“Preparing for feedback” is one of the three important parts you need to care about when having a feedback session (the other two are “creating agency” and “reviewing a feedback session”).
Feedback is most often given for a selection of works (chosen by you), and tends to consider your verbal contextualization – preparations for a feedback session should therefore at least include these two topics. There are various other things to consider:
Understand your intention: The better you understand your intention, the easier it will be to process the feedback’s result; do you care for the feedbacker to offer art historical contexts, to judge your progress since the last time you met, to acknowledge your improvements in craft, or are you essentially looking for praise? If you’re looking for feedback on specific issues, it makes sense to explicitly say so. If you want general feedback that relies on the feedbacker’s free associations, you might want to state this as well.
Be smart about the selection of work you present: Since feedback is most often given for a selection of works, it pays off to curate this selection wisely. Select works that have a high likelihood of letting the feedbacker grasp what you’re doing, in relation to the feedback that you’re looking for. Don’t go for quantity: select work that represents your current status quo, potentially including a tight selection of past work to visualize your progress and history.
Contextualize the presented work: Understand how to verbally introduce and contextualize the selected work, in order for the feedbacker to understand what you’re up to. Eventually your work should speak for itself – but in an apprenticeship phase (or when talking to someone from a different field), this often isn’t realistic. This also usually helps in building a relationship to the feedbacker, so over time they understand your personality and modes of expression increasingly better.
Try to have original works available: Nothing beats original works; even though professionals know that a reproduction can’t reach the original’s physicality, vibrance, volume or duration, discussing work on reproductions leads to all sorts of misunderstandings.
Understand the feedbacker and their preferences: Understand whom you’re asking for feedback by researching their aesthetic and semantic preferences – this will help you anticipate and understand their feedback, and can guide you when reviewing their advice, and how it might matter to you. It might even help you understand their character: are they benevolent, attentive, eloquent and confident – or insecure, passive-aggressive, sadistic, and weirdly incongruent?
Understand that researching someone’s work can lead to the wrong expectations: people can be more complex than their published work – or way more banal. That’s why it can pay off to ask colleagues about their experiences and assessment; ideally, you could ask a feedbacker upfront: “What art do you enjoy? What does art mean to you? What’s your aim when offering feedback? Do you believe in certain aesthetics to be better or worse than others? Do you care about the person behind the work you criticize? If so, do you feel responsible for how you make them feel?”
Expect implicit feedback: People love to offer advice. Since art raises endless questions (on quality, semantics, ideals etc), artists are bound to receive unsolicited feedback and work discussions at all sorts of events: on social media, at studio visits, at other people’s exhibition openings etc. Being prepared for explicit feedback sessions is one thing; it pays off to be prepared for implicit feedback rounds as well, since this can help you to properly present your work, and process what was said.
Ideal feedback would consider the person behind the work, their condition and progress. It would compare the current iteration to their previous work, while putting it into the proper art historical and societal contexts. It would be highly attentive and radically honest, and offer guidance through specific, actionable feedback (“Read up on the work of X”, “Look into the late works of Y”, “Experiment with wood, now that you focused on metal so much”, “Did you consider using oil instead of acrylics?”) – and would explain why the specific feedback is deemed important.
Ideal feedback would offer contextual criticism: “This doesn’t seem to work as you intended, potentially because you did X”. It wouldn’t speak in absolutes, and thus wouldn’t criticize works as “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong” – because these judgements only make sense in the context of specific quality ideals; instead of saying “I like how you did this”, ideal feedback would be drastically more specific: “Since you stated that your goal was to counter stereotype X, using this choice of color makes seems to work in your favor – it puts the piece in an unexpected context”.
Ideal feedback would care about both the artist and the state of art, while acknowledging that all opinions ultimately are subjective: yes, a feedbacker might have more knowledge about various fields (than the person who created the work), but that knowledge might not turn out to be relevant for the specific context or artwork – already because it always has to be the producing artist themselves who has to decide on their work’s quality ideals. Ideal feedback would judge without being judgemental. For all these reasons, ideal feedback is rare.
Safe Space Principles for Feedback
Ideal feedback would follow safe space principles, and would specifically
respect everyone and their creations, and be sensitive to individual, societal and cultural differences;
respect and acknowledge individual emotions;
use attentive, active listening that accepts silence in both feedbacker and artist (finished works are “allowed” to be able to speak for themselves);
use trustful confidentiality – both in one-on-one settings, as well as in group discussions (this can prevent participants from bringing guests unannounced, since the group’s trust matters more than the guest’s curiosity),
challenge the work (or the ideas behind it), not the artist who created it;
accept everything as having equal worth, even if not everyone can understand that worth: it would treat all perspectives as valid.
Processing Feedback
You can’t easily influence who talks to you about your work – if people are moved by it, they will do so even without asking whether it’s appropriate or whether you’re ready for it. Non-ideal feedback will happen. While it’s impossible to always anticipate the quality of feedback, it’s possible to judge exactly that after it happened. This enables you to sift through whatever information was given, to find what’s most valuable for you – enabling you to appropriate what has been said, and develop your own opinions about it. Your humbleness, sensitivity and self-worth are key to processing feedback effectively – to discard what’s irrelevant to you, without missing growth potentials.
Processing feedback represents a balancing act, since it connects the two universes: the feedbacker’s and the artist’s.
The feedbacker’s words rest on one side; they either discuss your work without having being asked by you; or have been contacted by you for specific reasons: your appreciation of their expertise, credibility, authority and/or success.
Your own universe on the other side, which got manifested into an artwork, brimming with expectation, mistakes, and hopes for future works yet uncreated.
Being an Expert
You might lack the expertise, credibility, authority and success of the feedbacker, but are usually an expert in your own life and history. While they might be experts in the field in which you want to improve and progress, they probably aren’t experts in your life, and of your work. They often don’t know why you did what you did. They might not even be interested, but rather care to focus on the medium’s history, and how your work deviates weirdly and wrongly from it. Their cultural, societal, gender- or generation-based background might differ too much to understand the potential of your work.
Depending on their subjective tastes they will applaud, make fun of, or even disregard your work.
Depending on their character and humanity, they might even disregard you, or attack you instead of the artwork (“ad hominem attack”). They might choose graceful or derogatory remarks.
An expert interested in offering ideal feedback will not simply talk positively or negatively about your work, neither of which helps you: if you came for facts and advice, someone’s praise or disapproval doesn’t really help a lot: it’s too obviously subjective, and not at all actionable; instead, it can be seen as lazy way of telling someone off. Someone actually invested in your growth would instead offer various references (art historical, political, semantic, aesthetic, etc) and actionable strategies.
All of this shows that ideal feedback is hard to find. To navigate feedback satisfyingly nevertheless, consider the following chapter.
Artists constantly receive feedback for their work, entirely independently of whether they’re looking for it. Feedback comes in many forms and attitudes, and for all sorts of reasons. It’s most often thought about as a tool to increase insights into one’s work practice: a feedbacker offers thoughts about your creation. Depending on the feedbacker’s knowledge about art history, politics, symbols, metaphors etc, your understanding about your work might increase – which ideally leads to you creating stronger, deeper, more focussed and simply “better” work.
The challenge with feedback lies in the multiplicity of art: because art isn’t monolithic, there can be no clear definitions of what creates a “good” artwork. Resultantly, the feedbacker’s knowledge might simply not be relevant to your aesthetics or vision. In the worst case, their opinions and preferences don’t match yours at all. In case of the feedbacker being in a position of power (eg. an art school teacher), you (a student) might be strongly inclined to favor their comments over your own opinion. This can also happen if you feel insecure about your creation: you might be on to something, but might not yet be strong enough to see or believe in it.
That’s why feedback benefits from people who are radically open-minded, and transparent about their intentions; an ideal feedbacker won’t have their advice be formed by their specific aesthetic and semantic opinions and preferences, but will be able to offer meta advice: if that is the direction you want to head towards, this might be able to get you there. This includes knowledge about the creator’s progress: the better a feedbacker understands the creator’s intentions and history, the better they might be able to offer advice on how to improve their work, according to its (and not theirs) inner logic – aesthetics, semantics, materials, etc. In contemporary art, the worst feedback is one that aims towards specific aesthetical goals, and wants to transfer them to a creator.
The ideal feedback setting is similar to a therapeutic safe space: both parties can rely on openness and transparency, aimed to increase enlightenment.
Intentions
Feedback benefits from understanding the intentions of both the feedbacker and the person seeking feedback:
Ideally, a feedbacker would want to help you get deeper into your work, and would be able to do so in a respectful way that considers you, your condition and previous progress. Realistically though, feedbacker’s can have all sorts of intentions; some feedback isn’t given to help but to vent (maybe your work rubbed someone the wrong way). Some feedback is given in order for you to adapt someone else’s artistic principles. Understanding the feedbacker’s intentions will help you in judging whether it might really help you in deepening your own way, and strengthening your voice.
Ideally, a person receiving feedback would want to deepen their understanding about their work; to expand knowledge of its semantics, get insights about the history of the chosen aesthetics, etc. In reality, some people look for feedback simply because they want the feedbacker’s attention and appreciation; they might not actually be interested in growth.
Implicit and explicit Feedback
Feedback can happen explicitly or implicitly:
Explicit feedback is defined by a clear setting, enabling everyone to understand the context in which opinions are given (eg. at portfolio reviews, when talking to a curator, …).
Implicit feedback on the other hand happens without this kind of framing (eg. during a studio visit by a peer, or a chat over coffee). Since it usually happens without introduction, implicit feedback often emerges unexpected and unwanted, and can be harder to spot and digest – especially if it’s transgressive.
In educational settings (art schools, workshops, etc), feedback is used as a major tool to convey insights, and thus to help you learn about yourself and your work. But even in institutions, feedback isn’t always explicit (as in scheduled feedback sessions): it can appear in casual comments by colleagues, assistants, teachers or curators, and isn’t always based on the feedbacker’s preceding analyses or self-inquires. Quite often, feedback is given seemingly as instantaneously as the artwork hits the feedbacker’s nerves. Since implicit feedback surrounds artists a lot, it is good practice to look out for this sort of “impromptu feedback”, and to increase once competency in recognizing it. Some people can register and analyze new work extremely quickly and sensitively – but most don’t have this capacity.
Feedback and Transgression
Feedback doesn’t simply include the potential for transgressions; in extreme cases (depending on the power dynamics, individual sensitivity and empathy) the act of offering feedback can itself be transgressive, especially if it is “offered” in ways that are too offensive to you. Even though often unrealistic, it’s healthy to expect the upholding of safe space principles for any kind feedback, independently of whether it’s given in explicit or implicit settings – whether it’s a family member suddenly discussing your work on the phone (when you didn’t expect it), or your professor during a scheduled feedback session. Feedback should only happen when you are ready for it – a safe space can’t exist if there isn’t knowledge about mutual control and respect. When someone pushes to give you feedback, it can be smart to understand them as an aggressor, independently of their position and power.
Emotional Attachment
Technically speaking, feedback returns information to the source of a signal: your work can be seen as the signal, and you as its source. As creator, you’re probably attached to your creations (your “signals”): you had specific reasons that led to their creation, and likely had to overcome obstacles during the creation process. This might have required all sorts of experiments and frustrations, but might also have shown potentials for further investigations. You might feel unsure about some of your choices, and happy about others. Creating an artwork is a complex, and often unstable process: quality ideals need to be established, knowledge of craft/materials/processes needs to be increased: at first, every artwork is a bold statement – potentially bolder than you. That’s why feedback situations are inherently challenging: your work, and thus your ideas, your intellect, your emotionality, your whole self, is put under the spotlight. Feedback can put you at a crossroads: do you believe in yourself and your work, or in the feedback that might want to see your work transformed?
A Moebius strip without clear distinction between outside an inside
Processing Feedback
Processing feedback requires you to balance trust in yourself with trust in someone else:
Purely believing in yourself likely results in ignoring the feedbacker’s potential valuable advice.
Purely believing in the feedbacker’s words risks disabling your voice – the sole reason why you initially wanted to make art.
How you navigate these topics is both deeply personal and philosophical, and always has tremendous consequences for your work. That’s why it can be a good practice to actually ask the feedbacker: Should I really listen to you? What if I don’t? Couldn’t worthwhile work emerge from pursuing my voice further?
Contemporary art thrives on diversity – your voice might be a relevant addition to it. For this reason, teaching and discussing contemporary art practices often differs from teaching traditional crafts, where quality ideals are predefined and often static. In the arts, quality is an extremely dynamic and personal attribute – it’s a multitude. Feedback and self-esteem are closely related. Feedback and luck are closely related as well: if you’re insecure about your work, and get to be a student of a highly successful, yet sadistic artist-teacher, a lot of your voice and ideas, your hopes and dreams can be erased or diminished before they ever got to exist.
Judging Feedback
Feedback can result in you feeling small and irrelevant – or praise your work to the heavens. Neither helps you to grow. To transcend this, establish a proactive attitude: judge what was offered.
Judge feedback according to its sensitivity to (and knowledge of) your goals, its sensitivity to the work you offered. Judge the feedbacker’s sensitivity towards you, your history and progress. Although feedback seems to imply the transfer of authority (from you to the feedbacker), this must never happen: as the work’s creator, you depend on your sensitivity towards (and authority over) it. Feedback should help you get closer to your ideals, not to subvert or change them.
Feedback can even be challenging when it’s positive: you might want ways to increase your game, but only received praise; understand that good feedback will always offer ways to increase your knowledge. Judge feedback according to the art historical references you received, and the amount of new information you can process.
Feedback and Autonomy
Some feedback settings will feel as if your work gets judged, stripping you of autonomy over it. Never lose this autonomy: judge the feedbacker and their advice’s quality and empathy, and ultimately work on setting up a network of trusted feedbackers: people on whose knowledge and advice you can rely on, and who care about safe space principles. Pursuing this search puts you in control (of the search, and ultimately of the setting and participants), even though you might still feel small and irrelevant.
In its broadest term, networking is about forming and maintaining relationships that are mutually beneficial – about building rapport. These benefits can have all sorts of characteristics, and depend on your personal interests and value systems: you might care about deep conversations and real emotional connections, or focus on the generation of sales and the expansion of your economic support network. Most frequently, art networking is used to increase one’s possibilities by increasing one’s visibilities, with each feeding the other.
When networking, your main currency is yourself – a self that features at least two sides: internal and external attributions.
Internal attributions are those that you can influence: the attention you give, your curiosity and sensitivity, as well as your awareness of other people’s intentions (the psychological term is “self perception”).
External attributions are those that others have about you: how people see you (your standing, alleged fame and importance), whether they appreciate your work, or whether they want to be associated with you (the psychological term is “social perception”) .
Networking is about how you interact with the world, and how the world interacts with you – it’s always a dialog. Although you might pursue specific goals when networking, the outcome of interacting with the world often can’t be anticipated: your intention of talking to Person A, might instead lead to an introduction to and collaboration with Person B. A random encounter on the street (with someone you first met at an opening the night before) leads to a studio visit, and sets the stage for an exhibition or sale: a huge part of networking seems to be random – the better you can surf the waves of randomness, the more unexpectedly exciting the results can be.
Being out there
The prerequisite for networking is to engage with the world – specifically by engaging with other people. You can’t network while producing your work, reading a book or writing an artist statement. Instead, networking requires you to encounter people, which can happen both in the physical and the virtual world: exhibition openings and other art events are just as relevant as social media channels: meaningful connections can emerge anywhere where people connect.
Although networking is a tool to foster any sort of relationship, your relationships ideally serve a purpose – the most common of which is to find support for your cause. Artists obviously have endless amounts of causes: exhibiting or selling their artworks, finding gallery representation or collaborators, renting a studio, commissioning a text about their work, etc. Of course, your causes aren’t inherently interesting to others; a naive way to approach the world would expect others to be interested in you and your work, and thus to be eager to help you – ideally for free. A less naive approach is to expect others to not really know about you, but to sometimes be curious to help you (if the payment or reciprocity is right). The most realistic approach is to understand that support always depends on a variety of factors, including mutual knowledge and liking, individual curiosities, time schedules and economic situations. Networking can’t influence all of these factors – but it can foster a deeper commitment and willingness to help each other, and thus be the basis for collaborations.
Networking vs. making friends
Since networking is based on establishing meaningful connections for mutual support, it’s inherently similar to friendship – after all, what are friends for if not to support each other. The distance between the two can be hard to spot: the strongest career supporters in your network can be the result of a friendship going back to your childhood days, just as your today’s collaborators can become your tomorrow’s best friends. While networking aims to establish business connections, the individuals behind these connections might end up being closer to you than your actual friends; their awareness and curiosity, mixed with the time spent in a collaborative work setting can often result in a deeper connection than some friendships offer. Networking collaborations can emerge just as organic as friendships – and can obviously turn into them. There are benefits to thinking of other people as potential partners-in-crimes, instead of as further nodes in your network; your network might be that much stronger as a result.
Each interaction with the world includes a networking opportunity: posting your artworks or thoughts on social media, attending industry events, organizing an exhibition. This isn’t limited to your professional field, but can include situations happening in your personal life; you can meet future collaborators when commuting, going out or pursuing your hobbies. Where artists traditionally have bad work-life-balances, this can further weaken the borders between their work and personal lives; if opportunities lie everywhere, when do you stop looking for them? When does your working day end?
The open-endedness of networking
Sustainable networking doesn’t just require reciprocity, but also mindfulness: you need to know when to stop. Yes, the art world is fluid, with people frequently changing jobs and functions; in theory, everyone can always help you further: artistically, emotionally, economically, structurally – just as you can (in theory) always help improve someone else’s situation. Yet trying to win everyone’s attention will only result in ambiguity and a lack of direction. The world offers endless possibilities, but you can’t pursue them all. There needs to be focus to your efforts. You need to establish and maintain a proper balance between your work and networking efforts: mindfully increasing your network allows you to foster a strong circle of collaborators – instead of loose connections without depth or commitment.
Challenges of art networking
While networking is a standard interaction in most fields, artists can have ambiguous feelings about it. In an industry based on the alleged purity of the artist’s idealism, advancing one’s career can be seen as impure. The reality is that artists either have preexisting networks to rely on (through family connections), or need to build them on their own; without it, their work’s visibility will be severely limited.
Working towards a goal builds up momentum: the closer you get, the more worthwhile your efforts can feel. This momentum can get scattered by reaching a finishing line; instead of stabilizing your work rhythm and thus your artistic identity further (knowledge of progress, of having manifested something), it can lead to parts of your identity crumbling, to be replaced by a vacuum: who are you? Why are you?
The deeper your identification with goals and challenges, the harder their absence can hit you: having had an exhibition opening, having finished a difficult piece, having published a catalog of your work – accomplishments can generate a lack of structure, direction and purpose. A limbo. You accumulated knowledge, skill and will, but then seem to have lost the platform to invest it in.
Processes and goals
Since goals are usually singular, temporary events, it makes sense to rather focus on what accompanies you more permanently: the processes that lead to them. Habitualizing these turn them into your life’s permanent backbone: being in the studio on time, preparing the next work, putting in a certain number of hours every day. Goals can be harnessed for increased productivity and motivation, at the risk of experiencing a motivational low upon their attainment. By analyzing your personal experiences with processes and goals, you can establish a balance that benefits from using both.
Forming habits
The long-term solution here is to establish habits, which can start today: habits are formed by repeating your actions consistently, based on specific triggers: once you finished your cup of tea, you put it in the sink. Once you get out of bed, you make the bed. This works for every part of your life, including your artistic practice: once you brushed your teeth, you get dressed; once you got dressed, you leave for the studio; once you entered the studio, you turn off your phone’s notifications and put it aside; once you disabled your phone, you sit down to work for an hour. The banality of these actions, combined by stacking them together (“habit stacking”), results in a powerful approach to life (and work): since you get used to these sequences, you question them less. Since you question them less, you can focus on your work more efficiently.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri series, 18th century
Apart from your habits, there are a few further strategies to consider:
Establish reliable habits: To consistently come up with new ideas is your perpetual reality as an artist: let it become your routine. Instead of defining yourself through your achievements and goals, consider establishing processes that will become habitual – reducing the impact of reaching your goals. Since quality is the consequence of quantity (of the amount of time you invest), this approach can result in your work’s quality to increase as well.
Work on multiple pieces/projects in parallel: Experiment with working on parallel sets of production processes – with the intention of them not being finished at the same time (if they would, this might exacerbate the whole problem of losing momentum). Note that finishing a piece/project might require you to temporarily focus it exclusively. Experiment with the various ways of working in parallel to find out which work for you (staying within one medium; touching various media but sticking to an overarching topic; working on multiple independent projects or with different collaborators, etc).
Prepone preproduction: Instead of focussing on projects consecutively, experiment with preponing the preproduction phase of upcoming projects right into your current phase – even if those later projects are utopian and unconfirmed. This lets you think about them without actual pressure, which can be both enriching and empowering; once you do focus on them, you are already somewhat familiar with their parameters. This can result in a more soothing gradient into new domains, which can come in handy once the current project is done.
Generate a list of potential futures: Establish and maintain a list of potential research areas and future projects. Let this list include both full-blown projects (a work series, a collaboration, a body of work for an exhibition) as well as smaller fragments of investigation (researching specific tools, writing about your work, deepening your understanding about a previously untouched work aesthetic). Let this be your timeline of potential futures: you won’t ever be able to dive into all of them, but having them available in a rough overview will help you see the many areas of potential investigation. This will return agency to you, enabling you to look at these list of utopias, and engage with them.
Setting up process-based work habits will influence your attitude toward goals, and lets you use the best of “both worlds”: the streamlined reliability of habits as your structural backbone, mixed with the short motivational overdrive and bursts of peak performance offered by goals. Used adequately and sensitively, this can minimize your loss of momentum upon reaching goals.
A lot of emerging artists eventually abandon their art practice altogether. This can be due to life changes (parenthood, having switched jobs from side gig to full time, having moved countries); there could have been specific health or mental health problems, or the realization that the artist’s life’s ongoing frustrations simply aren’t a good enough deal.
After having abandoned your art practice, continuing it can feel especially threatening. You might feel like having tried and failed – who are you to get back in the ring? Understand that the basic act of considering the continuation of your practice already highlights a tendency or will to continue: quite obviously, you haven’t ultimately given up yet. Try to see your previous actions as path towards a deeper, more fragile, and ultimately essential knowledge about the pitfalls of being an artist – knowledge that wasn’t available to you before. Instead of interpreting your past experience as failure, be neutral: understand it as a prerequisite to the next stage of your artistic life, required to proceed in a challenging field. You might have been gone and felt disassociated from your work; but more importantly, you might be back.
Consider the following strategies to reestablish your artistic practice:
Analyze what made you abandon your work: Increase your understanding of why you left your artmaking; was it because of specific collaborators, economic hardships, lack of visibility, or something else entirely? Understand the structural basis of your previous situation, and how you could improve on it today. Understand that while some situations cannot be improved easily, your knowledge of their existence and severity already influences your perception of them, and your potential handling of similar upcoming situations.
Accept your previous choice as part of your today’s expanded experience: Understand that situations are abandoned for valid reasons. Accept your previous judgment and see the benefits it brought you. To this end, write a list of things that happened since, focusing on what wouldn’t have happened without first abandoning your art practice. Understand how life has changed since – and move on.
Treat this situation as a new beginning: Although you could most likely return to established processes, understand that your current situation potentially benefits from a new beginning; consider reading about how to focus, how to investigate, and how to slowly increase the commitment. Question your former setup: did you have a healthy work schedule? If not, establish one now. Did you have realistic goals? If not, establish them now. Start small, with tiny steps, and gradually increase the pressure. See where it leads to.
Begin: Understand that you will eventually have to stop pondering and start acting. Start with whatever low-commitment task that comes easy to you: drawing on paper, your hands on clay, revisiting a specific body movement or rhythm. See how it makes you feel, and decide whether to continue or pause.
Remember that your goal as an artist is to focus your artmaking. While this can be challenging and complex, it doesn’t need to be when you try to get back in the ring: you have something to say, and have means to express it – it doesn’t have to be more complex that this, at least for now. You might wonder about your current doubts, about your place in life, about weird aspects of your surroundings – or you might not wander about anything. Neither matters: what matters is the connection to your materials, and what emerges from it. For this, you need to invest time. Consider thirty minutes per day, or three times a week. Understand that you don’t need to continue your previous efforts, but can reinvent yourself and your voice in new media and materials. Give it a try.
There are endless reasons for artists to feel disassociated from their work: accomplishing something can lead to post-achievement depression; both success and failure can feed emotional isolation and doubts. If you lost motivation or momentum, your situation isn’t too different from that of someone who just starts out – both situations are based on doubts, featuring various ambiguities on how to get going. It can be worthwhile to revisit the chapters on how to start, focus, investigate and increase the pressure; in addition, consider the following strategies:
Create a list of previous artistic choices: While a finished piece can feel like an answer to its viewers, it also always represents an open set of questions to its creator. Every finished artwork carries these questions within itself; strands to pursue further, manifestations that may want additional, potentially better solutions. Go through your previous artworks and list the formal and semantic attributes used to create them: format, palette, movement, duration, speed; thoughts, influences, references, etc. Understand what happened in the works, and examine what touches you. Some choices might feel to be dead ends, while others might make you giddy. Having a list with your formal and semantic choices lets you remember your passion, and see where you could delve into next. A list of your previous artistic choices is a personal map of paths to pursue.
Be social: Meet friends to discuss your situation. This gives you a voice, and enables them to offer insights and empathy, which could strengthen you to move on. Alternatively, take time off: consider vacation (even a day without the internet and your smartphone can be blissful), consider going to the movies or a library etc. While working might have required a certain focus through isolation, now can be the time to rekindle family and friendships, and to understand how to better balance life and work in the future.
Be withdrawn: Experiment with introspection: meditation, visiting museums or the gym, listening to podcasts, reading: it can pay off to not surround yourself with other people’s energies, but to rather stay focused on yourself. This lets you dive into your situation, your art practice, or your medium’s history – which often serves as a reminder of the many paths untaken in our own artistic practice. Analyzing art that inspires you (including your own work!) can remind you of why you started making art in the first place.
Engage in side tasks: Even if you’re down, it might be possible to engage with low-commitment tasks: skimming through an older publication of your work, going through your archive. What about cleaning your studio, uncluttering your flat, making proper photos of your work or sorting your archive. These activities can enable your mind to wander, with the added benefit of getting work done. They can help you remember what you’ve accomplished so far, and create space to breathe and focus. Being exposed to sketches from several years ago (or even sorting your invoices while doing taxes) might help you remember previous efforts, and thus highlight future domains of investigation.
In case of a reached goal: post-process it: Depending on the goal you reached, now might be a good time to post-process what you did; this can include writing a diary entry, sending out a newsletter, updating your CV/website or social media, or letting gatekeepers/your network know about it.
Working towards goals can lead to structure and focus, and enable peak performances: processes, collaborations and time schedules sometimes all work in unison towards accomplishing your targets. Streamlined work phases can be deeply and holistically satisfying: you know what to do, how to do it, and why you’re doing it. Even if your specific experience of working towards a goal is less positive, actually reaching a finishing line can easily influence your work structures negatively. Instead of experiencing bliss, you might experience hardships: your expectations might not be met (your hopes and ideas about what would happen upon reaching the goal), your structures might crumble (rented studios or tools need to be returned, collaborations with specific people end), and, if unlucky, a burnout might emerge as a result of the overtime you invested. While the idea of reaching goals is positive, its reality is often more ambiguous.
The value of your artistic practice
Understand that your previous satisfaction most likely came from pursuing your artistic practice while also having a goal towards which to work: you had a platform – one that required and rewarded your focus. Losing this platform is bound to result in frustration. While reaching your goal might have resulted in temporary happiness, the loss of momentum is often way more noticeable – which is why you need to get back to work and reestablish yourself: by reestablishing your artistic platform. For this, you don’t necessarily need a new project or goal: their lack doesn’t diminish the validity and importance of your artmaking practice. What’s relevant is for you to grasp the importance of your artistic practice as basis of your identity: you are an artist because you pursue an artistic practice. As long as you do this, you have a voice – which can ultimately lead to further visibility, projects and goals. Over an artist’s life, it seems most important to gradually minimize this loss of self. To this end, strong work habits seem the best strategy.
One step at a time..
For now though, if you feel unmotivated or depressed: take your time. Accept the challenge of your situation: to eventually get back to work. Focus on establishing a daily work habit in the spirit of beginner’s mind, and of reestablishing yourself as an artist (to yourself): you might have achieved a lot just days ago, and might have solved an insurmountable challenge. Yet with this challenge gone, you need to take care of the new one: to continue working. Instead of worrying about goals, focus on being the person who does specific actions: who’s in the studio on time, creates a clean studio, draws for fifteen minutes. Who stops before it gets to be too much.
Don’t expect yourself to work a full day; it’s OK to attend to (re-)forming the habit of simply getting to the studio at all. Considering the circumstances, achieving this isn’t nothing; it’s a lot. If you manage to get to the studio every day, you’ll eventually want to do more there. Small tasks is all it needs to get there: progress through tiny steps – without risking further self-alienation. Consider ritualizing the beginning: get dressed. Brush your teeth. Take your shoes on. Focus on the small, innocent steps without which no studio day can start. Once there, start cleaning. Read a book. Ignore your phone. Revisit unfinished work. Write down your thoughts, then leave for a walk: you’ve done enough. You managed to get dressed. You managed to get to the studio. It’s through the repetition of gradual, basic steps like this that you reestablish yourself.
Being without direction is part of the cycle
Your artistic practice is both opportunity and struggle. Whatever you create is what you get judged by – if not by others, then by yourself. Reaching a goal manifests your many inabilities, while removing your motivating force. To transcend this, strongly consider replacing a goal-based with a process-based approach. Once you understand life (and your artmaking) as a process, it’s easier to be OK with being stalled, to be without direction: it’s part of the endless artistic cycle. At the same time, don’t rush: you will develop subconscious inclinations on what to pursue next, similar to an athlete whose body aches to finally get back to training after a week’s vacation. To get back to a collector who was interested in your work, to call your gallery and meet for coffee, to visit friends or colleagues – or to do none of these, but simply stay home, watch a movie and sulk. It’s ok: this too shall pass.
Most media have a way of computing the artwork’s price based on physical facts like weight, size, duration, edition size, etc. Since these metrics differ between territories (inches vs. cm, pounds vs. kilograms, etc), there isn’t really one internationally established formula. The basic idea is always similar though: to derive the price from something objective and factual (a physical attribute), instead of basing it on something subjective like alleged work quality, likeability, use of material or production time (while use of material might sound objective, its use really is a consequence of specific processes and abilities, and thus subjective).
These formulas always include a factor (sometimes called “coefficient”) that inserts the artist’s individual market standing; without it, all works with the same metrics would cost the same, independently of their creator. Understand that similar mediums might still have differing factors (eg. drawings and paintings of the same size will usually use a different factor). Prices usually rise steadily over the years, which is done by increasing the factor according to sales success (eg. from 10 to 12).
Research the price calculation formula for your medium: For paintings, the metrics-independent formula could be as follows (talk to your peers to understand what length metric is used locally):
(Height + Width) x Factor = Price
Calculate the factor for your work, based on the price range you want to be in: Once you know both the formula to use for your medium and the price you want to use for a specific artwork, you can calculate your current factor. Simply add width and height, and divide the price by it; then round the result to the next integer. For a 40 x 30 inch (or centimeter) painting, the calculation would look like this:
(40 + 30) x Factor = 800 Factor = 11
This allows you to have your work based on the economic realities of your surroundings (which influenced your pricing decision), yet also have a clear factor to communicate. You might notice that in pricing discussions, stating your factor will often result in more authority than stating a work’s price – even though both numbers are interchangeable. The factor also adds an indirection layer between the work and its price, which can be beneficial if you don’t feel comfortable with the economic aspects of your work; since you discuss a number (and not a price), it offers a degree of dissociation from monetary aspects. Consider the following:
Memorize your factor, not each work’s price: Having a factor lets you memorize exactly one number, instead of each work’s individual price. If you raise your factor, you don’t have to memorize each work’s new price – but simply remember the new factor. Understand that since each medium will have its own factor, working in multiple mediums (drawing and sculpting, painting and performance), requires you to memorize several factors.
Use the factor when discussing prices with peers: Knowing your factor lets you easily discuss your work’s prices with peers. To prevent misunderstandings, make sure to know whether the formula is used to calculate the artwork’s price before or after taxes – both is common.
As an artist pricing their work the first time, you usually come face-to-face with two realities: the idea of commodifying your idealism, and your lack of knowledge about pricing expectations and dynamics.
Accept that your work has both artistic and monetary value
Even if your artmaking is based on idealism (searching for ways to expand a medium, to express yourself, etc), this idealism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a part of you, and thus a part of the society you’re living in. The societies that most of us live in exchange money for goods: once you start thinking about selling your work, you obviously need to attach a price tag to it. The better this price tag suits both your and the public’s expectations, the more satisfied you will usually be. But as the very first step towards pricing your work, you need to accept that your work has both artistic and monetary value. This acceptance ideally leads to a curiosity about not only the artistic, but also the monetary side of it:
Research the price ranges of local artists with similar CVs, who work in your medium: Find out where they exhibit and go there to take notes on their works’ prices. What range is it roughly in? This will help you see the realities of commodifying your work, and let you understand local price expectations – and which artists transcend them. It will help you see which artists stand where: some students are laughably expensive, while more established artists can sometimes be weirdly cheap.
Discuss pricing with your peers: Ask your fellow artists, as well as your professors and their assistants (if you’re in art school): “How would you price my work, and why?” Try to understand their reasonings, and whether they can be applied by you. You will realize that a lot of successful professionals have little knowledge about pricing: stay attentive and open-minded, but know that you’ll have to make your own decisions.
Investigate resistance: If you feel resistance about pricing your work, investigate its source: you might be worried about having a price tag for your work, since this firmly marks it in your economic surroundings. While encouraging to some, it will be unwanted by others, since it brings your art into a very specific domain of the world. If you pursue your work as a hobby, you might never want to price it; if this is your situation, consider how pricing your work can have positive benefits for your artistic process as well: it can heighten your awareness about your work’s quality. Similar to getting started on a piece, it’s another step to making the work real; not through physical manifestation (which is part of the artmaking process), but by letting people know they can own it, and at what price. If you’re worried about pricing, could you actually be worried about the quality or finishedness of your work? Could you be worried about disinterest or about your monetary place in the world making you unhappy? Try to understand these questions to decide your path forward.
Pricing gets easier once you get started. Developing a deeper understanding of general pricing dynamics, as well as specific knowledge about your local art scene will ultimately enhance your range of action – and gradually increase your confidence in pricing your artwork. This will allow your work to inhabit a specific place of the art world: the art market. For all its ambiguity, this will most likely help you in your progression as a professional artist: to understand the monetary aspect of your work, and to find your personal approach on it.
It might eventually be hard to remember these initial troubles, which are the consequence of a profession so deeply based on ideals of purity and idealism.
