Recently Alan Bamberger posted a poignant question on Facebook that left me pondering possible answers for several days. If you aren't familiar with Alan, he is a renowned art critic, author, and art consultant who also presents some great information and questions on Facebook.
The question at hand is, " why do people want to buy your art and what do they get from it"?
A simple question, but one that I had not given a great deal of thought to previously, and most of my musing was and is about the creation of art and how to sell my art.
One of the first things most marketers do before a product is ever put out for consumers is to ask the central question, "who is the target market"? They look for levels of education, income, geographic location, sexual orientation, gender, age, race, and many more factors. Compiling this data and using newer sophisticated neural marketing techniques they come up with a specific group of people that will purchase a certain product. There is a great deal of money, energy, and time invested in knowing who will buy a specific product. The marketers and media experts know why someone will buy and how they will feel when they buy it. All of this a byproduct from the free enterprise system that generally uses the inducement of fear as a motivating factor to get you purchase a product.
Is this ever done with art? I haven't encountered any of the above mentioned marketing techniques to sell art.
Artist are generally more concerned with creating art than with the sale of art. Creating art is realy a full time job in and of itself. Of course artist have to eat, buy paint, canvas, pay mortgages, and attend to the general financial responsibilities that most people do. There are the "hired guns" in the art world, the graphic artist, illustrators, muralist, and so fourth that create art on demand and get paid a certain fee for creating art, and are generally guided by someone else vision. Those of who are not "hired guns" and create art purely from our hearts, souls, and gelatinous gray matter, are compelled to create, and desire to have someone out there on this blue globe acquire our work in exchange for greenbacks.
Most of the time fine artist are creating from an inner calling, a need to share their humanity, spirit, and experiences, of which have to find and avenue in some physical medium like painting, sculpture, film, poetry, photography, novels, and many other mediums. As an artist it often feels like a strange compulsion of some silent, yet loud invisible source telling us what we must do and when to do it. Some say it is a curse to be artist because often creating art comes before good sense, though as we age this compulsive state of being generally becomes more rounded and better balanced.
What most of us want as artist is to have someone else sell and market our work so that we can focus on creating art.
Do we know why people buy our art?
Possible answers.
1) Acquiring art for investment, sort of like playing the stock market, buy low, sell high.
2) Desiring to impress other people and have them believe you are a cultured sort of person.
3) Artist often buy other artist works because they like to support their fellow comrades.
4) A love of human expression through the medium of art.
5) Must have something on the wall above the couch.
The answers are as many as there are stars in the galaxies, and I have yet to come up with any definitive answers, though all this musing has gotten me to contemplate what my target market might look like.
First, they must have disposable income.
Second, they probably have a general interest in modern art.
Third, more than often they know me and like me.
Fourth, they might believe that someday my art will be worth more than they paid for it.
Quite honestly, for all the musing I've done on the questions of selling I have very few answers, and hope that a good art marketing person will manifest in my life. Most of the art I have sold has been from art shows, friends, and a few on line sales, and the whys of their purchases remains a bit of a mystery to me.
I would love to hear from anyone reading this article as to what they think about the reason is that people buy art and what they get from purchasing it.
Saying For The Day: Create from you heart, be true to yourself, and embrace joy.
