Making Art Making Money FAQ
- Grants for individual fine artists are rare, and the competition is steep.
- Fine artists can not make a living by merely showing their art; they must sell, which they do not learn in art school.
- Art school academics have earned a solid reputation for shaming students for having any concerns about making money from their art.
- Rarely will fine artists find representation.
- Even more rare is an art representative who reliably sells enough art to sustain the artists they’re being paid to represent.
- Only representatives dealing in the secondary art market buy fine art.
- Art representatives typically consign tax-free fine art inventory and charge fine artists hefty sales commissions of 50%-70% when and if they sell their art.
- Fine artists who are making a living develop relationships with their customers and sell their art directly.
- Art representatives prevent fine artists from having contact with their collectors.
- No small business owner can survive without the ability to contact their customers to cultivate repeat and referral sales.
- Without knowing their customers, artists face a conservative annual loss of 80% in art sales, where they could have kept 100% of their money.
- Art representatives often limit artists from selling their work or working with other representatives by forcing artists to sign exclusivity agreements, even though this predatory practice is illegal in many jurisdictions.
- Even if representatives sell enough work to sustain an artist, inevitably, the artist is displaced by another whose work is easier to sell.
- Even if representatives sell enough work to sustain an artist, the art gallery will join the increasing numbers going out of business.
- Artist representatives represent their interests, not the artist’s interest.
- Artist representatives don’t make a financial investment in the inventory that they’re charged with selling.
- The scarcity and permission-based art establishment has been broken for far too long, causing countless fine artists to despair.
- Despite a commonly perceived promise, art representatives systematically disempower fine artists by severely limiting an artist’s ability to sell their work.
- The establishment has a financial disincentive to repair itself.
- Constructive reforms can only come from outside the establishment.
- Fine artists must take their power back by selling more of their art and making more money with dignity.
- Obviously, there are no guarantees that fine artists, that anyone, will succeed.
- However, it’s guaranteed that if a small business owner can not connect with its own customers, the business is headed for catastrophic failure.
- Our vision is that one day, fine artists will no longer live in a society expecting them to fail and a culture celebrating their suffering.
- Until then, fine artists will tend to live up to these universally low expectations.
- Someday, we will rewrite art history, and the common long-standing narrative that fine artists must be poor and suffer for their art will shift into the real examples of fine artists making a respectable and inspiring living.
- Art historians will recognize the entrepreneurial facets of the lives of the most successful artists in history and present a less distorted view of the business of fine art.
- Fine artists don’t sell goods or services; our product is emotion, which is completely subjective and falls outside the control of art critics.
- The world needs art because it connects us with our humanity.
- People who care about art care about the artist, not the middleman, and they prefer to support fine artists by buying from them directly.
- People who care about art don’t care about the middleman.