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10/05/2006: "Prosperity in the Print Market" by Barney Davey
For artists seeking success in the print market, there are many choices to be made. Such as should marketing be on a local, regional or national level? Should the artist self-publish or seek representation through an established publisher? Having wrestled those questions to a conclusion, the formula for success can be boiled down to:
- Product
- Promotion
- Persistence
- Public Perception
agree in advance these points are subjective and arguable. Still, any artist or publishers wishing to enjoy success in the print market can ill afford to ignore any of them. Some artists take umbrage at their work being described as product. I understand that. A piece of fine art is after all a product of their imagination, skill and creativity. But, the argument is semantical because if you don’t sell it, no one will ever see it. Art prints as a product merely means the artist has created something that appeals to buyers and a pipeline to supply the demand is in place.
Promotion for our purposes here encompasses lots of ground, including advertising, publicity, tradeshows, consumer shows, direct mail, Internet, sales people, gallery visits, alternative spaces and more. If an artist is talented and lucky enough to accomplish creating popular work, then she or he must also possess the ability to promote the product, or employ someone who can master the details therein.
These days, getting to market is changing for artists and for all media for that matter. A cogent look at how this is so is detailed in Chris Anderson’s manifesto on the Change This Web site. It is titled, The Rise and Fall of the Hit – The era of the blockbuster is so over. The niche is now king, and the entertainment industry—from music to movies to TV—will never be the same. You can read it at: http://www.changethis.com/pdf/26.01RiseFallHit.pdf.
Anderson explains why blockbuster hits in the music industry have become archaic. He also cites examples of how other media are suffering. For example, the country’s top-rated TV program in 2006, American Idol, with its 18% audience share would not have ranked in the Top Ten shows during the ‘70s. The examples for the music business are staggering. Twenty-one of the top 100 albums of all time were released in the years 1995 – 2000. The next five years through 2005 produced only two, Norah Jones’ Come Away with Me and Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Those works barely cracked the list coming in at number 79 and 91, respectively.
Bottom line is that technology is creating diversity. Consumers are responding by embracing previously underappreciated artists and genres in all sorts of media. Why that so many people can find exceptional art from all over the world on site such as Absolute Arts, is proof positive we no longer will accept, nor do we have to, being spoon fed mass media through a very small pipeline. We have our iPods jammed with thousands of tunes and we make playlists of the songs we enjoy hearing. Why then bother to listen to radio for hours just to hear a few fave tunes when we can deliver to ourselves our own eclectic mix.
Tivo and DVR are doing the same with television as HBO, Showtime, Blockbuster and NetFlix all brace for the coming ability to download full-length movies on a mass scale. I read a blog from an Army wife in Germany recently. She is downloading pay-for-view episodes of Gray’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives on her iPod to keep her in tune with American pop culture. Obviously, we want what we want when we want it how we want it and technology is now able better than ever to deliver on those demands. Daily newspaper readership is at an all-time low, along with weekly magazines.
So how does this all affect the art print business? Well, to start, technology is making it easier for artists to create their own prints and become their own publishers. We’ve come a long way from those first finicky IRIS printers and drum scanners. Just about anyone can afford to own a wide-format printer these days. I’m not advocating it for most, as I believe better results can be had from good professional printers. But, if you have enough geek in you, then you should not be afraid to set up your own print shop. Just be aware that the technology changes quickly and it’s likely far sooner than you have amortized the cost, you’ll be wishing you had waited a little longer when you see the newest iteration of printers hit the market.
I previously proposed that limiting editions should be passé. I still strongly advocate that position…more than ever now, in fact. I believe what mostly gets limited in limited editions is the income of the artist. Sure there are those industry stars that sell oodles of limited prints and gain lots of press along the way. But that’s not the reality for most artists whose careers are more likely to be in the shadows of these few stars. Don’t be discouraged, it’s possible to have a flourishing career without ever gaining fame. The same problems exist in all the arts. Think about how many talented actors, artists, musicians and so forth never are known nationally?
And, now with the advent of ever evolving print-on-demand solutions for fine art prints, how does it make sense to artificially limit the production? No other form of the arts limits production. Why should visual artists rely on an outdated marketing scheme that evolved of editions truly limited by production or costs that no longer hinder modern print artists who embrace digital technology.
Why should an artist be forced to stop selling a print that might have a shelf life of years, which might outlive her and pay her heirs? Is there another reason other than it is how it’s always been done it makes it easier for gallerists to sell their work? Come on, if the product is any good, it can sell all day long in open editions—and at top prices too! Sure, you might get 10% more for a limited edition, but what if you could have sold 400% more? Art is subjective and always will be worth what it’s worth. And, if it’s not that good as a product, it will never reach the “Sold Out” number anyway. So, what’s the point of limited edition digital prints today? Now that you can print to the size desired by the customer and give them what they want when they want it and how they want it, why wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t that help sell a few more prints too?
Technology has created a giant swing in how open edition art prints and posters are sold. Now www.art.com and www.allposters.com, (which owns art.com) command a huge percentage of art sold. Big box retailers from Target to Pier One, even Wal-Mart all have a hand in moving open edition prints. Technology in shipping has made massive quantities of cheap oil paintings from China readily available. I’ve blogged here before about the problems of counterfeiting and how it affects the art industry.
I digress, technology now makes it easier than ever for artists to promote their works in new ways and to find new niches for their work. They are not left to the hope that a publisher will like their work and that the publisher’s galleries will too. You can now create your art and look for new places, alternative spaces, to sell it. Or, as Chris Anderson puts it, “The future of business is selling less of more.” With the giclée, an artist can sell far fewer pieces than in an open edition/poster format and make more money.
It is common for an artist to make less than $1 for a poster sale at the wholesale publisher level. The same image sold in a coffee shop, restaurant, etc., can net an artist 200 times that income or more. Even sales on the Internet through sites like this one give artists an opportunity to sell their works at fair prices with fair markups.
Yet, no successful artist will get that way without persistence. Some get lucky to start with, some grind away for a long to make their luck, but none have ever had a great career in the print market without dogged persistence. Steven Covey aptly calls it, “Keeping the main thing the main thing.”
The right mixes of properly and persistently executed product and promotion will result in popular public perception and an ensuing successful print career. You can study the career of any successful artist in any field and you will find at the heart of each of them a burning desire to succeed, to be persistent to push for greater success. Sure, there are anomalies, J.D. Salinger comes to mind, but the preponderance makes the case for persistence.
As previously stated, art is subjective and public perception plays a huge part in the success of any artist’s career. How it is molded is by different in every case, but similarities do appear. They certainly include the items in the bulleted list above preceding public perception. In the case of museum bound art, the public perception is really in the hands of a small, but mighty group of tastemakers. A recent example of how this is true can be found in a story originally broadcast on ABC’s 20/20 newsmagazine.
John Stossel in a “Give Me a Break” segment titled, You Call This Art—Observers, Artists, Critics Rank Children’s Paintings with the Masters. You can read a transcript of it here: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/GiveMeABreak/story?id=563146&page=1. It shows how some very expensive modern abstract art and some children’s paintings confuse both everyday people and art critics with surprising results. It is eye-opening to read the transcript of the broadcast.
Is it some kind of mortal sin for an artist to paint what his collectors like to buy? Will it keep him from getting into art heaven if he does? Perhaps if art heaven consists of MOMA and other such institutions, then perhaps the answer is yes. I contend an artist can have it all if they manage their careers properly. Not to say a well managed career makes an artist a cinch for museum glory, but just that an artist can be seriously considered and still manage to make a nice living that includes a profitable print career in the mix.
Barney Davey
