.
Sounds in a way like mass marketing, creating a big mac that you know is going to sell to and be eaten by the masses. If you want to open a successful restaurant, stay as far away as possible from things like expensive, authentic, complicated and unknown recipes. Quality is not what sells. If we want to make quality, and sell it, we have to disguise it as run of the mill until enough people have it in their homes that it becomes familiar. Or at least offer a lower quality mass produced version for the masses.
Barney Davey’s blog referred to profiting from the print market, and that’s really worth a shot if you can organize it. Historically, as soon as good printing was available, a few forward thinking artists jumped right in and sewed up not only their financial problems, but achieved wide recognition for their work at the same time. The old N C Wyeth paintings printed in the Jules Verne books brought him and his heirs fame, and calendars and tire ads by Maxfield Parrish are still collected, while the paintings themselves are worth a fortune.
Have any of you ever seen this picture? In the nineteen thirties, it hung in 20% of Americans’ homes. It’s called, “Daybreak”.
You might well ask where these artists would be if they hadn’t investigated printing. I’d guess they upped the recognition of their work more than a hundredfold. Can you name the artist who used to do all those Saturday Evening Post covers? Do you think you’d recognize his work if he hadn’t?
Prints are mass marketed, but not really of low quality. They’re affordable enough for just about anyone to own. Notice I don’t say ‘cheap’. And they work for both the artist and the artwork by allowing it to be seen more frequently and gain recognition. Think about getting twelve of your works together that form a nice group, and invest in printing a calendar. The rich artists I know print books on themselves, their history, their achievements, and their works. That costs about forty grand for a thousand copies, even if you do it in a third world country, and most of these guys give every single one away. A thousand copies of a calendar can be printed and spiral bound for two, and sold for four. You’ve doubled your investment if you sell them all, which you probably won’t, but you can give a lot away, too. It’s great publicity that may not cost you a cent.
We all want to sell our largest, most expensive works and have them placed in prominent locations. We also want our newest, and most original ideas to be the ones that attract viewers and get them to appreciate the concepts that we used to bring them into being. With the notoriously short attention span people have today, how can we get them to delve that deeply into what each of us is doing?
Let the theories unfold slowly, and mix them in with things we know people are going to be attracted to. Give it to them in little bits at a time. That way, you’ll hold a viewer’s attention before it’s broken by his cell phone ringing again. Short takes. One hundred percent absorbtion.
In just about any artist’s portfolio, there are usually a few pieces that seem to draw people to them more than the others. When setting up a show, it’s a good idea to display these pieces by themselves in separate spaces. If you don’t, you dilute their power, and the work that’s shown with them is usually ignored anyway.
If you have the chance to make an artist’s statement, keep it short. A strong concept that people can relate to will only be weakened by having a secondary concept next to it that isn’t as strong, or by descending into an explanation that’s too detailed. Give your viewers a chance to speculate…it encourages them to talk with other viewers about what profound concepts might be hidden beneath a simple statement.
About getting Joe Average interested in buying your work, I strongly and unpopularly disagree with Michael Corbin when he lists off the possibilities surrounding appeal to the uninitiated and maybe even uninterested, or exhibiting in shopping malls. It is possible, after a lot of effort, to make sales to anyone at any economic level except the very lowest. But the effort spent and the meager rewards received don’t pan out unless you’re very, very clever. It’s just a beautiful dream, really. And since your needs are real, your sales shouldn’t be something you just dream about. You may make thousands of calendars, but don’t produce a single painting tailored to the desires and means of Joe Average. In just about any business, people who spend very little are the biggest pains of all to deal with. I don’t think, even as much as we wish it were so, that Joe Average is ever going to be of much help to artists trying to make a living. Will what I say? I hope so, even if it’s only one little phrase that’s remembered and somehow becomes useful. Remember, my attic is pretty cluttered. There might be something up there worth keeping. And so…
It’s time to be open about my own past. Any artist who has reached any heights at all careerwise almost never tells anyone the details of how they got there because everyone’s painting the same picture. “I got here because I’m really very good, and in time, people just couldn’t help but notice me…” Bullshit like that is what the art world is built on.
A few things just happened to me, and opened my eyes in ways not possible without luck. I train apprentices that come to stay with me in Italy, and help me with my own projects, in exchange for me teaching them to carve marble. When I have exhibits, I bring these people with me, sometimes to France, sometimes to Greece, sometimes to Monaco. On one trip, I brought a life size Harlequin with me to the Cannes Film Festival, where it was shown. Whatever we did, my apprentice, at that time Nathan Wasserbauer, and I always sat to down to analyze it afterwards, and examine why something had been successful, or not. Input from an outsider who had watched the process was good for me, and being a close part of what had happened was good experience for them.
We didn’t sell the Harlequin. My logic in bringing it to Cannes had been flawed. I knew that some of the world’s richest people would all be concentrated in one place, and that I’d have a captive audience since the piece was at the event’s check-in. Harlequin has often been used as a symbol of theatre, and fit. I was on television with the mayor.
Let’s start with the television appearance, which I thought would be great PR. It was an interview, in French, mostly featuring me and not the piece. Few of the thousands of actors, producers, directors, or sponsors there spoke French, and they were in their hotels watching CNN, if they had any free time at all. The reason they were in Cannes was to make film deals, not to look at or buy sculpture. That’s it. The fish were all there, but they weren’t hungry, at least not for the bait I put in front of them.
We tend to dream about how great a situation is, and like in dreams, we don’t need to see more than a nose to know that a whole person is in front of us. In real life we have to look at all of the details, because something essential might not be visible right off the bat. What wasn’t visible to me as I thought about all the VIPs and the champagne was the reason they were there.
Harlequin
I packed that piece up, and as Michael Corbin suggests, put it in the lobby of a fancy hotel near my home, for an unlimited time. In seven or eight months it sold, and once more, my apprentice and I went over the details to see why. The hotel catered to high end businessmen, not tourists, and had repeat customers who always stayed there whenever they needed to be nearby. One of them was the president of an electrical components company, who was a collector. He went to the concierge, and asked if it was for sale. He sent a car down from Bergamo the next week to drive me up for a meeting, and I left that city with a check in my hand for a hundred and ten thousand dollars. Bragging rights? Ok. Which part of this story would best be left out? Am I so insecure that I have to tell you this? Maybe. Even if I know it’s going to push one of your buttons.
No time limit on the exhibit. Traffic from people with means, and time for them to relax at the end of the day. That made the difference between chique Ferrari ridden Cannes, and unknown little Fiat ridden Lido di Camaiore.
I will tell you now, that as an artist, I am a nobody, and always will be. This sale didn’t make any difference in my career even if hundreds of thousands of people, including Gorbaciov, have seen the piece each year, and a search of ‘wielawski’ brings up more results than one of ‘duchamp’. What does make a difference is the money. It enables me to produce more work of that scale and intense technique. The piece took me three and a half years to make, full time, and I was more than thirty thousand in the hole on credit cards by the time I finished it. The money makes a huge difference.
Another sale, and another why. In 1986 I met a group of architects through a friend in the marble industry, and they asked me to demonstrate my ability in figurative art, and then do a statue for the lobby of the Alabama Power Company. I demonstrated in clay, and then I did that statue, pretty well, I think, even though at the time I was an abstract artist. I got the job because I was introduced to the right people at the right time. They didn’t want me to get references for them for other statues I’d done for other companies, they just wanted me to prove I could do this one. With every public commission I’ve ever gotten, it’s the same. Nobody wants to see my BFA, or my other credentials. Lunch first, then a few pictures, and it’s a yes or a no as to whether it’s going to go. If they want a list of your credentials, as they often ask for in competitions, or for GSA proposals, it means your chances are terrible from the git go.
‘Electra’ gained me the interest of a stone company in Alabama that had just completed the Supreme Court building in Montgomery a few million dollars under budget, and they asked me to estimate the costs of two twelve foot marble statues for its entrance. Coached by them on what we reasonably could expect to get, I said, a hundred grand each, and the offer was accepted. More than a year later, without having gotten a deposit, I was told it was a no go. Alabama is poor, and spending two hundred thousand dollars on two statues might have created a scandal. They got another stone piece, the Ten Commandments, instead, for a lot less.
Some readers speak of how art sales strategies dominate this forum ‘ad nauseum’. Artists need as much information about this as they can get, to survive and make more work. It’s the one thing they didn’t teach me in Art school, the one thing that would have given me a ten year head start, and above all, practically the only thing we’ve all got in common. The energy you put into a day job saps the energy you put into your creations more than thinking too much about money does. Because I was taught to produce only abstract art by my teachers, and given low grades when I tried to do anything figurative, the chance to do the ‘Electra’ became a turning point in my artistic aesthetic, enabling me to do what I’d always dreamed of. Unfortunately, I’d always dreamed about it with enough elements missing from my vision that I’d never have gotten anywhere, without a little help from somebody else filling in the details. The job, the sale, changed everything, especially my work.
I have never received another job from the ‘Electra’ even if, and I don’t know this, the people in Birmingham love it to this day. A good rule to remember is, a big sale doesn’t mean your ship has come in. The next one’s going to be just as hard to come by, or harder. The best way to achieve success with your work, is to enlarge your group of contacts as much as you can, and stay in touch with them. The more people that know you and your work, in positions to do something about it, the more commissions and sales you’re going to get. That’s the bottom line. The biggest Hollywood myth is, someone’s going to discover you. It’s who you know, and how many of them you know. Nobody does much without first having had personal contact with you and your work. The better the work is, the easier it is to convince them to make a move without relying on dishonesty. You can walk into a thousand architects’ offices, and I guarantee you’re going to walk away with at least one commission from someone if your work’s any good. But don’t stop at six hundred fifty, and especially don’t stop if someone says ‘Wow!’.
‘Phil’ once commented that I’d sold out after he saw my work on Absolutearts. What is pictured on my page is the realized dream of a small town shade tree autobody man. I never had any grander ambitions. First, the wet sanding, then the flat planes of the doors, then the curves of the wheel arches, and when you’re really good, they might let you work on the hood, or spray. Now I get to work on the cylindrical forms of the fingers, and quitin’ time is whenever I want. Am I influenced by those bodyshop calendars, or by Michelangelo? You know, Mike never could do women all that well anyway…
ANDREW WIELAWSKI IS AN EX BODY MAN AND AVID ART COLLECTOR
