Author: Christian Bazant-Hegemark

What are further art pricing facts?

After having read the anatomy of art pricing, here are further general pricing facts:

  • Prices need to reflect the economic situation of your initial target audience – not your production costs, research and production time, or how much you like or are satisfied with your work. Specifically, your work’s price needs to make sure that you have access to buyers who can afford it. That’s why a piece created by you, even though it might feel to be qualitatively “better”, can be priced lower than some other artist’s piece you deem “worse”, but is exhibited at a top gallery (consider reading this post about quality): if they have a sales network that enables them to sell the work, or the artist established a brand that allows for (or expects) this kind of work, then that’s a strong fact to consider. If you ignore this reality and price your work similarly, you risk not being able to sell it; and even if you sell it, it remains unclear whether you’ll be able to sell the next work at the corresponding price level.
    Outsiders to the art world (which includes younger, inexperienced artists) sometimes belittle the expensive works exhibited in galleries – especially if the work doesn’t pursue well-established craft ideals: “How can this cost so much? Anyone could do this!”. The reality is manifold: (a) not everyone could create this work – it’s usually a consequence of years of interrogation and manifestation; (b) not everyone could make a successful brand of it, and (c) not everyone would manage to establish proper sales channels to sell it.

  • Initial pricing requires knowledge about market access and target audience. Prices that feel too expensive to someone, will feel too cheap to someone else. This means that you can’t simply ask people to define prices for you – rather, you need to understand what target audience is within your reach, and what their financial capabilities are. If your parents are billionaires in the USA, your artwork’s initial price level will differ drastically to someone who creates the same works, but lives in the slums – simply because of the people you have access to. Don’t ignore your personal economic surroundings and market realities.
    Collaborating with a gallery changes this, since they will have detailed knowledge about the financial range of their collectors.

  • Prices that are too high can make sales harder or impossible. Prices can be seen as statements, with negotiations challenging these statements. Overshooting price levels risks for negotiations to never happen, if buyers either don’t have enough money to even demand a discount, or do have enough money but don’t feel the price to be justified. If sales don’t happen at all, your price range is likely to be off. If they do happen (but not often), the situation gets more complex: you might sell more if your work would have a lower price tag – but this doesn’t guarantee that your annual earnings (which are a consequence of your sales quantity and your work’s price level) might be higher. Even if your sales are less frequent, you might generate the same (or more) money than with lower prices. Finding a proper balance will take time, and is challenging because the market doesn’t seem to enjoy pricing experiments. As long as you don’t have a strong market, this might not matter, but the further you progress, the less options you might have.

  • Prices are often interpreted to signify quality – being too low can produce distrust in the work’s quality. Art is judged differently by everyone – there’s no single, monolithic quality standard to understand an artwork’s objective value. While art is subjective, money isn’t: it’s entirely established as signifier of something’s value. Contrasting the ambiguities of art with the clarity of monetary ascriptions clearly shows the latter having extreme authority over the former; it’s hard to disassociate these two. Consider an artist who is strongly established in one territory, but not internationally. If their work is exhibited abroad (where it’s unknown), people will still see the work’s price level – and derive quality ideas about it (“This is way too expensive!” or “This price shows how good the piece is”, etc).

    Where prices ideally should reflect quality, the reality is that they reflect market penetration and brand visibility. Prices signify the quality and sales expectations of the seller’s network, and shouldn’t be used to infer an artwork’s artistic quality – but in actuality, people do exactly that, most of the time. The price of something is predominantly used as a measure of value, and thus of quality and integrity – especially by those without a strong inner compass about art. When an artist decides on a low pricing level, they’re implicitly sending out signals: “This is the work of a newbie”. If they’re too low, they’ll also signal that something is fishy, and potentially bad – or even fraudulent: “This work might be sloppy, the artist might not have a strong sales network, and might not care about pursuing their passion professionally”. This can be especially true for clients who don’t trust their own quality judgements: instead of seeing a bargain, they might fear to see failure.

    Prices influence the perception of art to the point that a shooting star’s work might become less noteworthy than their artwork’s unexpected price range. Extremely high price levels can also lead people to distrust the work’s quality: can any work really be that good and important? The challenge lies in understanding your target audience’s economic expectations, and work from there.

  • Pricing is not the only external quality signifier: Your work’s price level influences your art’s perception, but isn’t its only external quality signifier; social media following or general fame might be others. Imagine an artist without gallery representation, yet with an extremely strong social media following. While their following might not be able to buy their work at its “normal” price level, the artist could bet on sales quantity, and opt to sell at a fraction of the price. This might be better for them than to sell through galleries (which rids them of 50% revenue), especially if they dislike certain aspects of the art world (elitism, dependency on galleries, etc).
    An artist like this would have external quality signifiers pointing in extremely differing directions: following, yet no gallery. Amazing art, yet priced extremely competitively. The challenge lies in understanding what kind of market access feels right, and generates enough sales. This topic is complex already because potentially existing previous collectors might see this as price dumping that loses them their investments – but it’s a dynamic that’s bound to happen more frequently, as social media progresses.
    This dynamic gets more complex, the more further external quality signifiers there are:

  • Pricing doesn’t have to reflect your living standards or whether you could afford your own work. Never forget that for all the idealism that got you into the arts, you’ll most likely be a producer of luxury commodities: you won’t have a lot of middle-class collectors with three-kid-families, since their focus often simply lies elsewhere (to save money for emergencies, student loans, cars, hobbies and vacations).
    While human culture needs the arts to thrive (film, literature, music, theater, dance, etc), buying art always is a luxury transaction. That’s why even with the purest intentions, your work will always be a luxury commodity to its buyer. Understand that while you might not live in luxury, the works you create will most likely only be affordable by people who do.

  • Prices for artworks are always attached to the artist, although it might be the gallery that defines them: Some represented artists benefit from galleries to manage their network and sales. This can give the impression that the gallery should define the artwork’s price level – after all, pricing is part of the economic domain, and thus better suited to a gallery (which is expected to understand economics best). While pricing obviously brings artworks very close to economic realities, an artwork’s price nevertheless isn’t ultimately attached to the gallery. In a way, it isn’t even attached to the artwork itself, but to the artist who produced it: A gallery can close down, retire or change owners, resulting in the artist to be without representation. A gallery can decide to end collaborating with you, from which point onwards your access to their network will be extremely limited.

    For all these reasons, do not ever let go of pricing decisions: they are yours to make. At the same time, don’t ignore advice either: enter a dialog with anyone who wants to advise you about pricing your artwork. This lets you increase your knowledge and influence the decision, while enabling you to offer feedback. It has the added benefit of highlighting your interest in business decisions – to yourself and the gallery. This lets pricing be part of your range of action, resulting in shared responsibilities between you and the gallery. This lets you grow.

Consider reading the anatomy of art pricing, how to price your artwork as a newbie, and the formula to calculate art prices.

What’s the anatomy of art pricing?

Pricing is a major topic on your path to becoming a professional artist. Pricing is a skill – and like any other skill, it improves with practice and experience. It is closely connected to one’s negotiating abilities: where pricing defines and attaches a monetary value to your finished artworks, negotiating defends and (optimally) maintains​ these prices in case of customer interest. Both need to be embraced and become part of your comfort zone. 

The topic of art pricing might not sound important for artists with gallery representations; the further you’re established, the more likely you’ll be able to rely on clearly defined gallery collaborations and sales expectations. Since most artists don’t have gallery representations (and few find one right away), it seems important to understand this topic even if you might one day not have to care about it.

Pricing

Thinking about prices for the very first time is uniquely challenging since you don’t have your own, preexisting price level as a comparison – you’re lacking a basis to progress from. The solution is to research the prices of artworks made by people in your situation. You need to compare yourself to

  • artists who have a similar CV (a graduate with gallery representation vs. someone trying to get into art school),
  • who work in similar media (painting vs. sculpture vs. a performative piece vs. an etching with an edition of 50+3: each medium has its own way of calculating prices), and 
  • who live in the same geography, or at least somewhere with similar economic conditions (consider the differences between LA and Vienna, London and Barcelona, and see how economic conditions can already just differ between urban vs. rural regions).

Things usually progress more straight-forward once an initial price level is defined, since this offers collectors (and yourself) clearer expectations on your work’s price tag. Over the years, artists usually increase their price level gradually and slowly, according to their sales success – until their geographies’ economic ceiling is reached. This steady increase is similar to an employee asking for their yearly or bi-yearly raise: after a while, there simply isn’t any room for salary adaptations apart from inflation compensation. Once one’s region’s economic ceiling is reached, prices mostly increase depending on increased demands: sales quantities influence both your current and your future earnings.

Sales and Visibility

Selling more artworks requires a higher demand, which depends on the artist’s visibility. Visibility is the result of a cumulation of strategies; if working in the studio creates zero visibility (but potentially amazing work), then collaborating with a gallery would already offer more (usually a solo show every other year). If that gallery brings the artist’s works to art fairs, has contacts to other galleries, has international collectors and access to institutions, then the chances for increased visibility rise further. Understand that galleries aren’t required to increase the demand for your work (although certain things, eg. booking an art fair booth, isn’t available to artists directly); artists can obviously do these things on their own, by establishing connections to collectors, gaining access to institutions, etc. They can network locally and internationally, and might even be their best brand ambassadors.
Visibility isn’t just about the physical world (exhibitions, art fairs, etc), but also includes virtual domains: your website can create visibility, as can your newsletter and social media; each of these can be potent tools to increase awareness of your work, if used smartly. The challenge lies in balancing your studio and networking needs, and to further balance it with your partner’s strategies (galleries, art advisors, etc).

Artists can increase the demand for their artworks by making them accessible to new markets. This is usually done by exposing one’s work in such territories; while in theory anyone could self-organize out-of-town or international exhibitions, this rarely generates visibility or sales. The preferred way is to collaborate with international gatekeepers that have established industry contacts – most often art dealers or galleries. The connections to these are usually the result of prior networking efforts (through your own or your galleries’ preexisting connections, non-profits, art fairs or residencies, etc). Instead of singular self-organized events abroad, this has the potential to create an ongoing collaboration through representation, and thus a more stable presence in a new territory.

Going International

Living costs can differ dramatically between countries and cities. Every territory has its own economic condition, and thus economic ceiling – that’s why the only way to ultimately transcend any local price level is to become established internationally. This increases the likelihood of generating more sales, since more people can be aware of your work, and can end up buying it. Understand that your price level doesn’t change simply because you are exhibited elsewhere; your pricing needs to be consistent across all territories.
Yet collaborating with a gallery that resides within a decidedly different economy still has consequences: if that economy is way below your previous one, your work will only cater to the very rich. If the new economy is way above your previous one, a gallery might not see the financial benefit to them, even if your show might sell out. In this case, the gallery might have a strong interest in adapting your price level to their market reality, which in turn can alienate galleries and collectors from previous (lower) economies. If you have a strong base of collectors already, this will lead some of them to sell your work at auctions: they’ll hope to get a return on investment, with the risk of their market not confirming the new economies’ price level. If that happens, it can compromise the new galleries’ intended price level. Yet ignoring the new galleries’ proposal to increase your price level is just as risky, since staying at your previous price level will alienate the new gallery, and most likely results in your show there to be your last one – independently of their appreciation of your work. Drastically changing price levels later in one’s career is challenging.

Art Auctions

The strongest, yet also most volatile sales mode doesn’t happen at studios or galleries, but at art auctions. Depending on their network, auction houses can establish actual supply and demand dynamics, and thus transcend preexisting price levels. Auction houses come in various sizes, each having their own access to collectors; only the best houses will generate the highest bids. Without a strong networking backbone, the best work can remain unsold, or go to the first bidder (usually at half the market’s price level). If this happens too frequently, it becomes a risk to the established price level, which the market obviously doesn’t validate. That’s why auctions ultimately require a lot of networking power (and thus are a consequence of time and/or luck), and remain a good judge whether an artist truly became an (international) brand: the work of an established artist from region A, might not get a good auction result in region A, simply based on a lack of visibility.

Consider reading further art pricing facts, how to price your artwork as a newbie, and the formula to calculate art prices.

What do I do at art events – specifically at gallery or art fair openings?

The fine arts industry offers all sorts of event types: gallery brunches, artist talks and preview dinners; work screenings, press conferences and afterparties; finissages, closed collector events etc. Exhibition openings and art fairs are the industries’ flagship events, and can feel intimidating because of their open social architecture. Whether they happen at galleries, art fairs, non-profits, museums or elsewhere, they don’t specify or demand a specific way of interaction. Primarily, openings exist for the public to be able to experience an artist’s manifested vision, their universe. Yet openings are just as much about the hosting institution, which the public gets to see in its newest form, its latest incarnation – which can be especially true in the case of curated group shows: who gets exhibited by which curator, and what does it imply about the current state of the venue?

Art events are social gatherings, and thus inherently feature randomly shifting opportunities.

While art events are usually based on the idea of experiencing art, they always also include social interactions at their core. This highlights the reality of the art world, which combines the idealism of artistic expression, with the realities of curiosity, networking and the art market. Newbies will quickly realize how rare it is for visitors to actually care about the exhibited work. People can be superficial, unfriendly or rude, which can overwhelm inexperienced or sensitive younglings. Might it be healthier to disregard openings altogether? After all, the studio offers a focused comfort zone with the possibility to pursue art making: where studios seem to incorporate pure idealism, art events can at worst feel to simply incorporate the bad breath of alcohol and capitalism. 

Both statements are based in clichés though: essentially, both domains offer their own challenges. To progress, you need to both work and network, in order to steadily establish both your oeuvre and your visibility. Depending on your character and fears, your inexperience and insecurities can cloud your judgement: if you don’t know anyone in a scene, it will be unclear what to do, and how to ever belong. But as always, there’s value in expanding into the unknown.

Understand openings as free networking events that you can ride like waves, and experiment to find your place within them.

Understand openings as free networking events that you can ride like waves, and experiment to find your place within them: witness and note which people actually consider the exhibited art, who knows whom, and how crowds will form groups of attitude and mutual consent. See openings as opportunities to learn about your industry (about its various interaction modes, languages and key players), and appropriate them to become another part of your networking strategy. See them as what they are: events where people get to meet each other, unique because of their open social architecture that allows people to arrive randomly, unexpectedly, and without commitment. Use them to get to know your peers, who might turn out to become business acquaintances, artist collaborators, friends or lovers – and to ultimately find your flow of moving from one opening to the next: randomly, unexpectedly, and with the commitment you see fit. See them as opportunities to transcend your comfort zone and your knowledge of art, and to expand your social circle.

To reduce the threshold of attending to art events, consider forming a group of like-minded peers. This lets you schedule the event upfront, and will result in everyone being more motivated to attend. It also reduces the risk of being unaware of important events, since your peer group creates a heightened awareness of them. You can meet in someone’s studio or for a drink, then head to the event together, and end the evening discussing your experiences.

Here are various things to do at art openings (or other art events):

  • Experience the artworks, and expand your knowledge about them: With art right in front of you, of course you’ll want to see whether there’s anything to learn from the exhibited pieces. What do you feel? What do you experience? Has the work been done sloppily or is it well-crafted? Is the artist known or emerging? Do you know how the gallery got to collaborate with them? What are your thoughts about the specific way the works have been installed? What would you have done differently, and why? An event’s exhibited artworks represent the core connection to your own artistic practice, independently of whether you understand or enjoy it.

  • Study the handouts: Every exhibition will have handouts with prices, the artist’s CV and a text about the show. Read these to expand your knowledge about both art and gallery: what do you think about it? Is it written clearly and concisely? Are there new words or phrases you can remember and incorporate for your artist statement? Does the text use ideas that you can adapt? Do you know the person who wrote the text? If you enjoy the text, remember who wrote it – you might one day ask them to write about your own work.

  • Scout and Connect: Try to scout the attendants to understand who they are, what role they have, and whether they might be interesting to you. This can include fellow artists, collectors, critics, the gallery team (owner, gallery director, staff), the general public, etc. Try to understand who attracts you for their sensitivity or verbal finesse, who’s there only to get seen, who’s needy and pushy. Scouting isn’t about getting to know the right person, but to understand each person’s relevance to the art world, and to discover your potential mutual relevance. By increasing your knowledge about the scene’s players, you’ll also increase awareness of how you might eventually fit in.
    Art events always also attract stereotypes: rich collectors, arrogant art students, know-it-all art critics and curators; but what about the others, the individuals that don’t fulfill a cliché? Find them, and see what happens once you connect.

  • Converse (“network”): Try to understand who’s interesting to you, and start a conversation with them – knowing that as a newbie, you’ll ​be invisible to most others for a while. That’s OK, since you don’t want anything from anyone: you’re not looking for an exhibition, a review, a solo show: you’re just here to understand and get to know others: to network. You can do that by talking about anything that’s interesting to both of you: the exhibited art and artist(s), the gallery; personal projects and challenges, etc. Be authentic and enjoy the other person’s presence. If you feel that they don’t enjoy yours, simply move on.

    Stay sensitive of others stealing your focus and time: some people will push themselves between you and the event (sometimes even physically), and won’t stop monologizing about themselves. For whatever reason, they use you – they might be intoxicated, narcissistic, or just plain weird. Remember that you’re under no obligation to stick with them, and will sometimes have to excuse yourself in order to pursue your actual mission of getting to know and actually engage with people.

    In case of interesting discussions, consider asking for contact information. This enables you to stay in touch via mail, or by simply forwarding your most recent newsletter. This gives the recipient the chance to see your work, and to subscribe to your newsletter.

  • Aim for the kill: If you want to approach someone who doesn’t know you, take a step back and calmly judge the situation: would you bother them by introducing yourself (they might be in an important conversation, could be intoxicated or simply busy)? Is there someone who could introduce you easily? Approach them sensitively and smartly, considering these circumstances: tell them who you are and that you appreciate their work, and whether they’d have a spare minute. Be humble and authentic, and stay open to the possibility of them not having time or energy for you – if this happens, ask them whether you could mail your request. Ask for their business card, and hand them yours.

  • Stay: This last point might be quintessential: don’t leave. Art events are social gatherings, and thus inherently feature randomly shifting opportunities. Instead of leaving once you experienced the exhibited art, stay and see what happens. This usually creates stronger opportunities that heading back home, and establishes yourself (to yourself) as someone who cares about both artworks and networking. You’ll notice new people arriving over time, and further opportunities with them. If the gallery is embedded in a local gallery network, consider visiting their neighbors as well.

How should I tackle life? What are general strategies?

Since every life differs, there can’t be a specific route that applies to everyone. Instead, here are three general, structural approaches to tackling life. It’s up to each of us to derive strategies from them that are individually relevant.

  • Accumulate experiences. Life creates experiences, which help us develop strategies to confront upcoming challenges. We adapt these strategies throughout our lives: we fail, are embarrassed or unlucky, and try to fail better next time – until we succeed or turn away. Even the most horrible experiences can serve as stepping stones to better understand ourselves and the world. We might not want them, but it’s up to each of us to make use of them.
    Experiences happen all the time, and don’t require a specific setting. They happen when meeting people, reading books, watching movies. They don’t even require external input, since our minds can produce them based on previous experiences, through thinking and introspection. They even happen through our dreams, where our subconscious automatically processes previous events. Life constantly shows us new things, and introspection can happen everywhere – in front of an older work of yours, or the daily commute. Accumulate and use your experiences to make sense of life.

  • Accumulate friends. Life usually starts in the small circle of trusted family members. We slowly increase our social reach: kindergarten, school and hobbies, work or university. Along the way we find like-minded people who represent a safe haven, and allow for self-doubt, truth inquiries, growth. They help us make sense of our experiences, to develop strategies and handle upcoming challenges. We reciprocate and help them make sense of their lives. Some friends become collaborators in our professional projects, others listen from further away; some are in our lives only temporarily, others more permanently – yet all of them are important. While some of us lead continuous inner dialogs to reflect their experiences, others need external stimuli, other people for this. Either way, we need friends to make sense of life.

  • Accumulate self-knowledge. As we grow older, understanding of our selves and our sensitivities increases – as does the knowledge about our inabilities and incompetencies. It all gets ever more obvious: whose advice suits us, what behavior harms us. Sometimes we trust the wrong individuals, and need to recalibrate our internal compasses. Sometimes we use the wrong strategies. We discover patterns of inadequate behaviors, both in others and ourselves. Some can be transcended through introspection and hard work, while others benefit from the structural approaches of psychotherapy. The more we invest in self-knowledge, the better we will understand ourselves, the world, and our place in it. The less we care, the harsher life will become: accumulate and increase your self-knowledge to make sense of life.

No matter how hard we try: our actions are always ultimately insufficient; we can’t know everything, we can’t “win” life. Eventually we all die, and that’s that. Experience, friends and self-knowledge can’t protect us from that – but they will enrich our lives. They will help us be better prepared and feel more welcome in life, and thus represent ultimate aids. They prevent us from continuously starting at Square One, which seems essential to leave a positive footprint in the world.

Benefits and hardships: Why (and how) should I raise my awareness of fringe benefits?

Fringe benefits denote supplements to a job’s wage, and are often used by employers to motivate and recruit their staff. Examples for common fringe benefits are private health care, childcare reimbursement, employee discounts or additional weeks of vacation – the list is endless. Uncommon fringe benefits often are the consequence of a specific industry or job situation: an ice cream parlor offering free ice cream to their staff, a pet store allowing their employee’s dogs to accompany them. Some of these benefits are implicit, and might not have been actively thought of by management – yet still improve an employee’s situation: a calm workplace, considerate colleagues and bosses, reasonable commutes, etc. These are the consequence of a working situation and of the employee’s personal affinities.

The financial situation of emerging artists is rough on various levels: artists don’t get employed to pursue their practice, so there’s no possibility for employers to improve their motivation through either salary or common fringe benefits. Emerging artists usually already have a hard time to establish any sort of income reliability. Since sales tend to be their work’s least frequent marker of success, it’s reasonable to consider a wider array of benefits: the freedom to pursue one’s passions, the possibilities of engaging with friends and family, etc – the artist’s life offers various rather unique, albeit mostly non-monetary benefits. While these won’t pay your rent, they can still improve your quality of life. They are the consequence of your personal affinities – your appreciation of them always depends on your character.

Examples could be:

  • Work related:
    • Flexible time management
    • Freedom to work on what you want (to pursue your passion)
    • The experience of people caring about your work, and to see their life expand as a result
    • The experience of people living with something you created
    • Deep discussions about art and life

  • Societal benefits:
    • Being part of broader social circles
    • Increased sensitivity for community problems
    • Increased sensitivity for human rights issues and equal rights
    • Increased aesthetic sensitivities
    • Standing out to people who pursue ordinary jobs
    • Free drinks at openings
    • Dinners that are paid for
    • Invitations to collector’s homes
    • The possibility to use collector’s holiday homes
    • Knowledge of fellow creators: artists, musicians, actors etc
    • Knowledge of powerful people: lawyers, doctors, politicians, etc
Benefits and hardships

Lists like that quickly sound corny – they risk over-cherishing. The point is not to be euphemistic about hardships, but to understand how your life differs from others on a structural level, and to raise your awareness about situations that come normal to your lifestyle, while being rare to others. Understand that each of these benefits likely has downsides associated to them – each benefit can hide a hardship:

  • Flexible time management vs. an imbalanced quality of life, due to working without time constraints (mornings, evenings, nights)
  • The freedom to work on what you want, vs. a total lack of clarity about what to do
  • Working without a boss, vs. the lack of external gratification after having accomplished something
  • Being treated to dinner, vs. the economic inability to treat someone else to dinner
  • Knowledge of powerful people, vs. being the powerful person yourself
Interactions of benefits and hardships

Your life as an artist has an enormous amount of challenges and hardships. Raising your awareness of their interaction lets you attain a more holistic, and thus more realistic view of your life. To this end, consider doing the following:

  1. Understand your life’s benefits 
  2. Understand your life’s hardships
  3. Understand how they are connected, and how you can increase the occurrence of your benefits; you can often do so by analyzing your hardships.

Emerging artists establish a place to pursue their work practice, and then network to increase their chances of survival.

Artists usually enter their profession in a slow, gradual manner; even after graduating from art school, there isn’t ever a hiring moment that upgrades their student precariat to an employee’s situation of financial potency and security. If anything, they get hired for side jobs: to work at a café, a book or art store, etc. These jobs themselves will likely carry fringe benefits, and it makes sense to stay aware of them.

Ultimately though, emerging artists establish a place to pursue their work practice, and then network to increase their chances of survival. This slow progress into their self-employment, usually happening over many years, can make them unaware of their changed circumstances – even though some of them would truly feel important and worthwhile if they would have appeared overnight.

Life, relationships, socialization, personal growth: how does it all connect?

Humans want to feel safe, embedded, relevant and valued. While we can create these states to certain degrees autonomously, it’s usually through interaction with others that we thrive. Social interactions are the basis of our species, but can be risky: what about misunderstandings, quarrels or fights? We need ways to judge others, and our interactions with them. Establishing​ emotional autonomy is a quintessential part of adulthood: to increase one’s capacity to self-soothe, to create a feeling of safety and to feel valued just for one’s own sake. Only those who can do this, can really care and love others – since otherwise they need a high degree of reciprocation.

This makes attention between humans a major currency (some will also feel this from animals or objects) – denial of it is immediately noticeable, and usually leads to frustration and pain: consider how social deprivation (through incarceration) is considered to be society’s strongest punishment. Since we crave others, it’s important to understand what sort of “other” is actually beneficial to us – without this understanding, unhealthy relationships will thrive.

Relationships are complex, implicit deals: they can be good, bad, and everything beyond such obvious patterns. They allow for endlessly​ intricate dynamics, way beyond schoolbook teachings, and even change over time: relationships are never static, but change according to their participants. That’s why introspection and discussion of experiences are important – they help us analyze and judge our encounters of the world, potentially turning hardships into life lessons. They help us uncover and understand the implicit, unspoken aspects of our selves and our relationships. This is extremely powerful: it can turn a victim into a proactive re-interpreter of past actions, resulting in someone with the power to influence future actions, and thus our approach to life itself. Relationships are complex puzzles that we can try to solve – perpetually.

Time Does Nothing

Depending on one’s socialization, it can take years to understand what sort of interpersonal contact is healthy and sustainable (offering safety that allows for growth). As we grow up, our unique character and style is blended with the behaviors of our educators. These usually become our first sociological and moral compass – but not necessarily one that actually suits or benefits us. Judging people and ourselves requires us to analyze our compass, which requires the deepest inquiries into our upbringing, and can uncover haunting realities. Judging people is an endless challenge, and benefits from an open mind, psychosocial knowledge, empathy, and the willingness to reflect our past behavior and interactions: time itself doesn’t turn experience into knowledge. 

You ultimately want to surround yourself with people you can benefit from. To understand what this means, you need to understand the many shapes and forms of benefits: criticism, economic support, attention, abandonment, collaboration – behavior that leads to your spiritual and emotional growth. Simply finding these in a person doesn’t imply beneficial behavior though: it’s always about a person’s attitude, their behavior and intention, and how these feel to you. The more you know yourself, the better your choices may be. At the same time, an increase in knowledge will always also blind you through arrogance: the more you think you know, the less your eyes and your mind will remain open. Finding a balance between knowledge and openness is a life challenge.

How can I increase agency to proactively handle life?

We are all endlessly challenged by life, with a major obstacle being our frequent lack (or low degree) of agency. This also applies to artists, which is why increasing agency can often feel like a primary objective: to set up a life where your proactivity influences your fates as much and as competently as possible.

Agency is the capacity to act, and thus the result of all of a person’s experiences,  thought patterns and psychological strategies – it doesn’t come easily or for free: it’s hard to do anything when depressed. There’s little agency available to a victim. It’s often the result of years of introspection, discussions, (self-)coaching or therapy. While every child has certain decision-making freedoms, a grown-up has deeper, harder, more challenging and potentially more consequential decisions to ponder.

As an artist, you want to make use of the creativity ascribed to children – the many ideas, hopes and dreams that can result in an artwork; your most precious challenge is to use your agency to pursue your art practice. At the same time, you need a firm grasp on the world, on reality: as potentially self-employed person, you need to navigate your life through both artistic practice and personal challenges, with ever-increasing business-savviness, self-knowledge and self-care. There’s little child-like about any of this. You need to develop a balance between the potentials of your inner child, and the necessities of being grown up. Every challenge lets you refine this balance anew. Yet quite obviously, some of the situations we’ll face will simply be too much for us. They can bring us to a stand-still.

How then to approach challenges? Consider the following template:

  • Analyse the situation: What’s going on?
    • What’s the essence of the challenge? 
    • What are the intentions and goals of each of the challenges’ participants?

  • Create agency: You need to find out what room you have to maneuver the situation. Without this, there’s little space  for agency. By starting to ponder your options, your agency begins to manifest. This removes you from self-victimization, and instead lets you become proactive. Ideally, you manage to create agency
    • without causing harm to yourself (by compromising your core vision, collaborations, work, etc.), and
    • without causing harm to others.

  • Implement the steps as envisioned: Life will always interfere with the dry theory of plans. The better you visualize your strategies upfront, the easier they might play out, and the better you will likely be prepared for alterations. The stronger your experience with the specific subject matter, the better your chances in manifesting your vision: how to stretch a canvas; how to sell a sculpture; how to end a gallery collaboration; which lawyer to involve. The better your knowledge about psychological aspects of yourself and the involved people, groups and cultures, the less friction there will usually be between theory and practice.

  • Do a postmortem: Reaching the finish line sees you more experienced: you moved through (or sidestepped) challenges, and experienced successes and/or failures. Yet how did you succeed or fail specifically? What’s the anatomy of the situation and your path through the challenge(s), analyzed retrospectively? The deeper your understanding of your experiences, the better you can be prepared for similar future experiences. The wider you dig into your experience, the better you can be prepared for further, slightly different future experiences: few situations result in only one lesson to learn. Most likely, there are all sorts of things to remember, for the next time a challenge arises. Consider:
    • How spot-on was your original analysis? Were there specific aspects that unexpectedly were (in-)correct? Where did you succeed, and where did you fail miserably in understanding and anticipating the situation?

    • How good was your strategy (to create agency)?  If you understand your plan as a sum of actions with specific attributions: what were their consequences, and how could you have improved the result? Could you have reached the goal more smoothly, with less alienation or humiliation, or simply quicker or more efficiently?

    • How did your implementation actually play out? Which aspects did you not consider correctly, in regards to people, situations, materials, processes etc? Which specific collaborators or negotiation partners, likes or dislikes emerged from this episode?

Our lives are built on experiences – yet experiences themselves aren’t always to be trusted; if you don’t invest time to reflect upon them, they can stay shallow. It usually pays off to interrogate your actions (and their outcome) both radically analytically and emotionally. You need to embrace yourself, hug yourself, and then still find out why things went wrong or right. With luck, this helps you understand the world.

The deeper you know yourself, the more likely you will find goals and strategies that will make your life bearable, and potentially exciting and fun. Noone can do this for you, since everyone’s truths differ. You can surround yourself with people who help you on this way – but the will to analyze yourself has to emerge from yourself. It’s the first and final step to being a person with agency, and thus the prerequisite to succeed as an artist.

I only started getting into art way late. So much time has been lost. Is my career doomed before it began?

With life being subject to time, and time passing in one direction only, life can feel like a one-way street. While this is true for time itself, it’s not true for our range of actions: yes, we are a weird accumulation of our past experiences; but no, we definitely don’t have to stick to previous choices – especially if they don’t feel adequate anymore. If anything, life offers an abundance of options: navigated smartly and with luck, a lot can be seen, experienced and accomplished. A lot can be changed.

Adapting the direction of one’s life is often both encouraged and admired by those that know about our frustrations. At the same time, society at large doesn’t usually offer a lot of support structure for such major movements; debt repayments are relentless, child and living costs increase steadily. Downsizing will usually be essential to changing careers, but is often interpreted as a step back; you’ll most likely have to wade through chaos, in order to establish a new, hopefully better order. In addition, ageism exists on nearly all layers of society, and also in the arts: art school applications, exhibition requirements, grants or gallery representation: they all tend to have strict, both implicit and explicitly stated age limitations. Does one’s career depend on them?

Your age isn’t something you can influence. You have no control over it. It can therefore serve as a perfect excuse to not ever start trying – it lets you be a blameless victim of circumstances. At the same time, although your age might seem absolute and ever-increasing, other people’s perception of it often turns out to be entirely dynamic: some will see 28 years as old, while others will interpret 63 years as young. Some will mention that you feel younger today, than how you appeared two years ago – after a diet, a separation, an accident or childbirth. In that way, age can be somewhat relative. Age doesn’t just denote the years since your birth; it also indicates the amount of time you had to grow, experiment, and collect experiences.

Your age can feel like a burden – but it’s always also your potential.

Age doesn’t denote lost, but lived time; time that can be used to gradually turn you into the person you want to be. Your experience and empathy can help you understand whether you want to work in the arts; it can give you the insights to increase your chances of success. Your age can feel like a burden – but it’s always also your potential. Society often favors the young, especially the alleged geniuses amongst them; yet art itself doesn’t favor creations based on their author’s age. While the art market might use extreme cases for marketing purposes (artists being extremely young or old), art itself never cares.

Art Doesn’t Care About Your Age

Instead, art cares about your expression, your authenticity, about your process and how you reflect and work with its past. It cares about pushing limits both sensitively and drastically. Art doesn’t care about careers or market values. You can’t be “too late” for art – but if you could be, why not see it as necessity for urgency? If you really could be too old to get into art, why even wait another day before starting your experiments? If your age worries you too much, consider using it as the starting point of your artistic exploration: depict age. Depict your alleged weaknesses, society’s unfairnesses, and the fears and desparations that drive your courage. Research artists that did the same before you, and find out whether you can extend their vision through yours. If you feel to have wasted years, you can either focus on what’s forever permanent and unchangeable – or refocus and try to set up a different future for yourself.

Remember that you are not your age, but your experience and motivation; your expression, network and luck. You can’t influence whether what you create is encouraged and wanted by your surroundings – but one’s surroundings aren’t necessarily the right judge on whether something makes sense or has importance. Accept that some of the most successful artists didn’t have a career in their lifetime; this can happen. Some art isn’t meant for its contemporaries. But by not trying to create the work that you could create, you’re most likely selling yourself short. Stop to regret, and start to work.

Without euphemism, consider the benefits of being older: expression is the consequence of emotionality, knowledge and courage – things that can ripe with time, if you focus and work on them. Most anyone’s career will benefit from visibility and networking; depending on your character, you might be able to present yourself and your work in a more adequate, self-assured way. This might help you to establish specific dialogs with gatekeepers, simply based on your potentially deeper experience as a human being. Or it might not: some people will focus your grey hair and wrinkles, and your allegedly outdated manners – and be unable to see your potential. This will be burdensome and frustrating, but it can’t be helped: let them lose out, and look for better options. It’s not a good reason to not get started. Understand that your age might even help you to be more disciplined and focused in the studio – after all, there’s no more time to lose.

While the art market has a tendency to thrive on young age (for market reasons: their work’s price level can expand easier, and over an allegedly longer time), someone’s age is never the only metric: it’s ultimately your work that matters, and your network. The later you start, the more important your network will be. You need to focus your work, and get to know gatekeepers: curators, gallerists, art critics etc. Read the “Networking” subchapters for detailed approaches.

If you consider yourself to be late at starting art, consider the following strategies:

  • Understand your situation: Although the art world is exciting, it’s also challenging and frustrating. Those who enter it later in life will quickly experience certain people’s arrogance and aloofness; compared to their previous work experiences, this can be off-putting. Understand that this kind of experience might happen to everyone switching industries later in life – it’s rare, and therefore suspicious to certain people (while admirable to others). Know that you will need to work and network smartly, and maybe harder than younger peers. You might require more luck as well. You will benefit from realistically defining your idea of success: it might be exhibitions and gallery representations, or it might simply be a life that’s no longer bound to your previous job (without gallery representation, you will get to keep one hundred percent of your earnings). Understand your fears and aspirations, and let neither of them drown you.
    Understand that everyone can set up an artistic practice. To judge your art world chances, consider your motives: what do you want from the arts? Money and fame, or a worthwhile mode of expression? You can work on both, but need to accept that in certain ways, you can control the latter way more than the prior.

  • Be realistic: Establish realistic structures in regards to time, space and money: how much time can you invest in your practice, where can you pursue your work, and how much money will these require. Set up work habits to pragmatically increase the depth and scope of your artistic practice.

  • Experiment: Allot time to experiment with different media, styles and semantics. The more you do this, the better you will understand what you like, and what you don’t like. This will help you to understand your quality ideals, and will therefore be another basis for your artistic practice.

  • Start gradually: Start your experiments in your spare time, without investing too much: most media have more affordable student-quality materials. You don’t need a studio: a dedicated wall or corner in your flat will suffice. Understand that most every invested hour will bring you forward. Try to motivate yourself to find thirty minutes per day, to continue your experiments. If you manage to establish this kind of schedule, you will know a lot more about your tools, materials, media, styles and semantics within a year.

  • Find education possibilities and funding: Research local adult education centers, universities and art schools, as well as adult learning grants. Visit institutions do understand whether you want to enroll, or rather want to become self-taught. The former will usually offer a stronger network, access to studios, materials and workshops, as well as more feedback opportunities – yet only accepts the lucky few. Adult education centers are a more affordable in getting to know media and materials – but usually aren’t strongly tied to the art world.

  • Find mentors: Your previous experiences might have created access to wealthy supporters – understand who they might be. Your path of trying to change your life, of living your dream might feel harsh and real to you, but might also serve to  inspire others, and motivate them to support you beyond expectations. They might be very curious about your new “adventure”, the works you create, and the new side of you they never knew about.

  • Start saving money: Investigate your financial situation to understand where you can save on your living expenses – housing, commute, vacation, hobbies etc. Understand where else might be able to save, and how you could downsize; the longer your savings lasts, the lower your fixed costs, and the easier your life will be – at least financially.

  • Consider therapy: If you lack self-confidence, specifically about your age, then consider for this to have a deeper reason. If you can afford the time and money, invest in a healthy therapy setting to reflect your past, and its consequences – it will likely help you to establish a better basis for the future. You might also consider using art as therapeutic model: while despised by some as too egocentric, others have used it to great success.
Photo of Louise Bourgeoise, Credit Unknown

How do I find or establish quality in my work?

As an artist, your highest goal is to understand your own ideas of quality, to grow with and expand them. Your standards will keep changing, just as you do, and sometimes conflict with each other: some works will need to scream, while others will need to be silent. Some works will need to do both. Think of your quality criteria as a rhizome, something of depth and complexity, and endless connection points: like a symphony, or a plant with indefinite subterranean roots. Something that can incorporate varying ideas of strength and power without opposition or conflict: to be slow yet strong, dedicated yet open. Over time, you’ll understand overarching standards that encompass, include, and potentially replace your prior ones: where smoothness of movement might have been relevant initially, your focus might shift to full choreographies – and later return to the initial focus. Quality standards are ever-shifting, just as you are. They will morph along your moods and life phases, carrying the potential for endless surprises.

XIV piano piece for David Tudor 4, by Sylvano Bussoti (1980); from “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”
How to Find Quality in Your Work

You establish your quality ideals by mindfully immersing yourself into art, and life. They are a consequence of all your aesthetic and semantic preferences, including all your affinities and actual capabilities. The more sensitive you are about understanding what matters to you (media, processes, tools, aesthetics and content), the more likely you’ll establish ideals that suit you. You’re never bound by current limitations though: your today’s capabilities can change tremendously, based on your willingness to invest time and effort.

Whenever you create something, you also form a value judgement: about what worked, and what didn’t. About what moved you, or moved you too much, or didn’t move you enough. About what was too bright, too large or too slow. About the little things that might require change to result in something to feel perfect: sounds, movements, traction; density and weight;  haptics and fluidity, etc. The same is true when experiencing the world: what food, hobbies, politics or social agendas you care about. Quite obviously, your affinities are deeply personal – yet your choices can sidestep them: you might like something, but decide against it; your bias might exist on a general level, but not specifically when discussing the current artwork.

Art History

While your quality criteria are yours to establish, art has a tremendous history of choices. The more you know about them, the better you will be able to connect to someone else’s choices, and continue or transcend what’s been established before you. Doing so changes your art practice from the pursuit of pure personal expression, to the proactive advance of a medium’s history. While artworks always focus on something, this adds another focus point: art history. As such, it defines your way of interacting with art per se, putting it on the same level as worldly topics. Understand that your focus on art history can lead to art that unbalancedly cares about the past – any of your choices can have the (subconscious) intention to find a secure hiding spot, a place to rest. These rarely exist in the arts, which benefit from courageous approaches. The challenge is to find a way to incorporate your self-expression in a way that reflects the past, and potentially helps to bring it into the future. For this, your references don’t have to be obvious or explicit – they don’t even have to be understood. By existing in your mind, and during the creation process, the artwork usually creates a spin that sticks, an aura that’s hard to describe but there to be felt.

Hiking without a Compass

Consider hiking in unknown territories, without a compass to guide you. You might never reach your goal: every direction is equally feasible. You might want to rest and wait for help, but the endless horizons in each direction don’t promise anyone’s arrival anytime soon. Yet you could reach your goal by simply deciding on a direction, and by starting to walk. You might want to change directions after a while, potentially subverting your previous choices. You might notice life around your path as exciting yet worrying, and keep moving. While you’ve walked for a longer time already, you notice that there might never be a goal. You get frustrated, worried, fearful – until you realize that walking actually is the goal.

This is both worrying and liberating: instead of an external goal to get to, you understand to be embedded within one already. You don’t trust this insight too much though, and keep moving. Over the years, you realize that you can walk in all sorts of ways: slowly, gracefully, weirdly; you can crawl or walk backwards, you can even dance or whistle along the way. On really good days, you move according to your inner self, without any thoughts on how it might look like, or how incredibly stupid the whole act of walking might be. Your increasing awareness of the endless ways of moving let you understand that this pursuit of moving, of the various modes of walking, is what ultimately defines you.

The pursuit of a goal resulted in you walking, and turned to you thinking of maybe, just maybe, yourself as being the goal. Once you truly understand this, you set up camp. The sun sets. You build a home, and decorate it with experiences and schemes. You still go for hikes, but look forward to returning to your camp. You don’t explore the world as much as you used to. You found a home, by walking the earth.

Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo da Vinci, ca 1490
Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo da Vinci, ca 1490

Understand that the artistic process consists of the pursuit of .. itself. It’s a deeply self-reflecting, self-referential system, based on your own sensitivities and creations. This system is then used to process the parts of life that you care about. While you can attach yourself to the beliefs and ideals of others, this will remove your voice from the world – maybe even before it was ever formed. By fostering an atmosphere of benevolence towards experimentation, you can raise your own  awareness and sensitivities: about what you want, and who you might be. Without these, you can imitate others, but won’t be able to develop your voice, your ideas, your interpretation of the world. You’d be silenced, and stripped of your power.

Read the previous chapter to understand what quality is, and why it is relevant for artists.

I want to understand “quality”. What is it, and why is it relevant to artists?

One’s personal understanding of quality is required for artists to establish their own work practice. Without it, they cannot understand whether a work is “good” to them, right now – and why it would be finished.

The one thing that unites all artists is their pursuit of establishing and implementing a personal work practice. For this, they need to understand their own quality criteria. Yet what does quality mean, and how does it relate to one’s work?

Quality in Everyday Life

When people discuss the quality of an everyday object, they usually think about the level of craft, as well as the care and attention that went into its creation. They also consider how well it fulfills its purpose: the durability of a battery, the sharpness of a knife’s blade, the stability of a chair. Objects rarely exist in, or emerge from a vacuum; most of them are the continuation of generational developments: consider the wheel, whose origins go back to before the Bronze Age. Quite obviously, humans had a lot of time to establish rather specific understandings of what makes a good wheel, and what doesn’t; that’s quality in everyday life: the sum total of valid expectations towards something whose purpose is clear

Quality in the Arts

Art seems to have always accompanied humans – it might even have preceded our species’ consciousness. Seen this way, it makes sense to think of quality in art as equally (highly) evolved as that of everyday objects. For sure, every art historian will be able to judge how well a piece of art fits the quality criteria established over the last couple dozen millennia!

As we know, this isn’t true anymore. While guilds and art academies originally defined, taught and pursued strict ideas about artistic content and form, contemporary art is defined by a near-total openness in regards to what can be done, and how it can be done. This is a consequence of the changed roles and functions that artists have – from anonymous cave painters to anonymous producers of craft objects (in a world before mass production, everything was a craft object), to ordinary people using technologies to depict the world. The age-old artistic function of documenting the world visually has turned optional. As a result, contemporary artists can’t rely on any of the predefined quality ideals that were developed over centuries. Instead, they can (or rather: they have to) adapt and extend the vastness of previous canons and approaches – or they can ignore them. Doing the latter feels shallow: who would want to work in a field whose history they aren’t curious about? Ultimately though, ignoring the past could be another valid way of being an artist.

Ambiguity and the People

This historic change of the role of art also has implications for the viewers of contemporary art: they might not be able to understand what they’re seeing and experiencing, why it could matter, and how to judge it. Differently to everyday objects, the purpose of an artwork might not be clear to them. Maybe the artwork means to criticize something. Maybe it wants to disturb. Maybe it wants nothing of them at all, yet their viewing expectations demand an aesthetically pleasing dialog that they aren’t getting – so their experience becomes frustrating. If viewers apply their preexisting value judgments, chances are they won’t “get” the artwork: the wide variety of contemporary artistic modes can make it unrealistic for a viewer’s expectations to meet an artist’s ideals. They might be entirely oblivious of the reference system that might give context to what’s in front of them. Outreach programs or basic dialogs can offer missing direction and explanations, but not everyone wants to listen to explanations. Some people expect an artwork to speak for itself, yet are unable to see the complexities that it might contain. In addition, some art simply wants to remain obscure. Another frequent issue is the one of craft expectations: what’s made with obvious care and attention to detail, is often understood to matter more, and to be “better art”. At the same time, some people care about art especially for its power to subvert expectations; these people tend to then be bored by art that repeats what’s already been established – they might thus miss the nuances of change in the art of those people who silently expand the canon.

Quality and the Market

Since an artwork’s qualities can be fleeting and misunderstood, it’s often not used as main metric for judgements. Many artists are acutely aware of a unique role reversal: instead of judging an artwork’s quality to derive its monetary value, some people rather want to know about an artwork’s price, in order to then derive its potential quality: in capitalism, the price of something strongly defines our expectations for it – this holds true for art as well, which can be frustrating: if the artist’s visibility is low, it will usually result in their work’s prices to be low just as well. It can take a lot of effort to experience a low-priced work of art, and see its actual qualities – especially if these qualities don’t meet our expectations about what art should be like.

Someone’s price level, awards, residencies or the number of solo shows are external metrics, and can strongly define the perception of an artist’s value: works are good because their price is high, or because they got awards, or because their creator received awards. Refine a sense of distrust when hearing about a work’s “quality”, especially when used by people in positions of power: professors, jurors, curators, art critics, collectors, fellow artists, gallerists, etc. Apply this distrust even when people discuss your work in positive ways: they might use the idea of quality to hide their actual intent.

Personal Choices

Contemporary artists have a lot of rather personal choices to make. They need to decide which media, processes, tools, aesthetics and content to use, and how to use them.

For each of these, they have to develop personal quality criteria. These can change over time – artists don’t need to stick to previous ones. To the contrary, the pursuit of quality ideals is so heavily ingrained in contemporary thinking of arts, that artists who “simply” follow one and the same recipe for years, are frequently frowned upon: certain people dislike or question the idea of formula-based art processes, although art historically, the application of such processes might be what defined Western art the strongest. Nevertheless, artists need high degrees of curiosity about their interests, and a willingness to express these interests through endless approximations, and often frustrating mistakes: no one can tell them what to do (how their personal choices might look like), yet people will only ever be interested in the consequences of exactly these choices: this is an unusual situation in today’s world.

One’s quality criteria include certain expected decisions of contemporary art: what to do, and how to go about it. They also include process-related decisions that can come unexpected to laypeople, and sometimes aren’t understood as important to the end result: which brushes to use, how to hold, use and clean them; how to mix colors; what palette and which canvas to use, and how to stretch and prime it; whether to work on an easel or the wall, or to paint on a table. While certain art schools offer specific and strict advice on how to pursue one’s artistic practice, their graduates ultimately have to decide on their own how to blend these guidelines into a contemporary art practice: their own artistic practice. If they simply stick to what they were taught, it will likely result in anachronistic works that recreate the spirit of a time that’s essentially past. In open-quality systems like art, you can’t rely on other people’s quality judgements – the likelihood of them pursuing exactly your goals is extremely low. They might be unable to comprehend your ideas, resulting in misguided feedback or advice. That’s why you need to develop and discover your own standards and ideas of excellence: your quality criteria. It can therefore be beneficial to find art schools that discuss meta-levels of art, instead of only giving explicit craft directions: how to think about art, how to pursue one’s curiosities, how to manifest and process. An ideal art school would combine meta with craft specifics.

Read the next chapter to understand how to find or establish quality in your art.