Making a Living as an Artist
Making a Living as an Artist
Considering intellectual property, creatives are an endless
source of potential wealth and prosperity. We often do not think of what we do
in this way because the intellectual property that we generate in our minds and
through our hands is not often brought to market. For artists, our work flows
freely like water and it can be difficult imaging ‘privatizing’ our internal
resources like companies bottle water. The water is free, the cost of bringing
the water in a bottle to your hand so that you can drink it is where all of the
production and distribution costs and profits are at.
While we usually are not making constant calculations
related to the value of our thoughts, imaginings, jotting down of ideas, etc.
there is value in it if that value can be contextualized in a marketplace.
There are various markets/businesses where people sitting around contemplating
solutions for problems or dreaming up new ideas are well paid for the effort
such as lawyers, business consultants, engineers, scientists, researchers, programmers,
product designers, etc. There are also established ways for people’s work to be
protected by copyrights and patents.
We as artists tend to underestimate the value of our time
and creativity because we do not think of it with a business mindset.
Traditionally, working in the arts is considered a leisure activity. Hence, a
business mindset among artists often takes a back seat since it is a private,
individual activity rather than a manufacturing company. But artists are
continually manufacturing art objects of some sort, usually – and rightly so –
following a private, individual creative impulse rather than creating
‘products’ for a market. The idea of just making marketable products is the
antithesis to the whole point of practicing an art which is for personal exploration
and expression.
However, taking into account there is a collector market out
there, there is no reason not to work in a way that will allow the artist to
capitalize on that market should he/she want to. The way to think about this in
my opinion is to design how you work in a way that is friendly to addressing
that demand. The primary suggestion here is to work in a way and with materials
that, as if by accident, yield finished objects that you are willing to exhibit
and sell. Contrast this to working in a way that has no consideration to ever
exhibit or sell anything. For instance, drawing in the sand on a beach that
will quickly disappear with the next wave or on a chalk board that you are
constantly erasing or on a dinner napkin that you wad up and throw away when
you scrape your plate into the trashcan.
You could have some life philosophy in which this is the
most true way to be an artist, just stacking some rocks in the woods or
arranging trash in an alley. However, if it is your intention to have a
self-sustaining creative lifestyle, this needs to be a consideration that is
only a matter of designing how you are going to capture your creativity in a
relatively permanent form.
Even if you are an artist who likes to work with alternate
or unusual materials, processes of decay, distress and destruction like, lets say: the
Swiss artist Dieter Roth or before him the collage artist Kurt Schwitters. It
is still possible to make the works in a way that can be relatively permanent,
collectible objects.
Myself, I work with collage materials, often deeply
distressed materials that might even be moldy but I usually do it in such a way
that they are mounted on 300LB watercolor paper and framed for exhibition. I
have endless boxes of collage material that, in itself, has no value at all. It
is in fact, trash picked up from the streets or torn from walls. But with the
addition of effort and vision it becomes intellectual property, a work of art. Since, over
the years, I have developed a market or following, I can sell the work eventually
for a price that I am willing to let go of it. I would rather keep them all,
but what good does it do me to hold onto everything when I don’t have time to
look at it? It just otherwise sits in the dark in drawers. Why not
share it and at the same time create enough income to live a comfortable life?
I know, for myself, If I had no intention to exhibit and
sell my works, I would not even bother to finish them. For my own artistic purposes,
I might be perfectly happy just to take a work far enough to get a feel for how
it would look when finished. But if you are keeping in mind that others will
eventually look at and study it, then it feels right to me to be considerate
and take the time to finish your thought by completing the work. Hence at this
point I don’t like to leave loose ends or things unfinished, but I don’t like
to force them to the finish either. Sometimes you want to think about it for a
while.
I have kept some paintings in a state of process for as long
as 20 years where I work on it here and there as I work out the idea. I might
think of something else I want to do to it or change my mind and paint
something out. But it would make me nervous and unsettled if all of my work
were in a constant open state and never completed or at least that I decide it
is complete. You have to find the stopping point and move on to the next thing.
Anyway, the main subject I wanted to talk about is the idea
about making a living as an artist. Since artworks can be whatever price you
put on them (unlike most other things) and that someone will eventually pay for
it, an artist needs to work out how much income one needs to live and to
function as an artist. I used to tell people jokingly that if I am not going to
sell something, I might as well not sell it for a lot of money. Which means,
don’t undersell yourself or your work even if prospects seem bleak at the
moment. The business side of art is a long game. It usually does not yield fast
results. It can happen, but it is not common. So that means you might make art
for a long time and have a lot of works completed before you ever start
figuring out how to sell something and that’s fine. But looking forward, the
works you have now might not find a market for 20 years.
In my case, since I keep my work well organized, I know with
certainty that I am still selling artworks I made 10, 20 or 30 years ago. So,
assuming you are still making art 30 years from now, everything you didn’t sell
early on is still in play long into the future and you will be glad you still
have it to offer. How do you take it that far into the future assuming you will
still be working? Planning for it, taking care of it, archiving it as you go.
Planning out a Creative Lifestyle
A simple lifestyle is typically the best, most achievable
and most sustainable. Choosing a place to live that has enough room to have a
studio and enough storage to keep things can often be affordable if you find
the right neighborhood or the right part of the country. While, in the US it is
nice to be in or around New York or San Francisco for example, it might not be a
good choice from an affordability point of view. Now-a-days, you can live almost
anywhere. I have said for years, as long as there is internet service and Fedex
pickup and delivery, as an artist I can live almost anywhere.
Since art is highly mobile, an artists doesn’t need to live
anywhere in particular, for that reason, if you can find a place that you can
afford and gain an increase in square footage then that is something to
consider. When we lived in Central Mexico, outside of Mexico City we often
heard about artists from New York moving to Mexico City because it was so much
cheaper to work from there compared to New York and you still had the big city
life which is important to some. Myself, I like plenty of elbow room.
Once you get to the point of having some dealers handling
your work. It is possible to develop a way to work that would allow you to live
virtually anywhere in the world and then ship the works back to dealers in the
US who will sell them and put the money in your US bank account. Then you just
live with your debit card from an ATM. We did this for years living in Central
Mexico. This can add a romantic twist to your story and can provide a lot of
inspiration.
Pricing Your Work
Making a living as an artist is about making a living like
anybody else. So how do you do that in a self-sustaining way? That’s the
central question. If you are in the gallery market you are going to have to pay
for your materials, studio costs, your effort, your intellectual property,
shipping, gallery commission and discounts off retail then taxes. Calculating
out all of these costs, you are going to end up with 15-20% of actual personal
income at typical retail prices. This needs to be the calculation. So, this tells
you that whatever you think your personal income needs to be from a given work,
you need to multiply by 500% For example, to end up with $200.00 of personal
income after expenses you need to price it at retail for $1,000.00
You need to charge that price even if you are selling the
work yourself, because you are then acting as the dealer too and the dealer
half of the work costs money as well. If you have a dealer, then his/her
calculation is roughly the same as yours or maybe little better but not by
much. Some claim that the actual profit margin made by an art gallery is
something like 6.5%. The advantage that the dealer has over the artist is that
they have a lot more artists’ work to sell, than the artist has galleries to
sell his/her works. An artist’s sales then, are limited to production
inventory.
You have to set your prices at whatever you would need to
sell the work for after paying gallery commissions and discounts even if it
isn’t in a gallery. All of these gallery expenses you just have to accept as
the cost of doing business. The advantage to selling your work through
galleries is that you have constant retail exposure and sales people working
for you while you stay focused on what you love - your studio practice and art production.
Being in the art market can seem confusing at first and
there can be fear about whether your work will be rejected or doesn’t sell. It
is easy to feel despondent or intimidated about the process of getting your
work into the market. Still, if you look at all the art out in the galleries
you will likely wonder to yourself how a lot of things that you don’t think are
any good at all are actually selling. But the fact is every artist has a potential
market and there is a diverse range of ‘tastes’.
How I have come to think about it for myself is that when I
am working in my studio I am an artist and that is all I think about. When I am
going out to see what I can do about selling it then I become an agent or
representative of the body of work that is in the studio. As a representative,
I don’t really care what anybody thinks about it. I stay detached from the work
on an ego or emotional level. I like my work, but I can’t expect everyone else
to like it. Just like there is a lot of art that I don’t find interesting. I am
just looking for the right people that do like it and take an interest in it.
Everyone else doesn’t matter when it comes to business.
Some artists feel like they need to be in the very best
galleries or none at all. However, you can build a career just fine by getting
in any galleries around the country that fit your work. Often it is easier to
get into galleries when they first get started and are looking for artists to
represent so you can keep your ear to the ground for this kind of startup
gallery. It is riskier because starting a gallery is like starting a
restaurant. There is probably a high failure rate in the first few years. It
takes deep pockets and at least 5 years to get a gallery off the ground.
Collector Market
On the other hand, a collector who buys works of art and
holds onto them for 20-30 or more years might get lucky and be able to sell it
for what we could call ‘a killing’, maybe 50x-1000x of the original purchase
price if the artist’s name was Pablo Picasso or Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol. We
hear of this happening and sometimes even with contemporary artists. BUT this
is the collector market that is driving those kind of prices, not the artist
who made the work. It is like the postage stamp market or the baseball card
market. The original item at the time of ‘primary market’ purchase was almost
nothing, but, over time collectors drive the values of a small portion of those
items to extremely high levels for a variety of reasons that, in the case of
art, the artist has no control over or influence on other than keeping on
making better and better work and deepening business relationships.
The collector market is its own animal and has little or
nothing to do with the artists in a direct way. Other investment players are
playing the ‘killings’ game. Artists only need to be concerned with making a
living and leave the future killings for speculators further up the economic food
chain.
At the beginning I didn’t really understand this idea and I
thought I would somehow need to become famous to make a living, but it is
actually not true. The mantel of fame in the art world hangs on the shoulders
of only a very few artists and they are famous to a very small slice of the
general population. A lot of the time it is about being in the right place at
the right time under the right circumstances with the right support. Most of us
can’t expect that kind of happy accident and we don’t need to.
When you think about it, what makes an artist famous is institutional publicity. If you are one of the artists that various institutions think is currently or historically relevant for any number of reasons - often for political, cultural or social reasons - then such artists get attention. It is in the institutional art world's interest to promote certain artists based on their own mission statements, collection policies and public reputation and status. This is quite beyond the control of the individual artist since so many other factors and decision makers are at play at any given moment.
In media such as film and music also, only a few bands or singers or actors and directors achieve the kind of fame that makes them a
household name. Most people in these industries go quietly about their lives
without anyone outside of their industry ever knowing who they are. But
everybody is more or less making a living and living out their creative
lifestyle one way or other.
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