We all have probably encountered this scenario in our lives: After months of nothing you finally get an opportunity to work with a business or individual that needs some creative work done and after the first coffee you both really get each others vibe, but when you pop the big question of monetary compensation, they look at you like you just butchered the collaboration with a knife.
An interesting article popped-up a few days ago on [Artnet](https://news.artnet.com/market/blue-red-art-auction-prices-1487596?fbclid=IwAR2XsdjF_J_3J3I0COnxxGBpQe6fAvhWIRPaA4maMaZzpxzZ50IgiV4lSa8), stating that predominantly red or blue monochrome artworks sell for considerably higher prices than all the other colour of the rainbow. And, while quite an interesting read, it did get me thinking about who exactly would be able to benefit from such information?
Link to Sara Thornton’s brilliantly written book about the art world.
*Affiliate link (thanks for supporting the channel).
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.
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!
Today, everybody has a webpage; from the free options at Wordpress, Wix or other web providers to the more sophisticated self-hosted options that I would encourage anyone with a free account to have a look into.
But it’s not having a website that is important, because it’s like having a nice new set of expensive brushes and colours; owning them doesn’t make you produce a painting and showing them to your friends wont get you far either.
You have to use them, and the same goes for your webpage.
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.
People will always bicker and whine, but at the same time, there will always be those of us, who show up and do the work. And now, through the powers of social media and those small metal and glass devices in our pockets and bags, we can become our own gallery representatives, our own brands and do so while on our daily commute. How fantastic is that?!
We are the creators of narratives, it is our job to produce stories and to communicate those stories to others. Be it feelings of pleasure, anger, excitement, or a well intended warning, a good creator knows how to produce art that speaks to those for whom the message was intended. But no creator will ever be able to create something for everybody, at least not anymore.
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](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/activities/modules/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf).
The next story, written by Frank Jackson is titled [What Mary Didn’t Know](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/).
Titled [The Chinese Room](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/), this wonderful tale of speaking Asian walls stirred the lines of cognitive scientists when first presented in 1980 by John Searle.
The number of people producing art has never been higher and with everybody including your aunt trying to sell their work and get exhibited, only the best actually manage to do so in the end.
But the issue with art is that beauty is incredibly subjective and there are more concepts and ideas than there are beliefs in the world, so defining the best people in the art business is incomparably harder to do than finding the winners of any sports competition.