Showing posts with label damien hirst. Show all posts
Showing posts with label damien hirst. Show all posts

Monday, October 27, 2014

extraneous work (viii): selling art, networking, social media, branding, marketing

by selling i do not only mean the actual sale of an artwork. i mean the work that is necessary to create appreciation for my art, in a broader sense. there are various ways to go about creating such appreciation in wide enough circles, and i would like to discuss some of these ways from my personal perspective.

one cannot expect to raise appreciation of one's art without taking some trouble to at least show it to one other person. in the most fortuituous case, this might start a snowballing effect, and the end of the year sees thousands of artistic pilgrims coming to your studio, begging for an artwork, any artwork, as long as it carries your signature... :-)

in reality, art appreciation usually works a little differently. i've had many individual art lovers be enthusiastic about my work, but i hardly sell enough. in order to make a living i should have much better access to people who are really looking for art to buy. and then, as with so much other endeavours in life, competition and all sorts of extraneous parameters come in. in the contemporary art world, the valuation and apppreciation is often most difficult, even for experts. there is a lot of hot air...extremely so even.

let's just take two quotes from germaine greer on damien hirst (she comments on robert hughes' criticism of damien hirst, in the guardian 2008)
What is touching about Hughes's despair is that he thinks that artists still make things. It's a long time since Hirst actually made an artwork with his own hands.
...
Hirst is quite frank about what he doesn't do. He doesn't paint his triumphantly vacuous spot paintings - the best spot paintings by Damien Hirst are those painted by Rachel Howard. His undeniable genius consists in getting people to buy them. Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative - revolutionary even.

damien hirst is the well-known extreme example of how contemporary art is more about marketing than about the art itself. but these mechanisms also impact on a small-time (at least economically speaking :-)) artist like myself. so, according to the experts, what should you do if you want to succeed as an artist - which is always interpreted in terms of selling your art, by the way-? the gist of it, as i perceive it, is as follows:
  • be recognizable: do something different, but don't change this: your own style
  • work on a branding strategy: brand yourself as an artist, brand your art (your own style)
  • work on your cv by participating in many events, show your art in many places, according to your branding strategy and pricing strategy, get your name noticed
  • network, and use your networks, look for endorsements from `art experts'
  • use all social media to draw attention to you and your work

some of this stuff is new (sometimes in its extreme form only), but other aspects already plagued artists in medieval times i think. strikingly, together with marketing dominating art, as a logical consequence of postmodern value confusion, (acclaimwise) successful contemporary art has officially lost connection with aesthetics. this actually leads to a shadow world: the world of `stuffy' traditional visual art values, in which `small-time' artists like myself operate.

another quote for you, from a very nice review of the book: seven days in the art world (review by adrien favell, book by sarah thornton).
It is perhaps this socially mobile dynamic in the book, that accounts for the fact that Thornton mostly dwells on success and fame in the art world, not its obverse—despite, in fact, the truth that this world is driven not by the stars who made it, but the also rans, in vast numbers, who get smashed trying. Only once do we get a glimpse of this other side of art: in a light and sensitive portrait of a day amongst slacker students at a California art school. The lockjaw of theory and conceptualism on contemporary art is graphically illustrated in the scorn these struggling and mostly hopeless young artists pour on notions that art has anything to do with “beauty” or “affect”. Everyone in the art world today talks this talk today, but it has to be noted how much a role these desperately old fashioned notions still play in motivating the big auction sales—something well observed by Don Thompson. But apart from the students, Thornton has much less to say about the lives and work of the legions of those who are always hopefully (or euphemistically) referred to “emerging” artists, trying to make the leap across the chasm from art school to Turner prize nomination. The book analyses the anxieties of the Turner prize nominees, but these are already “successful” artists; the everyday action in the art system is generally going on well below this, at a more intermediate level, in the mundane actions of dealers and artists to scratch out a career and living against its brute statistics of failure.

please read the review, you will notice that its author has far more stamina in writing about these things than i do. some people write really well, to the enjoyment of many. i hope that my writing, impatient as it may be, still contributes something too...since there are so few artists entering the fray of writing about art. i commented on this earlier, it is a bit comparable to having the discipline of complex surgery being dominated by non-surgeons.

Monday, September 28, 2009

inside the commercial zone: contemporary art bubble?

last night i saw the documentary the great contemporary art bubble (for a trailer see here on youtube by ben lewis.

lewis tells an interesting story, which clearly touches on many the same issues regarding money & art as this blog.

i'm not in a position to verify, understand or even judge all the financial mechanisms behind contemporary art. what nonetheless becomes clear is that the contemporary art world is obsessed with and dominated by money considerations.

moreover, the picture emerging from the documentary is clear enough:

* we are letting a very small number of people determine what supposedly is `the best' in contemporary art.
* these people include influential gallery holders and museum curators/directors
* another important subgroup are the rich investors and collectors, and the influential auction houses
* the contemporary art market runs in the billions of euros (109=billion)
* society pays along in various ways: by buying art for museums with public money, and through various tax deduction schemes
* there is little objective outside control over the art market
* there are few objective outside quality/reality checks as to whether `the best' in contemporary art is more than just a small group of people's temporary fancy combined with a small group of people's multimillions' worth of financial stakes.

$$$$$$$$

but now the real question: so what? the contemporary art market can hardly be as corrupt as the financial markets, and we couldn't even be bothered about them before the whole thing came crashing down. for any artist out there trying to create her/his own work (as contrasted to the damien hirsts who have studios filled with employees to produce `their' art) my advice would be:

just create, to the best of your ability. let the rich play, and be glad your work is not being treated like a stock commodity, but hangs instead in a normal living room, where it is loved by the people who bought it.

$$$$$$$$$

some interesting comments on the documentary can be found here, here (scroll down to `the mugrabis respond to my film') and here.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

art & money 3: robert hughes, damien hirst, mona lisa curse

so just a short note. it turns out i've missed a tv programme on the english channel 4 called `the mona lisa curse'.

really a shame i missed it, in the programme art critic robert hughes denounces the contemporary art scene in a clearcut way, it seems. i've tried to find videos on the web, to no avail.

a taste of the well-received programme can be found in a hughes' article in the guardian.

i'm uplifted by finding a prominent art critic sharing my views. still, the new clothes of the emperor keep on being admired and talked about...for instance by germaine greer in the same guardian. germaine really illustrates very aptly what i've been trying to say: `art in the 21st century isn't about making things, the real art is marketing'. or something similar (go read for yourself). and she's serious. the hirst auction is the artwork, according to germaine, not the stuff that was being auctioned.

well. sigh again. not a very deep work then, just rather lucrative. it's more like a pop tune for the rich. but who in their right mind is going to put britney spears in the same category as a certain old and dusty johann sebastian...although according to germaine we should do so, i believe? germaine?