Is there anything more insignificant on God’s green earth
than the life of an old painter who can’t sell his paintings? What possible excuse can he give for his
existence? Many of my painter friends,
who are in the same boat as I am, say with conviction that they don’t care if
they sell their paintings or not. “I’m
painting for myself,” they chorus.
Aren’t we a selfish, self-involved lot!
The truth is we simply can’t sell our paintings, and can’t
even give them away to our relatives because nobody wants paintings from a
painter who can’t sell his paintings. Don’t you just love reading those incredible
stories in the art magazines about all the 20-something painters who sell
everything hanging on the gallery walls at their very first solo exhibitions? How do they manage that? How many rich uncles do they have? I sold quite a few paintings at my first solo
exhibit, but it was far from a sold out show.
It was at a startup gallery in New Jersey
run by a prickly woman of means who closed shop in a couple of years after she
had exhausted the goodwill art purchases of all her friends in the area. As a matter of fact, the only galleries I
approached that I could get into at the beginning were startups that didn’t
last long, because a gallery owner’s life is not so attractive when sales
dwindle after the first few exhilarating months in business. Now my friends and I are hoping for someone
on a white horse to do the marketing for us.
That just isn’t going to happen.
People still like to be entertained by hand-made art and
artists, though, despite living in a digital world, so the art market is
fertile ground for the few entrepreneurs who know how to promote their creative
enterprises in outrageous fashion. I was
walking on East 23rd Street
the other day when a huge crowd of excited onlookers was gathered in front of
the storefront window of a Housing Works thrift shop around 3 p.m. Mostly made
up of young people, the assemblage was deliriously happy about something. Many were taking pictures of the window
display with their cellphones and digital cameras. I couldn’t see any reason for this activity,
so I asked one of the onlookers at the back of the crowd what was going
on. He said, “Banksy.” I said, “What?” He said, “Banksy.” I said, “Oh, yeah,” vaguely remembering that
this temporarily notorious British street
artist was creating quite a stir in New York
at the time. I continued walking, not
knowing or caring what Banksy had perpetrated in that window display and
feeling quite smug and superior to that idiotic mob’s reverence for celebrity. But I discovered later while viewing a
hastily constructed Banksy website called “Better Out than In” that he had
actually done something quite funny with this particular prank in his October “artists
street residency” invasion of the city, which included placing high-profile graffiti
on various buildings and wrangling an Op-Ed piece in the eagerly complicit New
York Times that disclosed his negative opinion of the new World Trade Center
building. Wasn’t everybody simply dying
to get his opinion on the matter? The
Times certainly thought so. Attention
must be paid, boys and girls.
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|
A thrift store painting vandalized then re-donated to the
thrift store.
|
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| Banksy, 'The banality of the banality of evil ' Oil on oil on canvas, 2013 |
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| One World Trade Center |
For the more traditional approach to fame and fortune in the
art world, it helps greatly to be young and full of yourself if you are going
to attempt to sell your oil paintings on your own. Most gallery owners in New
York are wealthy and full of themselves also, so they
respond positively to those artists who are a lot like they themselves. Otherwise, it helps to be wealthy or a Yale
graduate to begin with. That usually
opens a lot of gallery doors for your paintings. Teachers of art sometimes get recommendations
to galleries in the hinterlands from their well-heeled students who buy into
their confident approach to picture-making.
I don’t know of a single contemporary artist who would be in a
well-known gallery in New York City on the obvious strength of his work alone
if it were to be adjudicated by a panel of his peers. And that’s the truth!
The route to a gallery connection in this great city of financial
greed incarnate is littered with the bones of artists at all skill levels who
are routinely tossed aside for a number of reasons, including the undeniable
fact that most gallery owners find you incredibly boring and your work impossible
to hype. The quality of the painting is
a secondary consideration for most gallery owners, who approach the business
like a branch of the home decorating industry.
Very few gallery owners are able to stay in business selling paintings
that they themselves truly love and choose to show on their walls, whether they
sell like hotcakes or not. I did know
one gallery owner like that myself. What
a shame, for me, that he’s no longer in business.
There are a lot of ways to sell paintings on your own
without some of the aforementioned improper credentials, but as you get older, the
auxiliary work gets harder and you just want to spend your remaining time
painting. It takes great stamina to
drive for hours in a van loaded with paintings to sell one or two at a weekend outdoor
art show that cost you $400 to enter, especially if you don’t own a van. And who wants to vacuum the apartment and set
out crudités and wine just to have a home show to sell one or two paintings? Who wants to pack and ship paintings you sell
for a few bucks on eBay? Who wants to
email digital images to 1,000 art galleries in America that show similar work,
because, if by some chance they might be interested, you would have to
carefully pack and ship paintings to them at your own considerable expense and
effort, with no guarantee your paintings will sell in the first place? Who wants to move to some little touristy
town where you don’t know anybody in order to open up your own storefront
gallery at considerable cost of time and money?
Who wants to take time from painting when you are finally getting to
understand a little bit about how it’s done?
Remember Renoir’s last recorded words, “I think I learned something
today.” That’s what painting boils down
to for many of us old-timers who refused to pander to the art market in our younger days.
But like everything else in this American life, youth must be
served. Whenever my mind drifts to this
subject, I recall Noel Coward’s great song lyric, “Why sit and fret, daily
regret, things that have gone before.
There’s a younger generation, knock, knock, knocking at the door.”
We take some dubious comfort from knowing that the brains of
most artists are not hard-wired to the business of business. We are reminded of this every time sympathetic
friends kindly praise our paintings to the skies.
“Your work is so good, you should have a show,” they say. And we say, “Yeah, sure, but who’s going to make
that happen for us?”
