Surviving Art

After a (too) long hiatus, we're back with a conversation with performance and conceptual artist Oreet Ashrey, and we chatted about the art world, not being boxed up as an artist and how there actually was a time when being an artist was considered as being an affluent individual! Her website: http://oreetashery.net

Welcome to another very special episode at Surviving Art. We’re doing market research in London as part of a cultural residency, provided by Slovenia’s Ministry of Culture and will be conducting a series of interviews and talks about the art market in London. In the series, I’ll be chatting with book publishers, both emerging and well-established artists, gallerists and other art world professionals and today I have the immense pleasure to introduce the wonderful Denis Maksimov: Denis is an aesthetico-political scholar and independent curator based in London and Athens. His research focuses on the supranormal phenomena of power in European mythography, world history, literature, arts, and audiovisual cultures. His advisory practice covers the issues of political technologies, EU-Russia, and international relations. In his artistic projects, many of which are developed under the aegis of Avenir Institute, he investigates political potentiality in futures, something we explore in-depth in the coming chat. We talked about the future & avenirs, art institutions and art fairs in the age when accelerating neoliberal capitalism reigns over defining value, questions of power and attention in the arts and much, much more. Enjoy: Links: Avenir institute’s FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/avenirinstitute/ Avenir institute’s WEB: http://www.avenirinstitute.info Avenir institute’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/avenir.institute/ Denis Maksimov’s webpage: https://maksimov.eu

Welcome to a very special series of episodes at Surviving Art. We’re doing market research in London as part of a cultural residency, provided by Slovenia’s Ministry of Culture and will be conducting a series of interviews and talks about the art market in London. In the series, I’ll be chatting with book publishers, both emerging and well-established artists, gallerists and other art world professionals. And to kick it all off, today’s run-and-gun podcast (meaning, please excuse the London traffic in the background, it’s inevitable), is with Lizzie Reid from Lizzie’s Lines. We talked about art school and why going to art school might not be the best option (at least not in places, where education isn’t free (I’m still amazed that people come out of college with debt almost as large as the GDP of a small country). And we also explored her views on the possibilities curatives have in London at this very moment, how a longer hiatus can actually be good for you and much, much more. Enjoy. In her words: “Illustration, design and poetry are the facets that make up Lizzie's Lines. Sourcing her creativity from the subconscious mind, Lizzie uses instinctive mark-making and metaphorical language to reveal her current thoughts, emotions and beliefs of her place in the world. Predominantly using paint and ink, Lizzie draws in moments of creative desire and adopts a patient approach to enable her eye for visual balance to define the poetic relationships between her signature lines, shape, colour and space.” And here’s all the link paraphernalia anyone curious about what Lizzie’s work looks like could want, enjoy: Website: www.lizzieslines.com Instagram: @Lizzies_Lines Portfolio: https://lizziereid.myportfolio.com

Art is obviously emotional and as such its value is determined absolutely subjectively. The big question though is how, because even though ambivalent, subjectivity can still give us a lot of various starting points to think about our target audience. How people recognise a good story in objects and experiences differs from person to person — that’s why it’s subjective — but usually we can find basic guidelines that can help us define this perception. The main idea behind this exercise is to find what is most important for each person, that we are trying to understand. What are their needs? What do they wish for? Do these wishes and needs have a certain urgency? Do they provide pain or discomfort for them and can our art elevate or even completely fix their issues?

Artist statements, even though they might appear like a load of pretentious art-talk (which many of them sadly are), serve a very important purpose: presenting your passion in a bite-sized package, to be easily consumed and understood by the reader or listener (you can, and should know how to pitch them too). But what many of us present as an artist statement is usually exactly the opposite of what it should be; we focus on intellectually sounding words and sentences like this: “As wavering phenomena become rediscovered through subversive personal practices, the observer is left with an awareness of the boundaries of our era.”, rather than actually trying to communicate clearly.

Be it online or in person, there’s a lot of competition in the arts. And the fact that the art world is much smaller compared to the world of business, law or medicine, only makes it harder for any one artist to succeed. While everybody online is telling us to “niche down”, and explaining why it’s so important, usually no specific tactics are disclosed, and the how is left for us to figure out for ourselves. This blunder is intended for anyone who wishes to find their focus and stand out in today’s oversaturated creative market by understanding the immense power of storytelling — especially when positioning ones creative skill and aspirations in the market.

In the last two blunders we discussed the importance of calculating ones base expenses and all-around financial needs on a monthly basis and the concept of added value. Today, I’d like to combine the two and take a deeper look into how various models can help us to set fair and consistent prices for our work. First of all, we need to acknowledge a very important fact; the pricing model we use to determine our value shouldn’t necessarily be the same one we use to communicate that value to others. Not to be misunderstood, I don’t mean that we should hide such info or act as we’re beyond money — the main problem here is semantics. Part I: Pricing your art the right way Part I: Expenses and Resources Part II: Pricing your art the right way Part II: Value and Worth

Oscar Wilde once wrote: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.” A true artist therefore should be the exact opposite, but not due to ignorance towards the ever-present concept of money; the real truth of the matter is that putting a price tag on an embodiment of love, hate, reminiscence or longing (and all the other messages that art can communicate) just isn’t as easy as adding up ones material and overhead costs and slapping a 20% markup on the sum.

Creating a beautiful work of art is hard by itself, but when it comes to putting a price tag on whatever we made, it does tend to get even harder for most of us artistic types. The question for today (and a few future blunders) is therefore: How much is creativity even worth? And today I’d like to share the method that works best for me; and please don’t worry, there’s minimal maths involved, and the few equations that we will mention are of the sweet, money-generating variety, that — in my opinion — makes them much easier to understand. Let us therefore put on our green accountant hats (if you have one) and get down to business.

Just as with sweeteners and coffee, you have natural and artificial options to spice up your art, too. Both sweeteners and symbols are created by moulding reality to our will, but unlike aspartame and the like, artificial symbols don’t have negative health side effects (unless we count war and propaganda, of course). It does though open up your work to the possibility of being misinterpreted, and in today’s blunder, we’re going to take a peek at how we can at least guide our audiences into the right direction as well as take a jab at the underlying question that many of you might be asking yourselves. Namely, if there even is a “right” direction with art — we might just as easily say that any perspective is a valid one and that there are no “wrong” ways to understand a work of art. Well, let’s find out!

More and more you see art shows being coupled with support programs that, to an art goer from a couple of decades ago, would resemble more a visit to the local club than an actually gallery — albeit a club that, for whatever reason, seems to also have some “art” on the walls. But why is that?!

An interesting sentence, uttered by a friend of mine while we were chatting over drinks, was that “Art has no purpose, only consequences.” and these six words really struck a chord with me. In today’s blunder therefore, I’d like to explore this statement, because I think a lot of us may posses a misconstrued understanding about our artistic production that could (and probably does) influence our ability to reach the right audience and consequently grow as artists.

Welcome to a very special episode of Surviving Art (done for the 33rd Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana! What makes this one so special are the interests of my guest: Amy Whitaker. She is an assistant professor at NYU with a Masters degree in business as well as a masters in Fine Art. An incredible mix of interests and one of the reasons why I’m so excited for this interview. She’s also the author of two incredibly interesting books. Museum Legs, which is a wonderful collection of thoughts on the operation of museums, asking questions like: What's the purpose of an art museum? Should they educate us or entertain us, or merely act as a public display for works of art? And regardless of what purpose they have, should all art museums try to serve the same one or niche down and specialise in following one particular mission? Her second book Art Thinking explores the act of being creative in today’s world of schedules, budgets and bosses. It combines the mind-sets of art and creative thinking and the tools of business, offering practical advice, inspiration, and a healthy dose of pragmatism for anyone that wishes to navigate the difficulties of balancing creative thinking in a business environment. Link to the Hyperallergic article, mentioned in the show: https://hyperallergic.com/312390/why-teach-business-to-artists/ Link to Amy’s worksheet and notes: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Vm9rzvQMHZSTxX4aKkmbhQ9TXu3QWaCI Link to the video interview: https://youtu.be/wItaj6TLkvQ

Creating art is a two step process; first you obviously have to make it, but then you also have to show it and present it to the public, and hopefully leave an impact on the world (preferably for the better). But these two steps could not be further apart in both their methodology and all-around nature. The real problem is that making art is a predominantly personal and intimate experience, but showing and presenting it requires an entirely different skillset. So, in today’s blunder I would like to explore the act of creation and presentation and — with a little help from psychoanalysis, theory of mind and history, all sprinkled with a few down-to-earth examples — show that even though it seems like they are two very disparate things, in order to master either of them, we really “only” need to master one thing: ourselves. Link to the book, mentioned in the podcast: The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

A few days ago I had the great pleasure to interview Amy Whitaker (she has an MBA from Yale and an MFA in Painting from Slade University — an incredible mix!).She is also an associate professor at NYU and the author of two very interesting books: Museum Legs and Art Thinking. Our conversations and her writing got me thinking about my own exploration of both worlds and the ever-present question of economics in art. Amy speaks of two inherently different but incredibly interconnected ways of thinking and experiencing the world. The first kind she calls Art Thinking; this is the process of letting go, of giving ones mind the time and space to wander, explore, and get excited about the world and the question I want to ask today is: How can one create their own system that incorporates both? Or better yet: How can we find already created ones, that we can reappropriate and reuse to fit our own needs? LINK TO HER TWO BOOKS (Both are incredibly interesting for artist, that would like to nurture their business side and I highly recommend reading them both!): Museum Legs: https://amzn.to/2XBUZEm Art Thinking: https://amzn.to/2YRpHGt

A wonderful quote of which the author eludes me even after 5 min of thorough Google searching goes like this: “Life is a game. You can be a player or a toy.” And the question I’d like to pose today is: How does making your own rules, and sometimes even completely rejecting the already established ones, that our environment proposes, impact our perspective on life and place in society?

When we think about creativity and inspiration, we might picture an image of a spirit, a muse, that comes forth from the heavens and touches us in funny places at the most random of times imaginable. But these moments aren’t random, and there really is no extraterrestrial or divine power fondling our brains. It’s all an illusion, a misunderstanding of causality and how our perception and thinking work. While the idea of inspiration coming from outside of us isn’t that far from the truth — the building blocks of any idea are build, similarly to dreams, from our encounters with reality — it’s not the outside that needs to come into alignment for us to get a “great” idea. It’s our insides. Link to the book I mention: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

To be frank, all comments on either the meaning or purpose of anything are irrelevant in the grander scheme of things, because all are but a form of ideology, a kind of software that runs in our minds if you will, and contrary to common belief that humans are nothing more than complex Turing machines, no programs are actually alike. What I believe my purpose is, could not be further from what you or your friends might think your goals in life should be; while we might all resemble each other in the ways we operate — we may wish to expand, to satiate our insatiable curiosity about life, to play and consume and of course gain as much power as we can (or believe is appropriate to have) — each and everyone of us has a distinct means of operating in the world. What I’d like to focus on today is the distinction between form and function or between self-actualisation and power appropriation.

Countless figures throughout history have tried to explain this incredibly complex question: What is art? And more importantly, what isn’t art? But still the institutions have no real answer, no common ground upon which they could define a normative of what defines art. Brut art is a problem, so are other outsider artists, and home schooled creatives that defy or just never become part of the institutional system. It’s the carpenters that put more than the usual love and attention to detail in building their “consumer objects”. It’s the iPhones and iPads and other designer products that always walk the thin line between art and function. Then you have others that do not agree with the institutional idea that one needs to even be part of the system to be considered an artist. You only need to have ideas and communicate them with the world via your production. And in the philosophy of aesthetics — the field that studies this question ontologically — there is even more confusion. LINKS TO THE ARTICLES MENTIONED: The first one is by Thomas Nagel, titled What It Is Like To Be A Bat. The next story, written by Frank Jackson is titled What Mary Didn’t Know. Titled The Chinese Room, this wonderful tale of speaking Asian walls stirred the lines of cognitive scientists when first presented in 1980 by John Searle.

People have two intrinsic desires; to know themselves and to find a place in their environment. We constantly search for better ways, a clearer image of who we are and continuously try to place that projection of ourselves into society and our environment at large. But a lot of us make a grave mistake when conducting our search. A mistake we might not even recognise, but that defines and ultimately controls our inability to find our true way in life.

They say we are born as empty slates, pure white canvases onto which life leaves its marks and in the end produces a singular, unique imprint of colours, shapes and forms. While this may or may not be true, today I would like to think about the process itself. Also, I would like to inform all of you, that the daily blog will go through a few changes: The coming episodes will now be much longer, and published only once a week (Tuesday at 16:00 CET), with random episodes thrown in from time to time (like interviews, talks and other non-periodicals).

Let's stop with this romantic preposition that one hears all to often when talking with artists in academia. We go through a list of 8 steps to keep in mind when creating a commissioned work.

Art is emotional and as such its value is determined absolutely subjectively. The big question though is how, because even though ambivalent, subjectivity can still give us a lot of various starting points to calculate value from. It’s all about perceived value though — not that the actual value of materials in a work or the hours we spend aren’t important, but the tag word for this topic is perceived. Because let’s face it, unless your art is made out of pure gold, the materials should matter a lot less than the story that’s behind it.

I have struggled with this question for years. Not only with figuring out the value that I can provide to society, but the value I have for myself. But, even though you can find blueprints of how to build an atomic bomb online, answers to the question: “How do I fit in with society?” remained elusive, almost non-existent. The problem wasn’t that no answers to this question were out there though, it was that I did not know where to look.

A lot of us may think that artists are the only ones in the art world that are struggling with the changes, happening via social media platforms, online sales platforms and other PR, marketing and advertising related content, that now have to be made in addition to the work we do in our studio, but it’s actually a global phenomena.

Jasper Johns’ first show at the Castelli gallery was an enormous success for the artist and started off his career in an unprecedented way. But they exact method used by Leo Castelli (one of the biggest galleries to have ever walked the streets of New York) was remarkable and incredibly simple at the same time.

I have been noticing a lot of my peers creating exclusively museum sized artworks and/or installations, but most of them are failing to ever sell a piece they make. And sure, large works do have their place — a lot of my work is on the larger side because, to be honest, making it smaller would diminish its narrative powers. But the reality is, almost nobody has enough room to really hang or exhibit such a piece in their home and making such large works can be detrimental to our ability to sell.

One of my early mentors in the arts once told me a story about her artist friend that used to come by her studio and show a lot of interest in her work. He actually showed a lot of interest for every one of the local artist’s works and was a regular visitor to their studios too. Just a friendly nosy guy. It was a nice chat and after their conversation ended he left as he did many times before. She continued with her paintings, giving absolutely zero thought to the whole thing. Little did she know, what was about to unfold. I can tell you though, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

First it came for the hotel businesses, then the taxi drivers and food delivery services, the radio stations and telecommunication providers. It’s coming for all of us in the arts too. But there’s a good thing about the transition that is yet to come, that especially pertains to us artists. The wonderful news is that it’s not coming for us — it’s the galleries that will feel it the most. In fact, a lot of us will actually be much better off. But we will have to adapt everything we do in order to really take advantage of the coming shift.

To tie together the previous two blogs, I want to discuss what is in my opinion the highest and most complex function that art has in human society — the artificial creation of the experience of the sublime.

Various sources state, that about 10% of people worldwide are either not part of any religion or agnostic, and a big chunk of these people are full-blown atheists. But, while these numbers are about as precise as if the statisticians had gotten them from a local ultimate pub trivia night; the one thing that is absolutely for certain is that whatever the actual number of non-religious people is world-wide, it’s definitely growing.

Religions have defined cultures and people since the beginning of time; man time, not time time — unless you ask a theologian. They will tell you that both are pretty much the same and that ancient man rode dinosaurs and made babies the same way sponges do; asexually through budding. This is when a small piece of sponge is broken off but is still able to survive and grow into another sponge, and surprisingly this fact is able to explain the genesis story quite effectively if you really think about it. Jokes aside though, today’s blunder is focused on the essential functions of religion — especially its ability to placate the basic fear, that all of us humans carry inside ourselves, but rarely speak of. The fear of death.

Contrary to common belief, art is not a material thing. There are no traits that an object has to posses to be deemed a work of art. But, that doesn’t mean that art does not need to be embodied in an object.

At its core, art is an experience. And like all human experiences, it’s created through perspectives — so the idea that 100 people will see 100 different things in the same work of art, probably doesn’t come as a shocker to any one of us.

This is not a social commentary folks, so for anyone expecting a rant on all the junk that gets sold off as artistic masterpieces; I’m sorry to disappoint you, this is not the point of today’s blog. But that’s not to say I don’t have a book’s worth of it, waiting patiently to be distributed over time on various social channels, preferably in text-based format on any platform that rhymes with bitter. To get to today’s point though, enormous amounts of texts have been written on the topic of art, especially the question of: “What makes something become art?” Link to the book: “The Concept and Phenomenon of Art”. Enjoy.

The tag word today is ideology; every piece of art has its own story and thus its own bit of ideology infused into it. And the main question for all of us artists is: “How can we either become part of an already established ideology, or even how to make our own?” The point of this is quite straightforward and based upon an interesting phenomenon that pertains to objects in general, but especially artistic object in particular. So, before we venture into the how, let’s try to explore the why fist:

The kind of art we produce has an enormous effect on the end customer we attract; pretty flower paintings will attract people that like flowers. But this does not translate directly; some of them are much fonder of pretty flowers and may be specific about which kind of flower is deemed pretty and which isn’t. And even when getting the type, colour, and other factors right, only a few of those people might actually want their pretty flowers to be presented via paintings (the more specific our work, the less of a target group we are aiming at effectively).

There are a few companies that really know what they’re doing — even if we don’t agree with their products, their models of how to sell said products are the best in the world — and we artists can really learn a lot from studying them.

I guess most of us don’t become artists, but end up artists. What I mean by this is that as the kids that grow up in an engineer household, filled with technical models, equations and maths, can end up loving physics as much — if not more — than their parents, they ultimately have no control over the fact that they were born into such an environment. No-one does. We could’ve just as easily been born a carpenter’s son or a lawyer’s daughter — or even not at all for that matter — the chances of us being who we are because of where we started out are almost ineffable in the grander scheme of things.

The internet, especially social media, have given us an incredible tool — we can now potentially reach anyone in the world. If before you had to go through all the gatekeepers of the art world, now you can do everything yourself and have full control over every aspect of your art, including profits. But it does come with a price and it’s probably not what most of us think it is, when confronted with the myriad of things we have to set-up to get our art business started.

There is a wonderful analogy used at the beginning of the book The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, where the author describes any entrepreneur as a company of three strongly distinct individuals: the entrepreneur, the operator/manager and the technician/craftsperson. When we start to offer our skills and services to others, we inevitably become all three, but one of the biggest problems for a lot of us artists (pretty much the majority, really), is that we love the craft and enjoy it immensely, but have no clue or even desire to do the business part and management of our small business.

Just like Ferrari and Honda don’t use the same pricing model for their products, we artists have to differentiate between two distinct ways to approach our prices. Depending on whether we aim to have a go at the gallery system or sell our art directly, we need to adjust our behaviour to fit either one of the markets demands. Today I want to talk about the gallery model and the way I believe any one of us should think about our prices, if indeed we are going all in and focusing on becoming part of the fine art market.

Being an artist is a full-time job and then some; creativity doesn’t just come on its own and setting up a routine for us to be able to create day in and day out takes a lot of effort. And so does marketing and taking pictures and writing applications for open calls and all the other stuff we do. But there may be an aspect of our job that a lot of us never think about, because it’s more boring than a weekend of watching paint dry, but alas, it is incredibly important in the long run, so today I want to talk about archival work and cataloging.

As tastes in art are incredibly subjective, the value of any particular piece can seem like it has been decided upon on a whim. But while this may even be true for many a piece of art being sold today, there are many factors that can be defined and influence the value and as such, the price of our art.

Knowing who to sell to and what their needs are is crucial; too many artists struggle with not knowing who their target group is or what they want. While we might think that portraits are for everybody (I mean, the majority of people I know have a face and therefore can be potential customers), the reality actually is much more complex, when demand is taken into consideration. But before we think about how much people might like our work, we need to find out who they are first. Regardless of what we produce, the question is always the same: Who is it for and why do they need it? And the easiest way is to compare art to drill bits — yep, we obviously know what we are doing here.

Up until this point, we have been discussing pricing as a one-sided equation of how much I as an artist need to get, to pay for whatever my lifestyle or other financial requirements are. But sales are never just a one-sided discussion — a deal always has to have two sides. And while of course it’s imperative to find a good place to set-up our side of the equation (meaning we don’t sell our work for bread crumbs, and are consistent in our pricing structure), there is an equally important part that a lot of us may not give too much thought to, but is imperative that we understand. The customer.

We’ve talked about setting our prices by the hour and calculating them via size and base fees, and now it’s time to tie it all together and talk about project based pricing. What I mean by this is the way we present our prices to our customers; the easiest and most straightforward way is to just add all of our expenses, base fees and pricing model of choice and end up with some rounded-up number, but a bit of tweaking can make our prices a lot more understandable and transparent to our customers.

Cars can sometimes be confusingly used to extend ones, well, let’s call it perception of self to be kind. Art on the other hand, cannot only provide us with a symbolic extension — sometimes it’s even made in the literal shape of one. But today’s podcast is not so much about sizing-up as it is about putting a price tag on it, so brace yourselves, because we’re going to explore the pricing-by-size model of art evaluation.

In yesterday’s podcast, I discussed the importance of calculating ones base expenses and all-around financial needs on a yearly basis, and today we’re going to look at one of the most popular but potentially most problematic ways of determining how much our art is actually worth. This model has a lot going for it — especially for anyone starting out — as it is the easiest to use in order to determine how we’re going to make the minimum amount we need to make, for our business and personal life to flourish and even eventually come to the point, where art becomes our full-time profession. But it has a lot of problems, too!

Story is Everything is a booklet I prepared for United Art Space and in this podcast, Michelle and I discuss the importance of storytelling, narrative and context in art. And, if you like to get to know more about Michelle's project United Art Space, here are the links: United Art Space Website, United Art Space Facebook, United Art Space Instagram. Enjoy!

From the three ways one could determine the value of our work, the hourly-based pricing model is probably the most popular one, as most other jobs we might have had (or still have) determine the value of our work on the merit of how much time we spend there. But before we jump the gun, there is an important base question that needs to be answered beforehand: How much do we actually need? And I don’t mean how much we would like to make to buy a new phone or go on two more holidays per year — the emphasis is on need, not want.