Working for both the Muse and the Market
"I'd like to make more money from my art," she said, and so we started talking about her career and her work over coffee. She is someone that has been complaining to me for years about her situation. She is, what she calls, a 'half-artist.' Half of her working time is spent in her studio making art; the other half of her work time is spent being a letter carrier. She hates being a letter carrier, but she needs the money and she is keenly aware of the value of the federal pension that she will receive when she retires. Still, she has been agonizing as long as I have known her about quitting the letter carrying and working full time on her art.
It is very clear to us both that she is 1) chronically unhappy, feeling unfulfilled; 2) a non-consumer – she lives modestly; and 3) convinced happiness lies in working full time on her art. She wants desperately to quit the letter carrying but she is frightened to death about doing it. "If I could just be sure I could sell more work," she says every year, over and over again, but over the years I have learned to let her rant and not to make suggestions on how to achieve her goal. I've stopped making suggestions because whenever I do, I meet resistance. The crux of her problem, to me, is her attitude. She wants my advice but she also sees me as a kind of "enemy;" she feels all my suggestions are too "commercial."
She dismisses my philosophy as "too crassly commercial" because I encourage her to make adjustments to her artistic practice that I believe would make her work far more marketable. She has been seeking my advice and support for many years and yet she has steadfastly refused to make any changes, even experimentally, to see if any of my suggestions might work. She frustrates me because I believe firmly that she could easily and significantly increase her income from her artistic practice.
My suggestions do not involve any changes to what she is currently doing. I am not telling her that her work has to change at all. She needs to create the art she makes in order to satisfy her creative soul. She is still experimenting and loving the creative process. She is a painter. What I do suggest is that she devote the time she currently puts into delivering mail into creating work for the marketplace – that is, creating work for which there is a proven market and creating it for specific retail outlets in her community.
She is totally resistant to that approach. "It lacks artistic integrity," she says. And I am thinking, "What's the problem?" I wonder why there is less integrity for an artist to create art for the marketplace than there is in the artist being a letter carrier. Her attitude frustrates me and has, as I have said, for many years.
She is not alone is this regard. When I do workshops for artists on pricing, marketing and effective sales techniques, I am frequently struck by a subtext in questions and comments that my approach to increasing sales is somehow "dirty." Many artists, it seems to me, see catering to the marketplace in an unfavourable light, yet what I am suggesting is never the abandonment of their current practice. All I suggest is that there be an expansion of output in order to include the production of more marketable products – products that can be very close to the work they are doing, but slightly tweaked in a way to greatly heighten the potential for sales (creating prints from paintings, for example, or working more to standard sizes of work on paper, or placing some designs on T-shirts instead of canvas). I seek solutions for artists that are comfortable and honourable, but for many artists as soon as I mention "the marketplace" I start to lose them.
"What can I do?" I asked a friend who teaches marketing at a local regional college. She had no solutions for me, but she did sympathize with me and she understood my frustration. "You are trying to make artists into entrepreneurs," she said, "and the best entrepreneurs are born not made." She also said that I was trying to get artists to think of themselves as manufacturers and small businesses and that my approach would never work because artists want to think of themselves as artists, not anything else. "But I am talking about attitude, not job title," I said. "I know," she said, "but watch your language and try to think of how you can make the changes you recommend more palatable."
It was great advice, and the answer came to me while I was visiting the Monet to Dali: Modern Masters exhibit from the Cleveland Museum of Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The era covered by this stunning exhibition reveals the birth of modernism – that is, it shows how artists of the time were moving from the classical subjects of Greek myths and religious subjects into painting life far more realistically and stylistically. We see in this show, the birth of Impressionism, Dadaism and Cubism.
I saw this exhibition as focusing on the time when artists stopped working so often to commission and instead started working more and more from their own voice and their need to express themselves. And then it hit me. I realized that most all the work that so moves me in the great collections of historical art was commissioned. In other words, for the marketplace! And I had my answer.
Now, when I am talking to artists about ways to increase their income from their artistic practice and they balk at what they consider working with too great a concern for the marketplace, I can tell them that all I am suggesting is a return, in part of their practice, to a form of art making that has a long and proud tradition. Nearly all renaissance art I have seen, I tell them, was made to commission for a lord, a bishop or a regent patron. Creating art for a buyer is not something to be ashamed of and an artist can do both – satisfy market demand part time; satisfy the soul part time.
ctyrell@shaw.ca
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