Making Art that Sells vs. Art that You Want to Make
Journal Entry: Sunday, January 14, 2024
Question from Laila Rezai - lailarezaiart.com
How often do you find yourself making art that you think will sell vs. art that you want to make? Or does that ever happen?
The answer to the question, when I contemplate it, is more complex than you would first think. In the early years I contemplated the idea of the commercial viability of my art activity because my interest was always based on working full time in my studio with little or no interest in doing anything else unrelated to it.
My own tendency early on – mostly from impatience - was to work on a piece of art up to the point that I could see where it was going and to answer my question but not bother to finish it as a whole statement. After exhibiting a few things in group shows I decided that it would be to my benefit to be more finished with the works and polish things off with the idea of exhibition. This meant taking into account the public space, unknown viewers and hence possible buyers. I needed the work to be acceptable as ‘professional’ work. So, I started working that way; that everything I did needed to take professional standards into account. The standards in visual art are very flexible but it boils down to how art functions in an exhibition environment.
I was never making things strictly ‘to be sold’ in a market following what’s fashionable at any given moment – that fades very quickly - only to make them and take care of them so they are sellable over a long period of time. I always try to think in terms of timelessness as much as possible. As an artist I always followed my own trail and worked on my own ideas. Of course, one wonders how it will be received by the public. But I realized at a certain point that whatever any artist is doing it will be accepted by some number of people. Maybe a small number, maybe a large number. You can’t know that ahead of time.
However, as time passes, one realizes that some things get more response than others and an artist is going to tend on focusing on where the response is when it comes to what goes to market. But at the same time an artist will want to be constantly exploring. The main thing more sophisticated collectors want to buy into is the artist’s private authentic world, not the fashion of the moment. But there is a market for both. But I am more interested in the perennial, the enduring than the momentary. This is ironic in a certain way because, as a collage artist, I work with ephemera, but I am trying to speak to the deeper harmony behind the appearance of things.
For quite a few years my daily practice when in the studio is to work on whatever comes to me for the day within the range of my interests and then when ready to send things out to market, sort out from what I have made to send out of the studio. The rest just goes on the racks or into the drawers, which is often most of it. Stuff for the archives and for a possible future market when appropriate. With the internet I can seed those other ideas out into the image world. Grow them out in the Massurreality so to speak – the shared mind world we all live in through mass media/social media. By putting these other works not currently on the market on the internet, that starts to make them known to viewers as also being my work so if I ever release them ‘out into the wild’ they will already be vaguely familiar to viewers when they see them in person as being part of my work. That’s my theory anyway. Some artists prefer to keep what is not released into the public secret. I am not really like that.
My secret plan is to eventually make the posts in the Touchonian a book about the Creative Lifestyle for Artists. You, my favorite readers, are privy to the book in it’s formation. I would really appreciate your help by making comments, asking questions and suggesting topics I should explore and write about. It is hard for me to dream up what artists need and want to know to keep going and keep creating. I have fifty years of figuring out all of the details I needed to keep going and become self-sustaining as an artist and want to share enough insight to smooth the path for others facing this complicated, daunting task of being a self-sustaining artist. I know from experience it can feel overwhelming, unreachable and even depressing. So feel free to share you thoughts and experience or ask something! Thanks in advance.