March 19, 2004
I've been worrying too much about finances lately (basic stuff, like where am I going to get rent money if I don't sell another painting soon) so I decided to calm myself by re-reading Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift - Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. This time I started at chapter 8 - "The Commerce of the Creative Spirit", which is really the heart of the book. He starts out with the question of the sources of an artist's work and concludes with this:

I do not want to overreach the bounds of my argument here. The destruction of the spirit of the gift is nothing new or particular to capitalism. All cultures and all artists have felt the tension between gift exchange and the market, between the self-forgetfulness of art and the self-aggrandizement of the merchant, and how that tension is to be resolved has been the subject of debate since before Aristotle.

And yet some aspects of the problem are modern. Eros and logos have a distinctly new relationship in a mass society. The remarkable analysis of commodities with which Marx opens Das Kapital appears in the nineteenth century, not any earlier. and the exploitation of the arts which we find in the twentieth century is without precedent. The particular manner in which radio, television, the movies, and the recording industry have commercialized song and drama is wholly new, for example, and their "high finance" produces an atmosphere that all the sister arts must breathe. (Your favorite show) may be the best show that ever came to television, but it belongs to a class of creations which will not live unless they are constantly fed large sums of money. The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The true commerce of art is a gift exchange, and where that commerce can proceed on its own terms we shall be heirs to the fruits of gift exchange: in this case, to a creative spirit whose fertility is not exhausted in use, to the sense of plenitude which is the mark of all erotic exchange, to a storehouse of works that can serve as agents of transformation, and to a sense of an inhabitable world - an awareness, that is, of our solidarity with whatever we take to be the source of our gifts, be it the community, or the race, nature, or the gods. But none of these fruits will come to us where we have converted our arts to pure commercial enterprises. The Nielsen ratings will not lead us toward a civilization in which the realized gifts of the gifted stand surety for the life of the citizenry. Sprinkles of gold flake will not free the genius of our race.

March 11,2004
How can you sell art you don't care about? And if you sell your own art, the question becomes, why bother making art you don't care about? There are plenty of downsides to living as a freelance creative - you may as well engage in the main upside, which is making work that you're passionate about. But at some point, most of us have to sell it. Which means you have to be able to talk about it. Explain the unexplainable, or at least shed some light on it. I saw a couple of things recently about a "reality" TV show that set two teams of apprentice art dealers loose to see who could sell the most art:

from the Art Biz Coach:
"The teams visited four artists and selected the ones they wanted to work with. One team ended up selling over $13,000 worth of art. The other sold a single work for $869. Why the big difference? The losing team selected the artist based on the price of her work. No one on the team seemed to like it, but it had higher prices and, so the logic goes, they would have to sell less of it in order to win. The Donald (Trump) said over and over again, “You have to love your product in order to sell it. You have to believe in your product.” That was the failure of the losing team. They had no interest in their artist or her artwork. How can you sell something you don’t believe in or care about?"
Copyright (C)2004 Alyson B. Stanfield, Stanfield Art Associates, 5968 El Diente St., Golden, CO 80403. All rights reserved.

from About Last Night:
"Trump put them on the wrong foot at the outset by standing on the steps of the Met telling them, in his introduction to the assignment, that all art was "subjective," a view that they all parroted when it became clear that they were failing. ... So intent on proving their ambition and business-worthiness are these contestants that you wonder if there's a genuine response out there anywhere among those who don't hit the galleries and the museums. ... their utter inability to talk about the work, even if only to sell it, and their bemused indifference about what they were doing only consolidated the idea for me that visual art is a flummoxing agent of the highest order. And it deserves better. These works tonight deserved better, and with my enthusiasm for what I was seeing I could have outsold the Apprentices with my mouth taped shut. It wouldn't have been hard, given the quality of the "product." Why is enthusiasm so elusive these days?"
Thanks to Our Friend on the Block (who previously opined forAbout Last Night here)