As we continue to prepare for a summer of festivals and outside shows with our creative projects, I am looking forward to hopefully be in places where we will actually start selling things!
Whereas it might seem natural to look at the past two years of having been more or less forced to be at home due to COVID restrictions as a positive for developing art and creativity, I have to admit that the idea of selling art online has failed pretty miserably.
Well... I should qualify that by saying that my own efforts to sell art have failed pretty miserably.
Signs of Spring
Which got me to thinking about one of the major challenges and sometime paradoxes of trying to be an artist who is actively trying to sell their work as well as just creating it.
There is a huge difference between "having items for sale" and actually "having sold" items.
This is something I frequently observed, back when I owned and managed an art and fine crafts gallery for a living. Simply hanging something up on the wall and saying "hello, this is for sale for $100!" doesn't necessarily mean anything until somebody actually looks at that and says "wow, I want that for $100!" and writes a check and takes the art home.
An "Acid Test," of Sorts...
In a sense, putting your work up for sale with the intention of trying to actually sell it is very different from simply looking at a piece of your work and thinking to yourself "this is worth X amount of dollars!"
It becomes a sort of "acid test" in which you get to discover the reality of whether the people who have looked at your work and patted your your back for years, while telling you how great you are, were just humoring you or do those kind words actually translate into the greater reality of life that makes an artist commercially successful.
Art can be a very funny business.
People... and Their Perceptions of the Art Process
Back when we had our first gallery, one of the underlying reasons we slowly ended up being a fine crafts gallery that focused primarily on blown glass art was that people would walk in, would admire was in the store, and blown glass out stood out as one of the very few items that nobody looked at and said "Oh, I took a crafts class once in school, so I can go home and make that!"
"Twin Towers"
As such, glass art remained an art format that had a certain mystique to it, and alchemy, as people's perception remained that you needed a special talent and specialized (expensive) equipment in order for it to come into being.
Conversely, pottery and ceramics — no matter how fine and beautifully executed it might be —turned out to be the most difficult thing to sell because people looked at it (and even though they recognized the beauty and skill involved) and had the perception that "oh, I took a pottery class once in high school, I should take up pottery again and make something like that."
At this point some of you might be reading these words and thinking "C'mon, people don't really say that," but I assure you they do.
We might be given to wonder why that actually happens.
I believe it's because in most people's minds art is actually a "luxury item" of sorts, which means they use every conceivable rationalization they can come up with to construct an argument as to why they should not buy it — not because they don't want it — but because there is some subtle way in which we feel we don't "deserve" it as long as we maybe have bills to pay and other things that we consider more essential that has to be bought first.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard the words "I absolutely LOVE it, but I just can't justify BUYING it" I'd probably be very wealthy and still in the gallery business!
Thanks for stopping by, and do please leave a comment if you feel inspired to do so!
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All images are our own, unless otherwise attributed
