The Belligerent and Inappropriate Thing about Selling Your Art

1. The Belligerent and Inappropriate Thing about Selling Your Art First of all, as someone who has worked with many creative as an art coach, and because being belligerent and inappropriate is part of that job, let me ask this somewhat belligerent and inappropriate question: Is your work yet good enough to sell? What I’m saying is, are you completely confident that your work as it stands can fetch a price that is worth all of the blood, sweat and tears of starting the endless and daunting task of online marketing – that task that people say is the only way to sell your art in the 21st century of modernity? Secondly, if your work is good enough to sell, and you have a couple of years supply of sellable art, are you seriously ready and willing to start a new career in marketing? Because in most cases I’ve seen, that is what you will end up doing. Once you have taken this blue pill, so to speak, and you start down this seemingly comfortable yet secretly rocky path, chances are you will look back one day and go, ‘why didn’t I just keep creating art instead of worrying about selling? I would have become a much better Artist and probably would be selling a lot more art.’

2. If you did go down this road in order to sell your art, and you are now feeling the pain of it, take a look at all those hours you spent doing something you didn’t like to try to get something you thought you wanted. Then you might ask yourself this question: is selling my art something that is really important to me? Is it more important than becoming a better Artist? Is it more important than spending my limited time in this life doing what I love? Paying the Bills ‘Yes,’ you might say, ‘but I have to pay the bills, don’t I?’ Well yes, you probably do have to pay the bills. So then you might ask yourself, ‘does spending hours everyday doing something egregious like self-art-marketing really going to make enough money to pay my bills?’ This is the hundred thousand dollar question, and it is what this blog post is mainly about. Let’s take an example of an historically famous Artist – before the days of online/internet anything, but still very relevant today. Take Brooklyn born Jean Michel Basquiat, who started out as an iconoclastic graffiti artist in NYC’s Lower East Side in the late 1970s. Then almost overnight he

3. became one of America’s most renowned contemporary painters. Did he do that by going against what he loved to do, hunkering down and putting in the marketing hours? No. He did that by going out into the world and doing what he loved, and by never letting his vision subside. The story has it that meeting Andy Warhol was his ticket to becoming such a sought after Artist. Would he have garnered the admiration and support of Warhol (who, rumor has it, was also his art coach) had he done what gallery experts might have recommended he do, and climb that Art success ladder rung by rung? Likely not. Instead, Basquiat took risks and continued to explore his artistic pursuits regardless of his money situation. To know more about: www.houseofflow.org