Making It in the Art World

New Approaches to Galleries, Shows, and Raising Money

Brainard Carey

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781621533818
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Business

Learn how today's artists survive, exhibit, and earn money, without selling out! This book explains how to be a professional artist and new methods to define and realize what success means. Whether you're a beginner, a student, or a career artist looking to be in the best museum shows, this book provides ways of advancing your plans on any level. Making It in the Art World is an invaluable resource for artists at every stage, offering readers a plethora of strategies and helpful tips to plan and execute a successful artistic career. Topics include how to evaluate your own work, how to submit art, how to present work to the public, how to avoid distractions in the studio, and much more.

Workbook Section 1: The Contract with Yourself

After reading the introduction and first chapter, this is the work-book section that should be completed. If it is being taught in a class, this is the homework, the results of which are discussed in class.

If the reader is doing this alone, then please complete each section before moving on so you will have guiding markers for the process of proceeding in the art world professionally.

While success can, of course, not be guaranteed, I can tell you that if you follow the plan I have outlined here for you to fill in, you will be trying and doing all you can to be a professional. And when you look back on your life at ninety years old, you can say, “I tried everything possible,” as opposed to being too afraid or busy to try. At the very least, this workbook completed will give you a map that is an alternative route you can take to pursue a career in the arts.

Do You Want to Be a Professional Artist?

Today in the world of fine art sales at auctions, fairs, and galleries, you only need to be professional and persistent to have a chance to get in the door. In the following workbook pages, you will be taught how to do that with an end in mind, which is the exhibition and increased value of your art.

Written Exercise

Print your name here:

As of this moment, I commit to filling out this workbook and giving it a chance, assuming it will help my artistic life flourish financially and artistically and without compromising my aesthetics in any way. I am choosing a different path. I am choosing my own path, and as of this moment, I am making a contract with myself.

Check here if you agree to the above statement.

Sign your name here as a contract with yourself:

Here is the first written exercise. Think about it and then write very concisely.

If you put practicality aside for just a moment, dream a very large dream of what you would ideally like as an artist, with your career having gone in the direction you like. Imagine it is three or more years from now and everything has happened to you that you desire. What does that mean exactly? How much are you earning, where are you living, and all the details?

Have fun with this, but take your time.

Don’t write anything at this very moment. Pause a bit, reflect, lean back in your chair, and let your mind dream a bit. Again, put practicality aside for the moment and reach for something ideal.

Then fill out the following:

 

1. I will have reached my goal in years. (Take a guess, be optimistic!)

2. My goal consists of earning per year before taxes.

3. At that time, I will be living in (location).

4. Other residences at the time (location)

5. Other separate studios (location).

6. What I will sell to make the amount of money per year that I just projected.

    (List the number of works and what types and how they will add up to your total income.)

7. My studio practice will consist of the following:

    I will work for hours a day, days a week.

    I will have museum shows a year.

    I will have gallery exhibits a year.

8. I will be selling work in other ways, including (list other ways you might be making sales or commissions, or a second job that you want to have) the following:

In two sentences or less, write what other forms of income might be contributing to your yearly total income.

Chapter 1

Looking at Different Income Modes for
Artists and Building Self-Esteem

Perhaps you have had the experience of walking into a gallery or museum, and after seeing work on the walls that is clearly bad or at least of poor quality, you say to yourself, “My work is so much better, why are they getting $50,000 for that? And how did they get in a gallery?”

Those are the questions to explore, because the reason they are getting that much money, or at least asking for it, is not necessarily because the work is of high quality. The idea of objective value or objective quality is clearly slippery in the arts. There are no standards or review procedures the way there are for cars, for example. By reading enough reviews on the web, we can get a sense of a car or almost any product, but art is very different. Since we know this already, then the question of why some art in galleries is priced so high even though it may not be very good is the right question to ask, as well as why it is there in the first place. One answer is that it clearly has nothing to do with its quality! And since, as an artist, you have a sense of quality, then you know that there is truly something else at work.

The simplest answer is that a big part of what is going on is how art is talked about, presented, and, more importantly, written about. Similar to the marketing of other products in our lives, art, at most levels, has a story with it of some kind to help sell it. Exceptions to this are the very lowest ranges of work, such as the paintings for sale in IKEA and Wal-Mart that are mass-produced and printed on canvas, or some artwork that sells for under $100 on the streets of cities, in stores, and in galleries. Having said that, the market for the lowest-priced work is large, and you could make a career out of that as well. There are many factors that increase the value of art, and I will go over a few examples here. The artists I am writing about below represent new and old forms of entering the marketplace with your art.

Selling Out a High-Profile Gallery Show

One traditional model is a gallery show that sells out. A friend, Ellen Gallagher, is an example of this tactic. After being in the Whitney Biennial, Mary Boone asked her to have an exhibit. At that exhibit, huge paintings that were often eight by ten feet in size were all sold for about $10,000 each. That began her career and created value. But there were other factors. Ellen Gallagher had a story and a way of describing her work that appealed to art buyers and gallerists. Ellen Gallagher is biracial and has very dark skin. Her work looks minimal, and in the beginning, it looked a bit like Agnes Martin’s work from a distance, with fine lines often making a delicate grid that looked like lined paper.

How did she talk about her work, and how was it sold? In her work, there is a language of her own that she has embedded into the lines. If you look closely, you see eyes, lips, and other forms that look like doodles, and together, they make up the lines in her work. All those tiny images have meaning that is social and political in content. They are about the history of the African American experience, from minstrels to riffing on the clichés that are often derogatory. Her work has a wonderful aesthetic to it because from a distance you see this beautiful canvas of lines, and up close, you see a personal history about the black struggle in America. As an artist and human being, Ellen is very easy to talk to and is approachable. She speaks well, refers to historical examples easily and, as a black woman, is a representative of the achievements that African Americans have made in the United States in the visual arts.

In summary, what gave her work real value was a show with Mary Boone with low-priced paintings that sold and, more importantly, a way to discuss her work that revealed its inner workings. She was able to tell an engaging story with her work that taught all the viewers something about her experience as a biracial woman in America. That was a story that writers could easily write about and that gallerists could use to sell her work. While this is all marketing techniques, it should be mentioned that, at a distance, her work was very minimal and often calming in contrast to its close-up content. Her work is and was beautiful and delicate and yet had a more intellectually confronting aspect upon closer inspection. To many, this story may seem like winning the lottery, and it is true that luck played a role here, but also her story and images worked very well together, so that the system could easily consume and digest her work.

Damien Hirst–Style Marketing

Damien Hirst is another example of high-end marketing, and at the moment, he is one of Britain’s wealthiest artists. He began right out of college to stage shows of his own. Curating warehouse shows in available buildings with his own work, as well as the work of many friends, he began getting collectors to follow and buy his work.

His earliest collector was Charles Saatchi, who helped to propel many careers by buying artwork and getting his collection exhibited.

Hirst is one of the savviest artists in terms of business deals. In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s auction house and bypassing his long-standing gallerist. The auction exceeded all predictions, raising almost $200 million, breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst’s own record with $18 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with eighteen-carat gold horns and hooves preserved in formaldehyde. The idea of an artist bypassing his dealer and going straight to auction was unheard of, and totally new. He cut his dealer out of almost $100 million! Everyone doesn’t need or want to be Damien Hirst, but it is important to understand what he has done. Like other artists I will discuss, he is able to change the rules of the game a little bit, and that is something artists can do no matter where they are in their careers.

For the Love of God

Damien Hirst also created a now-famous work of a skull covered with diamonds called For the Love of God. He said it would be the most expensive artwork ever sold. He thought it would sell for about $100 million. In fact, it never did sell for $100 million, but he received tremendous worldwide press for saying he would try to sell it for that much. It is an age-old technique of announcing you are going to break a record of some kind. Donald Trump, the developer, has used a similar technique, saying he is about to build the tallest building in the world, and even if he doesn’t build it, he will get press attention for that claim.

Damien Hirst was using the same public relations model by claiming he would sell his diamond-encrusted skull for $100 million. In fact, he didn’t sell the skull for $100 million, but he had a very savvy backup plan. He put together a group of investors, of which he was one, and sold the work for $76 million to the group. Does that give you any idea? He is often criticized as a model of excess, and he may deserve that, but he is also offering new ways for living artists to make much more money off their work than anyone previously thought possible.

He has ushered in a new era where the marketing of the art is part of the art itself. When the diamond-encrusted skull was exhibited in London, the setup for viewing it was an artwork in itself. It was exhibited in a small gallery that had several security guards looking very ominous. The room the skull was in was almost completely dark, and there was a long line waiting to get in. Once you were in the gallery, you had a very short time to see the skull because you were moved through rather quickly.

The problem was that your eyes didn’t have enough time to adjust to the darkness in the room, so just as you were starting to see the skull on the way out, the angle of the light caused a spectrum of colors to come out of it, and then you were outside. It was an incredible scene. You could barely see it, and once you did, it was all colors and reflection, and you couldn’t make out too much. The end result was like a vision or a dream of some kind. The press loved this and so did the people lining the block to see it. If nothing else, Hirst is an example of how far you can go in being creative and caring for every aspect of your work, including his exhibition and how it is seen and perceived. He has opened the door for artists to be creative in similar ways. It is notable that his work is fetching such high prices that most museums cannot afford it. However, his ideas of being creative in your approach can apply to any artist.

Banksy

Banksy is also an artist from England who began as a graffiti artist. Because he decided to remain anonymous as the artist, it was a move that got him more and more press because everyone was so curious. He would make his own framed paintings and walk into museums and hang them on the wall with double-stick tape and leave. As an artist who wants to exhibit and show the world his work, he found a way. But he kept pushing the boundaries of what and how he could do it. Like graffiti artists before him, he plastered his images all over cities, and all illegally, of course.

The content of his work was often political, and that also got people’s attention. The press loves new photos, and he gave them plenty of photo opportunities by placing his images everywhere for them to see. He used stencils and spray paint so that he could make images quickly and move on.

His great achievement was to protect his anonymity fiercely. In a terrific marketing ploy, he remained anonymous and created a mystique about himself that way. Everyone saw his images around the city and wondered who he was. The more people asked, the less they found, and this only added to his notoriety. Then in 2005, Banksy had a show in an abandoned warehouse in Los Angeles, which he elaborately staged with the help of a curator he hired. He put a real elephant in the room that he hand-painted with nontoxic paint. This was the show that not only brought in a huge amount of people, but also press as well. Celebrities came to the show, bought work, and that was his big start. Not long after, his work was being sold at auction houses. Does this story sound familiar? In the tradition of Damien Hirst and others, he started by creating a show outside of a gallery, in a warehouse. The content was very different though; his work is antiestablishment, antigovernment, and anticapitalist. However, his ability to market himself to the capitalist system is very effective.

By painting his artwork all over city walls and streets, he is getting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising—for free! There are lots of books on how to market your work a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Workbook Section 1: The Contract with Yourself
• Chapter 1: Looking at Different Income Modes for Artists and Building Self-Esteem
• Workbook Section 2: Establishing Value
• Chapter 2: Getting Into The Whitney Biennial
• Workbook Section 3: Write A Sample Letter Now
• Chapter 3: Presentation Tools And Techniques For Artists
• Workbook Section 4: This Is You, On Art
• Chapter 4: Relationships In The Art World And How To Maintain Them
• Workbook Section 5: Making Friends
• Chapter 5: The Artist’ Fs Statement And The Critic
• Workbook Section 6: Writing Your Statement
• Chapter 6: Time Management Techniques
• Workbook Section 7: Scheduling Time
• Chapter 7: Generating Multiple Streams Of Income
• Workbook Section 8: The Vision Articulated
• Chapter 8: Getting A Solo Show At The Whitney Museum
• Workbook Section 9: Big Dreams
• Chapter 9: Working With Sponsors And Private Patrons
• Workbook Section 10: Communicating
• Chapter 10: Managing The Press
• Workbook Section 11: Your Press Release
• Chapter 11: How The Living Organize Their Estates
• Workbook Section 12: Call A Lawyer
• Chapter 12: Your Attitude
• Workbook Final Section: Your Plan
• Book From All Worth Press