برچسب: Distraction

Let’s start with a warning. If
you are an influencer, thought leader, or you are a celebrity with an opinion
on stuff you really have no idea about, this ain’t going to be the most
comfortable of reads. Hey, you can read right?

A month or so ago I started
writing a blog post about how the cost of art supplies had increased, it was
going well apart from the rising costs for everything and a feeling of sadness
as I realised just how difficult it is to be an artist these days.  I even created the now mandatory list (because
lists are an internet thing) of cheaper alternatives that still accomplish the
same results for a lower cost and without compromising the quality. Today, that
article is a work in progress and as soon as I find that elusive thing we call
time, and I’m able to tick more things off some random internet list, I’ll get
around to finishing it off and because according to my fuel bill, we’re all
heading to economic Hell in a handcart real soon.

By the way, the four horsemen
of the apocalypse are now known as, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and Putin. I digress
but you at least now know where I’m heading with this.

I like to research every
article I write, that’s why some of my articles are long, I never want to just
give you one view of the world. The art supplies article was about 80% done when
I decided to change track after one particularly lengthy research session when
I stumbled across some advice online that I honestly think couldn’t have been
any worse had it have been a photocopy of a photocopy of the most pointless
advice in the history of ever.  It
mattered not, the author had absolutely nailed the SEO and that stuff really
matters apparently.

The Last Arcade by Mark Taylor – Available from Fine Art America and my Pixels store now!

The advice in question was
that every artist must have a successful YouTube channel, must
be present on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, must network at major
shows including such gems as Basel, (good luck getting an invite), and must leave
comments with links on every blog and forum post you can find. Try doing that
here and you’ll quickly realise that my spam filters are going to deal with it
before I even see it.

That’s the wrong advice
however you want to cut it and it sounds like a heap of work that will either
burn you out or burn everyone else out. As an artist who still believes that at
least some of your time in the profession should continue to be dedicated to the
noble act of creating art, I wouldn’t even begin to guess what compromises I
would need to make to fit that lot in. I’m exhausted with the little I do in
comparison, and that little I already do can easily consume 16-hours a day.

The internet isn’t all bad
advice, scams, propaganda, and NFTs, I absolutely adore well written websites
from artists sharing their musings that come from experience. I can relate to most
of those and many of them offer some real nuggets of advice that could only
come from someone who has lived at least a part of their life in the art world
but even then, someone who has the lived experience of being an artist might
not have the lived experience of also being the teacher.

So where should you turn to
for advice as an artist? There are plenty of artists and others who have the lived
experience of being inside the art world, you just have to look at that advice
and determine whether or not the advice they offer will work for you. Good
advice could see your business bloom, the bad advice or the advice that is only
applicable to businesses that are poles apart from yours, well, that could see
you fall over a cliff edge, or at best, forever run in circles which we’ll get
to a little later.

Spectrum by Mark Taylor

The way I run my business
probably wouldn’t work for someone else with a different audience. I think I
have always been careful to point this out throughout the hundreds of posts I
have written over the years but what I do hope my posts achieve, is to raise an
awareness that you can decide if something fits into your business delivery
model or not, and to make you think about the uniqueness of your own art and
business and more importantly, where you and it fits.

The real issue I have with
many of the generic business advice websites out there, some of which I am sure
are well intended,  is they just don’t
provide the answers that have a good fit with the business of art, make you
subscribe to their Patreon, or they lack any sort of context.

I can’t ever recall the last
time I sat down and drew a Venn diagram to demonstrate to my imaginary shareholders
how well I understood the lesson on Venn diagrams for diagrams sake. I tried
demonstrating this to my two dogs with one responding, he’s got my favourite
ball, make him give it back, – Yes, I know, but no one should think it’s odd to
have a full on conversation with two Shih-Tzu’s, they’re full of inspiration
and hugs but mostly the stubborn aloofness that only really small dogs can pull
off so well.

That said, there are plenty of
websites written by artists and others who have been in the industry for some
time and who really do get the nuances of the industry, they understand that
they are sharing their experiences rather than imparting the absolute rules of
art, or they have a track record within the sector and they go to great pains
to explain how they went about making changes that worked or didn’t work for
them.

There are fewer who can take
those experiences and present them as some kind of masterclass, they exist, but
they’re a rare breed who mostly have a really good grip on the business of art
and understand the difference between selling an artwork and selling a widget.
Anyone who says that selling art is no different to selling a widget has most
likely spent a little too much time puffing on a bong.

The only advice I would stand
by for any artist is to develop a sense of being able to take any information
that you get and to carefully consider how that advice might or might not help
your business. Even advice from the greatest living artist of all time might
not be suitable advice for your art business. Honestly, if Van Gogh were alive
today, I’d be a little dubious of listening to his top ten fortune 500
companies to back because y’all just know that Buzzfeed needed another list.

Cable Management by Mark Taylor – available now from my Pixels and Fine Art America stores!

I get it. The art world has
never been an easy career choice, sales can never be guaranteed, and because
there is no one size fits all master blue-print to follow we soak up all of the
information and advice that the internet can throw at us and then, at least for
a little while, we dabble with ways that we can better engage with our audience
in the vague hope that we stumble across a secret formula that will catapult us
quickly towards success as defined by the same con-fluencer who wrote the top
ten couscous recipes to make on a budget.

That very definition of
success is different for every artist, or at least it should be. There is no
bar, nor flag, nor anything etched in some biblical stone to suggest that an
artist must achieve some level of greatness proven only by a solid sales record
or because of some, in the know contact written in an address book. This is
what the gatekeepers would once have us believe we needed to do and we would
all dutifully chase the mythical unicorn we call ‘becoming discovered’ so that
the gatekeepers would allow us passage through the gallery doors.

When the internet met the art
world, the very barriers that would once prevent the majority of us from
pursuing our creative dreams would begin to ebb away. It was suddenly easier to
reach a global market than a local one and at the same time, the art world,
through this new found simplicity, became a little harder to navigate too.

The internet soon became the
promised land of opportunity, sales platforms, direct access to the masses, gave
us some shockingly bad advice for everything and it introduced the birth of the
click-hungry influencer. It’s little wonder that so many artists fail before
they even begin.

Along with the internet, the
accepted norm of the art world we once knew had now become disrupted where a
hive mind of twenty-something self-styled celebrity influencers collectively tried
to convince us that everything we thought we knew now needed to be relearned to
conform with the branding guidelines of their latest sponsor.

Cabled Up by Mark Taylor – Available now on a wide range of print mediums and products – this looks fabtastic on steel plate and acrylic sheets!

For those artists who look only
to the internet to solve all of their problems when they struggle to sell their
first work, the click-winning whims of the influencers and so-called thought
leaders (whatever they’re supposed to be) can make us believe that we always have
to follow entirely new paths. Become a YouTuber, become an affiliate marketer,
read the latest top twenty ways to sell more art, and they make us believe we
need to do this at the same time as being our best selves when simply being
human is perfectly okay.

Whatever the top twenty things
are that Guru Internet tells you to do in these constantly regenerated copy and
pasted generic lists, you absolutely don’t have to complicate the art world or the
business you conduct within it any more than it already is, not when there are
real artists and art world experts who frequently share their lived experiences
but who might not show up on the first page of Google.

I’ve chased those unicorns,
tried every novelty trick in the book, bought the T-Shirt, even designed one on
Zazzle, and after the best part of almost four decades in the business I’ve
come to one conclusion, I get way more sales from spending time with my tribe
instead of spending countless hours editing video that very few will watch, or
chasing whatever this weeks version of the unicorn of success is.

Heavily influenced by the
influencer, there’s an inherent risk that your creative process, your first
love, the very reason you are exploring the internet for new ideas, becomes
demoted to a secondary side hustle while you’re chasing the unicorns of sales, success,
and discovery.

Copying worthy hashtags,
repeatedly checking your notifications, or any number of hashtag relevant
things that have been suggested by the pre-teenage master of marketing currently
trending and presenting 10 minutes and 7 seconds of footage that just so
happens to align with the required length of time favoured by the algorithm.
All in an attempt to reach, well, we don’t quite know who, with, we don’t quite
know what. There’s rarely any specificity that we can apply to some of this
almost random advice, they tell us what to do but never quite get to the point
of telling us exactly how to do it.

Art, or what is now known as,
that thing which at one time really was your first love, has now become the
distraction that you no longer have time for. It has been replaced by the chase
and it’s a spiral. Let’s try this, okay that didn’t go well, so let’s try this
instead. Instead, how about let’s try something really simple.

Britain’s Best Bike – Although I never owned one which also makes me sad. You can order a print online from my stores.

No one can argue that the
traditional way we once sold art has changed. We no longer only have the option
of walking through a physical gallery door, we can walk through any number of
virtual ones, or even alternative physical ones. Galleries are no longer
exclusive to galleries, they can even be found in the local coffee shop.

No one can argue either that
video isn’t a thing, people consume everything differently in the internet age
and we’d be fools to think that they don’t. As artists, we need to respond to and
address these things but we also have to find a balance that allows us to find
our people while still having enough time to create whatever we create while
staying physically and mentally healthy, so we really shouldn’t be making it
more complicated than it already is.

Instead, we need to think of things
like the internet, and in this day and age, dare I say it, even gallery
representation, only as tools in a toolbox. They are incredibly useful tools if
they’re used in the right way at the right time, but should we always reach for
a screwdriver to crack a walnut?

The way people consume and
purchase art might have changed but the overarching principle that sells art is
just the same as it always was. Art sells when relationships are built, and it
is those relationships that turn people into buyers and buyers eventually into
collectors. That’s as true today as it always was despite the economic mess the
world is in, but you don’t have to become a slave to the online world to make
those connections.

If you are looking for any
kind of secret formula, I think it could be that you really do have to build
relationships with people, whether they’re buyers, gallery owners, or anyone
else who takes a second or two out of their lives to give you a love, like or
wow. Now this takes effort, and building relationships and maintaining
engagement with those who you build a relationship with, is frankly, hard work.
Hey, no one ever said art was easy.

Where art is sold might be
different today but the process of selling it continues to follow a very
traditional path, it really is all about the relationships that you can build.
Sure you can sell to casual buyers with little to no relationship, but this
will often be random, more often than not it’s unsustainable and those buyers
will quickly move on and that’s not great if you’re looking to build up a
collector base.

Despite what we’re told, the Holy
Grail for an artist should never be gallery representation, neither should it
be some kind of temporary YouTube celebrity status, it should be being able to
have a direct relationship with the buyer, on your terms, where you can
absolutely keep inviting that buyer back.

London Pride by Mark Taylor – a retro view of Britain that still mostly exists today – aside from the iconic Red Telephone Box!

The number of likes, loves,
wows, views, emoji’s, emotions, or even having a social post reach viral levels
of success, isn’t any guarantee that you will make a sale.  This is where frustration can creep into the
business of art, or rather, the lack of business from your art. There’s a real
risk that by chasing the trends we begin to rely too much on specific things
that are ultimately only single tools that should be used alongside everything
else in the toolbox.

We place so much effort into
creating a carefully crafted social post, a YouTube video, a podcast, or any
number of things that the influencers, advisors, or anyone with a passing
interest tell us we should do to raise our exposure, but unless we ask the
fundamental question of “who do we want our work to be exposed to”, any advice,
good, bad, or indifferent, is fruitless.

This is something I often
discuss with friends and the many new artists I get to work with when they tell
me they have tried everything they can think of to market their work and close
a sale. That chase often includes setting up a YouTube channel and investing
hours into yet another venture that requires as much effort to market as
selling the art itself. I’ve been there in the past and all too often what seems
like a good idea at the time can frequently turn out to be another major drain on
that elusive thing we call time.

The fundamental problem isn’t
that setting up a YouTube channel is completely wrong, it could well be the
very best strategy you can have, but unless you know exactly who the audience
is and what the audience wants, you are more likely to spend as much time
chasing the exposure unicorns to promote your YouTube channel as you’re already
spending chasing the other exposure unicorns to sell your work. That’s also the
one piece of advice that I wish I had listened to when I first stepped into my
career.

Numbers often lie in the art
world. At best it’s a world that’s not overly keen on being transparent, and
just because some artistic leaning influencer is telling you that you could be
earning ten thousand bucks a month with a YouTube channel or posting on social
media, doesn’t firstly, mean that you can, and secondly, doesn’t mean that they
are making that kind of bank either. Hypothetically, anything is possible, hey,
it’s even possible that the ten bucks of ad-revenue I made in the first three
years of this blog will get paid out for finally hitting the threshold.

Equally, it doesn’t mean you
can’t or shouldn’t, you could be one of the however few, in every one thousand
it is these days, who go on to find some kind of celebrity status funded by
masses of advertising revenue, but be warned, it’s exactly this chase for the
ad revenue that takes over the art, demoting your primary business to little
more than a hobby in the process.

Telephone Exchange by Mark Taylor – A retro inspired juxtapose of eighties communications – available from Fine Art America and my Pixels store!

There are lots of things that you
can do to raise awareness of your art without having to go down every rabbit
hole, and mostly, the things that you need to do are the things that centuries
of artists have found to work before. Sure, there will be modern things that
you can do to help you find your tribe on the way.

Fundamentally, the basic three
elements are always going to be the same three elements that every successful artist
has used before.

The Hook, as
in the message that you want to communicate with your art.

The Grind – how
you communicate the message your art is telling to your tribe.

Your Health – not
just your business health, your physical and mental health too. The endless
chase to find the unicorn can play havoc with all of these.

One thing you definitely don’t
need to do is to replace one set of complicated marketing efforts with another,
or worse, find you now have twice as many things to market. By all means, set
up a YouTube channel but be mindful that a YouTube channel is no different to
art when it comes to letting people know that it exists.

Ask any successful YouTuber
what the early days of finding viewers were like and they will tell you it was
a grind that involved plenty of creative marketing, a heap of learning about
algorithms, and at least some blind luck. There’s a real risk that any
promotion of your new channel could become nothing more than a doubling of your
existing effort to market your art with the same level of little reward but if
that’s where your tribe hang out, that’s kind of where you need to be.

If your strategy begins to
look at all of the tools available today simply as tools that can be used
either individually or in tandem with other tools, in the right place, in front
of the right audience, and at the right time, you are much more likely to start
seeing some success. If you mix those tools with tried and tested practices
that artists have relied on for years such as making sure that you build on the
relationships and engage with people when they engage with you, the chances of
success will exponentially rise.

Britain 1982 – The Protype – Home computer innovations of the 1980s – available from Fine Art America and my Pixels store!

From experience, it’s worth
being mindful that exposure doesn’t always equate to sales, or at least
immediate sales. If you have been in the business of creating art for any
length of time you might very well of heard that line where the client says, I
have no budget but I can pay you in great exposure. No, mostly they can’t. I
was probably the original case study in the art of being duped by these
charlatans who then go on to produce T-Shirts featuring your work.

Increasing your exposure has
to be a part of your business strategy, but it should never be a strategy
determined and set by others whose only interest is in obtaining free art.
Exposure is a slow burning candle that takes time to develop, and it needs to
targeted to the right audience where you can then deliver the right message,
not all at once, exposure needs room to grow over time and you need to be able
to sustain it.

No one else knows your
audience like you do and after a while, you will instinctively come to know
what messages resonate with your people, so one question to always ask of
others who promise to give you this exposure they talk of, is whether they also
understand the message you are trying to convey. The only time great exposure
via a third party might work is if the third party has a similar audience to
yours and they absolutely have the ability to influence that audience.

In short, it comes back to
that single question that answers so many things, you have to know exactly who
you are trying to reach with your marketing message, then you need to follow
that famous Aristotelian “triptych” – tell them what you are going to
tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.

We’re artists not marketing
professionals…

I’m not going to sugar coat
the next bit, but being an artist in the modern age means that you also have to
be everything else. Where you can’t find the spark to move into that place
where you need to be to wear the marketing hat, you might have to look towards
other options such as paying someone else to run that side of the business for
you because no matter what they say, art doesn’t sell itself.

This marketing thing is
challenging for any artist, and one thing that certainly struck me in the early
days of my career was just how overwhelming it could all be. When I started out
I was told I needed to network but no one told me who I needed to network with,
or how I needed to network with them. Turns out that just showing up cold at a
gallery with a portfolio and an expectation that they would immediately
represent me wasn’t an acceptable networking strategy in the art world. I distinctly
remember the advice I got from one prestigious gallerist who suggested that I
might need to be careful on the way out so that the door didn’t smack me in the
ass. He later represented me but that was three years later.

One of the things I did back
then whenever I hit such an obstacle, and something I regularly see new artists
fall into the trap of doing, is to go away and look for the next piece of
advice and then I would rinse and repeat until I either found something that
worked, or more often, something that landed firmly in my comfort zone. I later
realised that there’s really no such thing as progressing out of that comfort
zone if I would forever only look for excuses to remain within it.

None of this is easy to
master, no one is born a natural marketer, neither is anyone born a natural
artist, these things are learned and mastered and the things we do and the
experiences we collect influence how we learn and master those things over
time.

They often say it all comes
down to practice which in itself is a piece of advice that I have often
struggled with. If you want to learn to draw then the consensus of advice on
the internet often points to you protecting some time and drawing every day so
that you become better over time. What I really struggle with when hearing this
advice is how few people giving out that advice actually go on to tell you what
to draw, or the where, or the how and the when.

The advice is often simply,
draw every day. The problem is if you are drawing circles every day for a
month, at the end of the month you will be brilliant at drawing circles but not
very good at anything else. Advising someone to practice drawing, practice
their marketing skills, well, yes absolutely, these things can only ever be
truly mastered through doing them, but the how, the process, the why, those are
all important things to understand too.

Great British Phone Box by Mark Taylor – mostly today these are listed buildings where they survived being sold off by the Telecoms companies, some are local lending libraries, some accommodate defibrillators, others are just for show. Available from my Fine Art America and Pixels stores now!

The single best thing I ever
figured out, and in the pre-internet days before we even had dial-up and a free
America Online disc, was that you absolutely must figure out who you are
creating your art for. If the answer to that is everyone, as it sometimes is
with eager young artists, then you are doing art all wrong.

If you can work that out, the
reliance on generic advice will lessen, the non-generic advice from those in
the know will become infinitely more useful, and you will also discover the
answer to so many other burning questions such as, how do I price my work. Art,
or the business of art then becomes, dare I say it, a little easier.

The British Payphone – the centre of the dial was in itself an iconic image from the 80s and before! Also, available now!

When I started out in my art
career I made sure I found a mentor who had been involved in the art world
since, well, let’s say he remembered the last of the dinosaurs. But, here’s the
thing. I didn’t always take his advice. Sometimes, gut instinct can be your
very own inner influencer and you will instinctively know if something will
work for you and your vision of where you need to be, but it takes time to
trust your inner instinct.

Ultimately, your business and
any decisions you take fall well and truly under the heading they call, your responsibility.
The internet really has become a self-styled promised land of advice for everyone
and everything and it’s easy to get swept along in the latest marketing trends
and get rich quick shortcuts that are anything but, particularly if the advice
describes a solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem you already have. We
humans have this uncanny ability to always listen to what we want to hear but occasionally,
we need to hear what we need to hear, but hey, the internet has always favoured
emotion over logic.

The internet certainly has its
place, but unless any advice is actionable and is firmly rooted in already well
established art marketing practices, there could be very little benefit from
the additional chase that many of these trends suggest they will deliver.

This doesn’t mean that setting
up YouTube channels, having a presence on social media, or any number of other
modern day things are a complete waste of time, if that’s where your tribe
hangs out then of course it makes sense to do those things but because someone
tells you that MySpace is making a return for hipsters and this is where you
need to be, doesn’t mean you have to have a presence there.

Electric Dreams by Mark Taylor – 1982 was the year that created bedroom coders who made millions or nothing! Available now from my Fine Art America and Pixels stores!

Like so many other things in
life, running an art business is essentially a balancing act. You need to juggle
everything from creating your art to maintaining your health and you have to do
these things simultaneously. There seems to be quite the knack to this life
thing, extra points to those who figure it out.

If you feel you can find some
value in following the advice of someone who expresses themselves purely in the
internets vernacular, then by all means follow it. The art of marketing and
selling art could never be conveyed in a single blog post or a ten minute seven
second video, less so if it’s written by an influencer who turned a hobby into
work and transitioned their opinions into personal brands, and bear in mind
that even ‘tone deaf’ has been turned into a brand by more than a few of these
so called influencers.

As artists, we absolutely don’t
need to complicate the art world any more than it already is and as the
internet age matures even more, it’s likely that the future of the art world
for the majority of working artists will become even more complex to navigate.
That shouldn’t put anyone off from becoming an artist, as difficult as the
industry is, it also has a whole heap to give back to those who don’t
constantly chase the shortcuts.

Console Gamer by Mark Taylor – There was nothing quite like getting a new game cartridge and plugging it in, no massive day one updates, just fun, fun, fun!

They say that any blog post
that doesn’t also include a top ten list of things to tick off isn’t worth a
read, so for what it’s worth I have assembled one and added an eleventh point
to tick off as a bonus. Also, the things on this list are in no particular order
but by ticking each off, you might just finally get a little closer to closing
that elusive sale!

11… Apply
the human filter more frequently. If something screams too good to be true, it’s
usually too good to be true. Influencer marketing in the internet age can often
be mistaken for promises.

10… Don’t
try to sand down complex marketing with trending hashtags – they only ever
trend for a limited time, sometimes hours or minutes, art is forever right?

9… If you
are setting up a YouTube channel, set it up for the right reasons and find the
right audience. Never confuse attention for personal or business growth. Find
your tribe people!

8… Remember,
you don’t have to be hyper-online, face to face communication and relationship
building can bear way more fruit than chasing ad-revenue unicorns.

7… You
don’t need permission to paint. Remember that success can be fleeting
especially if you are seeking validation from online strangers.

6… Are
you looking for alternative income streams to eventually replace your art,
because they might offer more longer-term reward, because you want an audience,
because on paper it sounds way easier, or because you can provide a value add
to your work that has a fit. Make sure that any additional side hustles aren’t
going to be another endless chase for unicorns and that you are doing it for
the right reasons. Be honest about why you’re doing these things and your
honesty will provide you with a much clearer direction of travel.

5… Seek
out those with first-hand knowledge of the art world when you are looking for
advice rather than giving too much truck to the many generic articles written with
every business in mind, or at least copied and pasted from every other website.
Searching the internet for the gems isn’t something you can afford to be lazy about!

4… Stop
asking the questions that you already have, or need to find the answer to. Unless
you can answer who you make your work for, no one can give you any real sense
of, A) whether there is a market, B) How much you should charge for your work,
C) what art sells best. For what it’s worth, the answer to C is landscapes and
nudes, and if neither are in your wheelhouse, don’t sell out.

3… If you
can’t commit the same amount of effort/work/hours into the side hustle as you
put into your current art and marketing, you won’t make much headway. Unicorn
chasing side-hustles often require more than doing a little something on the
side!

2… Never
lose sight of the value that going old school can provide when it comes to
communicating with your tribe. Contrary to popular belief, a small ad in a
local newspaper can provide you with more exposure than a social media advert
to that hard to reach local population – as surprising as it seems in the
internet age, physical newspapers remain the preferred choice for many. Leaflet
drops can work too, they’re less spammy and local newspapers still love to
cover a good local business success story.

1… It’s
not a battle between becoming an influencer or the influenced. You can be your
own person, your own artist with your own style. In truth, that’s exactly how
art movements have been formed for centuries. The art world at every level
wants unique, well, unless the viewer has been influenced by the celebrity
influencer.

Fluid by Mark Taylor – an unusual return to abstract works, each grain was hand painted in the wood effect!

Yes, I know I disappeared for
a while, unfortunately I was struck down with that dreaded bug after avoiding
it since the very start, and my eighties work took on a whole new pace that I
have barely been able to keep up with. In between, I hopped on a cruise ship to
take up a vacation that had been cancelled annually for the past three years
and had a brilliant time sailing the Norwegian Fjords, visiting what was
perhaps the most expensive coffee house anywhere, thirty Euro’s for three
coffee’s and a bottle of water. Talk about buyers regret, the coffee wasn’t
that great.

For those of you who have
reached out to me to ask about the possibility of me creating a colouring book
of vintage technology, I am looking into it but who knew there were so many
different uncoated papers. If I do go down this route then of course I will
document the process and let you know if it really is as easy as they say it is
to self-publish these days!

Until next time, I hope you
all have a brilliant and creative time and you all keep safe and well!

Mark x