Some things people have told me about selling art this month

1. You must NEVER, NEVER, give your work away for free. It means it has no value.
2. Price things depending on what you need. If you need a laptop, that string’s worth £1,000.
3. Prices must never be round numbers or it looks like you’ve made them up.
4. You just have to make the prices up.
5. If I love a work and it’s cheap I’ll buy it for myself; if it’s expensive I’ll buy it for my collection.
6. Artists need a good few years of making work before they start selling, or they might never get their work straight. A lot of good artists never became great because they started selling to early.
7. I think you’re just going to have to grow up about it.

It needs a thinking gaze

On Saturday while we ate our V.I.P. cinnamon whirls two New York collectors Susan and Michael Hort talked us through their approach to art collecting.

They keep all the artworks they’ve acquired in their home, but they can only show about fifteen per cent of it at any one time because of space. They’ve thought about opening a museum to house it all, but keep coming back to the conclusion that they want the work to be lived around. To keep the works in circulation they rehang almost everything every four or five years (a handful of works are permanent fixtures; a handful are no longer loved), lend work out to museums and galleries on request, and have big brunch receptions so the work reaches a wider (but still exclusive) audience.

Art Market

When my sister and I were quite young (I was six probably, and she would have been seven or eight) we spent a whole day making small saleable items out of paper and rubber bands and card and plasticine and sellotape, including very possibly some sculptures made entirely of sellotape, which were a speciality.

Then out in the garden we put up some tables and arranged on top of them all the things we’d made. By now there were dozens because many of them were variations on a theme and so didn’t need much time or effort to make in a good quantity, and some were very carefully made, and there were some things in groups and some things on their own, and then we put prices on all of them and called our parents down because there was a summer fête.

Getting round to the Money Question

I want to sort out my ideas about selling my artwork. It’s been coming up a lot lately in things I’ve been reading, conversations I’ve had, and especially with talk about the price list for this exhibition.

At the moment my part of the Citations price list has no prices on, and just asterisks pointing to a rather ambiguous “for acquisitions please contact the artist”. I was careful to use the word “acquisitions” rather than “sales” because I am open to people having my work, I’m just not sure exchanging money is the way to go about it. It might turn out to be the best way, but there’s no reason to assume it.

Let me try to write down what concerns me about selling my artwork. I should point out that I’m talking specifically about my own artwork, rather than artwork in general, because my concerns are very specifically tied to my own approach and practice.

Careerism

“Minimalism and postminimalism agreed on one thing: eliminate pictures. Painting took to a pure territory, while the new art forms expanded the realm of art to every conceivable issue and strategy. The scene seemed wild, but there were simple rules all along. You were given a white room in a Big Art City for a month. You had to do something in that room to generate attention beyond that month. You had to be written about, bought, or at least widely discussed. Then you would get to have the white room again for another month, and so on. If you did this enough, you had what was called a career. This generated what is perhaps this century’s biggest art movement: careerism.“

For a Practical Avant Garde: excerpt from a paper by Dushko Petrovich, n+1

Art is Dead etc

Anton sent me a link to this article about a couple of Russian exhibitions in London at the moment, which bring up questions of the post-WW1 ‘Art is Dead’ movement to abolish art. Here are the beginning and the final three paragraphs, but the whole article’s worth a look.

Die Kunst ist Tot, es lebe die Neue Maschinenkunst

From Russia, Royal Academy and Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography, Hayward Gallery.What would a world be like without art? And why did the most talented artists of the period immediately after the First World War end up advocating the abolition of art altogether?

Exhibiting my Boat

A couple of days ago I was so proud of my boat/raft thing that I thought I should enter it in a competition. Once I’d downloaded the forms and everything though, I noticed something alien was creeping into my decisions about what to include and what to put where, and I realised I’d have to be very careful to keep the work honest and close to me now that it would potentially be seen – and more specifically be judged – by other people.

What starts to happen is a persona emerges who takes my place, and my actions and the work itself settles into a citation of itself. I start wanting to put signposts all over the place to demonstrate things and mark things out, even when I don’t know what those things are myself. I suppose this happens to some extent whenever art-making is taking place, and perhaps this is what people mean when they describe work, positively, as self-conscious.