The Art of Selling Art – The Fine Balance of Creativity and Commerce

     I would like to attempt to address the delicate and confusing balance of money and art. As a disclaimer I would like to point out the fact that this is such a broad topic that I can only begin to scratch the surface by offering my personal observations.

     At first glance money and art seem to be at opposite sides of the spectrum. 

     A person who makes art for the sake of appealing to others is often respected less as an artist than someone who makes art for him or herself. This is contradictory to the popular moral belief in today’s society that selflessness trumps selfishness on the moral compass.

     “You can’t have art without money and you can’t make money without art.” When I first read this sentence I found it interesting but my preconditioning to the concepts of art for money made me immediately dismiss it and feel negatively towards it. Going back to it now I can start to see more truth in the statement.

     Money is representational of value. A laborer exchanges his value (time and energy) for money, which he can use to buy more value (property, food etc…) A shoemaker can’t walk into the grocery store and pay for his groceries with shoes. He trades his value (shoes) for the money, which the purchaser has exchanged for their value.  He can then use that money to trade it for groceries. This is a healthy democratic exchange of value for value.

     If your creativity can’t put food on the table or pay your rent you must turn in your art making time for moneymaking time. It’s the reality that most face unless they are one of the privileged few who are supported by a wealthy family or partner.  “Artists battle every day for grants, awards, famous collectors, positive reviews, scholarships, and publications all for the sake of building artwork value.”  If you don’t accept this aspect of the business then you can expect to be spending more time doing less fulfilling work to stay alive.

 I’d like to share something from the website www.artbusiness.com on the subject.

    “The main reason you go to art school is to learn to make art that’s good enough to sell. You believe that with a quality art education, you can make a living as an artist, like med students believe about med school and law students believe about law school. We all know how much money doctors and lawyers make, but we’re less clear on how much money artists make, not to mention what they have to do in order to make it.

     These days, a decent art education runs around $100,000. Art schools need lots of $100,000’s in order to stay in business. If prospective students had any idea how tough making a living as an artist is, how good they have to be to make those livings, and how hard art is to sell, art schools would get fewer $100,000’s than they do now. So art schools don’t talk about the survival aspects of being an artist, they offer precious little instruction in how to make enough money to survive, and worst of all, they appear to discourage their graduates from venturing outside the academic realm to learn survival techniques. Sure, they expose students to the formal gallery system and maybe show their art to local dealers and collectors, but that’s not nearly enough ammo for confronting the realities of the marketplace.

Some art schools dismiss the art business altogether by intimating that making art is pure while making money is not, making art is a “calling” while other professions are not (oh really?), that selling art is not only irrelevant, but it debases the experience of being an artist. One fact the schools rarely seem to mention, however, is that if you can’t make money making art, you have to stop making art. That’s not something the art schools have to worry about, though. They already have your money.

Until art schools offer courses and ongoing assistance in how to sell art, taught by qualified art business professionals, you’re going to have to get that education on your own. If you have trouble selling your art, you can learn how to sell it, you can find art business people to teach you, and most importantly, learning how to sell art does not diminish your credibility as an artist– it enhances it. Incidentally, if you have to pay a few bucks for an art business education, remember that it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what you paid for art school.”

    The key to being successfully creative is balance.  You must appeal to the masses to be free to create. This doesn’t mean you have to give up your creative integrity. Sure that’s one way. You could make nice decorative art that sells purely for the sake of making a buck but then what happens to your credibility as an artist and your joy for creation? A better way would be to accept the business side of making a living as an artist. Learn about business and marketing.  Instead of making art solely for others, make it for yourself but market it in a way so others will be drawn to it.  That way it’s a win-win situation. You’re making a living creating what you love and the more people you turn on to your work the more value you’re adding to it.

    The same is true for art galleries.  Being a new art gallery owner I have come to realize the full spectrum of galleries.  On one side we have decorative art galleries that cater mainly to wealthy tourists and the older generations, choosing their art based largely on aesthetics, and on the other we have institutional art galleries that are publicly funded which can give more artists the chance to show work that doesn’t necessarily have to be extremely marketable, choosing their art based largely on academic credentials.  Both of these have their purpose.  A balance we have been trying to strike with our art is to show work that is creative, thought provoking and inspiring as well as being marketable. Sure it would be great to show nothing but innovative installations all the time but at the end of the day I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent.

    A great example of an artist I have come to love to represent is Autumn Skye Morrison.  She is a young, amazing artist that fills my walls with her beautiful figurative paintings. Some pieces from her artist statement: 

     “The hunger to create gives me purpose. Since I can remember, it has been my constant and my passion……. The intent is to reveal a symbiotic relationship between artist, muse, and viewer. Texture, colour, and mixed media bring the images into our space, creating an interactive and sensory experience. Each encounter, an intimate rendezvous. I wish to portray spiritual essence in physical and realistic form, to reach out and move people beyond any barriers they may have.”

     When we had our gallery opening Skye was here to celebrate the occasion and talk about her work with our visitors. She made the 4-hour trip to be here, was one of the first to show up and the last to leave. She seems to have a great balance of creativity and seeing the value of actively marketing her work. She supplies us not only with originals but also giclees and prints so that people of every means can afford to have a piece of her work to appreciate for themselves.  Art should be accessible to all, from the masses to the elitists, from the poor the wealthy.  It’s good business practice to make this a reality.

From www.artbusiness.com:

“As for the galleries and agents you’re asking, they only show art they think they can sell. If they don’t think they can sell it, they don’t show it because if they can’t sell it, they go out of business. They’re not in business to figure out how to sell your art. You have to figure that out yourself, and once you do, try to convince them that if they take you on, the two of you can sell more art and generate more capital than either of you can generate on your own. But even that’s tough because dealers already have mechanisms in place for finding art they can sell. So (a) selling art is really hard and (b) making a living as an artist is even harder and (c) if you’re going to make a living as an artist, you have to sell your art at least as well as you can make it.”

“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” -Andy Warhol