Selling your art: Selling your story
Tiko Kerr is a very outgoing and a committed artist who is well known in Vancouver. Sadly, many years ago, be became infected with the HIV virus and over time, he became resistant to the many modern drugs that so effectively control the disease. We know this because he, and internationally renowned AIDS expert and head of BC's Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, Dr. Julio Montaner, successfully waged a very public fight to gain Tiko and several other HIV patients access to new experimental drugs that had not yet met Health Canada's testing standards and without which Tiko would die. Today, Tiko is thriving and on April 3rd, he opened a show called "The Lazarus Tree" at the Winsor Gallery in Vancouver.
A day or so before his show opened there was an extensive and highly uplifting story about him in the Vancouver Sun that included many images of the work in his show. The opening was packed, and within minutes of the posted opening time, roughly eighty percent of his works had "sold" dots on them. His opening felt to me like every artist's dream experience and the success of his show illustrates a valuable lesson about the marketing of art.
I am a writer and over the years I have often been taught, "Write what you know." We are all many stories – one long one (the story of our lives) and many, many short ones, parts of the whole. When artists create art rooted in their personal stories they can create very compelling work.
Tiko's show is a vivid manifestation of his emotionally evocative story; all his images in the show related to his renaissance. One piece is a self-portrait painted on a collage of pill bottles that once contained his life-saving medications. It is a powerful, potent piece of art. His story is an uplifting one with a happy ending, so it is easy to understand why people would want to own a piece of his work – it is strong and accomplished in its execution and in owning one of his pieces, his buyers become connected to a genuine and accomplished man and his amazing story. That is something many art buyers like very much – having a good story to tell about the work they buy.
Tiko's show and the incredible public response to his work reminded me of another artist with a different kind story. Janine is a Seattle-based artist who recently graduated from art school. I learned about her experience for a book I am writing about art marketing. Janine's father Rob, who had concerns about his daughter's career choice to become an artist, put pressure on her to be practical in her approach to her career so that her bills would be sure to be paid.
Rob is a successful advertising executive. He convinced Janine to undertake an experiment as part of her professional development when a unique opportunity presented itself. Following her Dad's suggestion, Janine listed the same painting on two charity art-auction websites. One site (Site A) had over 400 bids during the life of their online auction (for all the art in the virtual gallery); the other (Site B) had 500 bids. On Site A, Janine titled the piece "Le défunt" (The Departed) and wrote about 250 words about her work as being about the "personal loss" of her best friend. The title on Site B was "Étude en bleu" (Study in Blue). The description on Site B was 95 words about creating depth through a study in tone.
The highest bid on Site A was $650.00; the highest bid on Site B was $200.00. To Rob, this result proved something important to Janine. His conviction is that a commodity that involves image-based decision-making has to be "understood" by the buyer – the buyer has to be able to explain why it fits his/her self-image, and so art must be described. He felt the description on Site A as being about loss, made the painting relevant to everyone who has ever been left or suffered the loss of someone dear. The description of a study in tone is not comprehensible to most people.
In Janine's email describing her experience, she said that her father had analyzed the correlation of auction sales with descriptions to further his point about the impact of a good story or explanation on sales. "People always have a reason to buy" Janine quotes him as saying. "They either want a work of this dimension for a particular place, or of a certain colour to go with the site palette, because it enhances their self image or because they 'love' it." Because Janine always labeled her work with information about each piece's dimensions and media, he felt her greatest shortcoming was not including enough about its "meaning."
Rob's thesis is easy to accept. Everyone is a consumer of products; many of us buy things every day. As consumers we have expectations, anxiety, desire and need. When we are shopping for anything, we want to make the right choice and the knowledge of what is right comes either from our own experience or from obtained information. If we have a choice between two similar products, both of which we like and both sharing the same price, but one we know a lot about and the other we know nothing about, we will likely choose the one we know something about.
By writing effectively about your work as Janine learned to do or by explaining the relationship between your work and your life story as Tiko did, you add value to your work by turning your viewers into informed or engaged viewers who can then turn into customers. By enhancing their viewing experience, it can deepen their emotional reaction to your work thereby adding to their incentive to buy.
Another artist fighting a health challenge is Persimmon Blackridge whom many readers may know. She is in desperate circumstances. Please visit Donors Needed to learn about her need for a kidney donor.
ctyrell@shaw.ca
Opus Customer Service: