Archive for the 'The Art Business' Category
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
Indy Star’s Jay Harvey and I do a Q&A about StutzArtSpace. Here’s an excerpt:
Q: How do you sustain positive interaction among artists?
A: Creating art is a pretty personal thing. There’s a big risk in how people accept your work, and how confident you feel about your work as you share it. We’re trying to take the whole community into consideration, and some are looking at it from their own needs. We need to figure out how we’re pursuing new things with the gallery, where we need to compromise and where to take a risk.
Posted in The Art Business | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
It’s summertime, which means that art festival season is underway. I can tell that I’m getting older. My body now takes a couple of days to recover after each weekend. One recent show in Chicago provided back to back eighteen hour days of low sales. Drive in on Friday evening. Get up at 5 a.m. to set up in the cold fog. Stand in the chill all day until the show closes at 10 p.m. Get a few hours of sleep and repeat. Tear down the next day at 9 p.m. and arrive back home in the middle of the night. It would have been alright if I had more sales. Sales have a way of warding off the chill and adding energy. Funny how that works. Is there a way to separate money from the appreciation of the experience? After a weekend like that, you spend a few days questioning. Why am I making pictures? Who is it for? What’s the point? I really should find an easier way to make money, like being a waiter.
Then there are the weekends where collectors show me pictures of my photographs hanging in their homes. Or when I get email from a framer complimenting a piece that their customer brought in. I get to be outside on breezy summer days spending hours talking to people about my work. That is really quite alright.
And, I get to have conversations like this. A stranger walks into my booth, looks at my work for 5 seconds and…
Stranger: I’m looking at your work because last weekend I was looking at work by this oriental artist. He had this picture of a bridge with people on it. I was fascinated because it seemed like he would have to be standing in the water to get that picture. I asked him, how were you standing in the water? He said no, there was a piece of land jutting out across from the bridge. I was standing on that land.
Me: I stand in the water for all my pictures.
Stranger: Oh. (walks away)
Posted in Images, The Art Business | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 21st, 2010
I wrote part 1 about two months ago. Better late than never, here are some of the photographers I met at FotoFest. I appreciated their work, insight and worthwhile company. Check them out:
Jessica Auer
Megan Cump
Stephen Gross
Amanda James
Mark Malloy
Dana Miller
Carolyn Monastra
Whitney Vosburgh
Posted in Misc, The Art Business | Comments Off
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Last week, I traveled to Houston, Texas to participate in the FotoFest Meeting Place portfolio review. I was assigned nineteen reviews over four days. Each review is a twenty minute one-on-one meeting with photo publishers, gallery owners and museum curators. I’ve talked to artists that work in other mediums and none of them knew of any similar events outside of photography. This was my first review event. After going, I’m still amazed that these types of gatherings exist.
The evening before the first day of reviews, I went to a welcome reception for the participants. I met a photographer that had recently participated Review LA, a well respected event in Los Angeles. He said that it went well, but he was nervous about FotoFest. I asked why, assuming that LA would have prepared him for what to expect here. Oh no, Fotofest is the “big one”, he replied. Oh, I said. Oh my, said the voice in my head.
Weeks before, I was torn on what images to bring. What size should the prints be? How many? Should I bring newer work or older work? I asked fellow photographers. I asked a couple of art dealers. They all had different opinions. I ended up bringing images from two projects, “Where the Fairies Are” and “Little Pieces All Together”. I brought more images than I would actually present, so I could do a final edit once I got there. I ended up showing about fifteen images from each series, printed at 12″x18″. The prints were collected in a black folio box. I also brought three 22″x33″ prints rolled in a tube.
The reviews take place in a hotel banquet room. The photographers wait outside until their session time and then all rush in together to find their reviewer among the forty-some tables in the room. I find my first reviewer, a gallery owner. We make introductions and I sit down. The room is loud with forty simultaneous conversations. The reviewer slowly flips through my images. She starts to make a comment, and I lean in to better hear what she’s saying. This is really wonderful work, she says. I’ll definitely be in touch. My shoulders relax a little and I smile.
Of course, not everyone was as enthusiastic. One reviewer slowly flipped through all my images, paused for several seconds and took a deep breath. He said, how do I put this…. this work you have, it is not art. Then it’s my turn for the deep breath. OK, I’ve come here to learn. He articulately explained why and then suggested several ways to make the work better. I listened. He was one of the more critical reviewers, but he may have also been one of the most useful.
I had high expectations for Meeting Place and it turned out even better than I expected. The preparation, time and expenses were well worth it. It’s hard to imagine a better way to get so much high quality feedback in a such a concentrated amount of time. After four days, I was exhausted. In between the reviews I chatted and shared work with the other photographers. In the evenings we went to some of the many FotoFest exhibits around town. Even without the reviews, meeting the other photographers and seeing the exhibits would have been worth the trip. I’ll be saying more about that in the next post.
Posted in The Art Business | 6 Comments »
Monday, May 25th, 2009
Business cards used to be convenient because they are sized to fit in a wallet. The problem is, everyone packs too many things into their wallets. When someone gives me a business card, it has to compete with stacks of receipts, grocery membership cards, lint and whatever else gets lost with all the little things in my pocket. When I get home, I empty my pockets and all that stuff ends up in a pile on top of my dresser. Eventually, I may go through them by stuffing them into an even bigger pile within a dresser drawer. The card is never seen again.
I haven’t had a traditional business card for a few years now. In its place, I have a postcard sized hand out. The 4″x6″ card has my contact information and a prominent image of my work. It’s large enough to not get lost in a handbag and can be noticed if filed in a folder. The image is large enough to be a mini version of my artwork, but small enough that people would be curious about buying a larger piece. People stick them on their refrigerators and tack them to bulletin boards.
I keep the cards fresh by creating a new design each year. Here are the last few.
2007
2008
I sent the newest version to the printer this morning. I changed the design to encourage action and interaction. People that like what I do feed into what I do which flows back out again. I like that.
2009
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Sunday, March 15th, 2009
In March, I await the news that will determine my year.
To understand March, we need to go back to January. At the beginning of each year, I spend a couple of weeks swimming in applications and planning my schedule through October. Most art fair applications are due by February. There’s a bit a pressure in having to plan the whole year all at once. If I miss something in those couple of weeks, I’ve missed it for the year. There’s a show that I’ve missed two years in a row because the deadline has already passed by the time I start planning.
Each application consists of 3 or 4 images of an artist’s work and an image of their display. Along with that goes an application fee, ranging from $20 to $40. I applied to about forty shows this year, so the fees add up. The applications then get reviewed by a jury that decides who gets to exhibit and who doesn’t. Some of the fairs will have a thousand applicants competing for one hundred spaces. Actually, not even one hundred spaces, because some of the artists from the previous year get invited back. If you’re one of the lucky ones that make it past the jury, there’s a booth fee that ranges from $200 to as high as $2000.
After the applications have been sent, it’s up to fate or something. You hope the jurors aren’t too bleary eyed after viewing 600 applications before yours. The responses start coming back in March. In March, I check my email a little more often than usual. I look for the mailman, flipping through envelopes for the latest acceptance or rejection letters. Who knows how each day will be, a celebration or a sigh? Most day’s there’s no response, just bills and junk mail.
After all that anticipation, here still hasn’t been any selling of art. If you’re accepted, you get the chance to sell art. That is, once you’ve created your latest series of work, edited down the images, printed, matted and framed, promoted the show, packed up the van and made it to the show site to setup and welcome the customers.
The process, when successful, is a series of victories of unknown merit. There is no top. With each step you may not even be getting anywhere more beneficial. And the higher you get, the more chances you have to fall. And yet each year I feel that my work is getting better and that I am getting farther. Or is it all just a delusion? I suppose the only sanity is to enjoy the journey.
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