John Smith
Thoughts From My Studio The MARKET We also need to understand what ‘Marketing’ means. It is the means by which the players in the market or market-place design ways of making the public aware of / attracting / encouraging the public to purchase or invest in the product created by the Artists and the Arts Industry. Before proceeding with the above I must add that there are those in the Visual Arts community who have some difficulty with the description “Arts Industry” I suppose it is because it then somehow classifies fine art as a commodity? Is there any other way to describe it? It is in fact an industry if you consider all the people who are employed in it, starting with the artists who give it a reason for being. At best (or is it at worst?) we are a huge team each depending on the other for our existence. In fact if the powers that be got off their overpaid bottoms and did some research, everyone may well be surprised and even astounded to discover the extent of this industry! There are the people who provide education in its many forms, also books and all the many things artists require to maximise their skills and talents. After that there are the sectors that provide paint, brushes, clay, stone, tools, canvas, frames, kilns and all the other things that artists need to create their works of art, and which to the outside world could well be considered commodities. After these come the galleries, dealers, agents, journalists, funders, advertising, magazines, societies, groups, internet etc. No matter how you look at it, it is an industry – what else? Having dealt with all that, I think it may be prudent to first ask what this MARKET consists of, and then consider various means to bring the market and the public together. It may also be prudent to consider the break-down and capacity of the Market / Public who invest in and purchase the product/s produced by the Artists (And Industry) and also have a closer look at the people who are the Marketers e.g. Artists themselves, Galleries, Dealers (in their many guises), the Internet, and so on. I will not hesitate to admit that what I know about marketing is limited to my asking questions, some years of experience as an artist who sells his work, as well as the bit of research I have been doing since this subject started pressing urgently in on my usual state of mild reverie. Never having studied marketing as a subject does not mean I have not thought about it. I have, constantly in fact! I must admit though that I have never really reached the point of making much sense of it before. Mulling it over and trying to reach some conclusions presents many other questions and problems and it seems apparent that without ever asking those questions or ignoring the problems, we are slipping into deep quicksand. Am I mistaken or have you also wondered about the peculiarities of this Art Market and how it functions? First of all, I do know that if you want to sell your art work and function effectively, then you do need to make some attempt at learning and understanding how normal ‘marketing’ and ‘the market’ works. Perhaps in these lines I can plant the seeds which will goad those that have in the past taken things pretty much for granted into learning more and hopefully energising this rather forsaken subject? I know that in some other countries marketing art has reached what can almost be considered an art in itself. Sadly in South Africa, except in rare cases, MARKETING ART (If we consider marketing to mean creating an interest and desire to own art) is almost non-existent. At the very outset, let me stress that I am dealing here with the ‘selling market,’ and will leave the more academic area, where funding is their main means of sustaining themselves, to those who function in that region to investigate and explain what occurs there themselves. I have little doubt that that area could well do with some investigating and explaining too. I feel that the very first question that needs to be asked is ‘What is the extent of the Art buying public in South Africa?’ It is difficult to say exactly as there are virtually no statistics available and so far no attempt has been made by the Dept. of Arts and Culture or the many Universities, or anyone else for that matter, to gather those rather critical statistics. The whole South African Arts Industry is in fact working in the dark. Sucking their thumbs as it were. We do need to have an idea of what we are working with, so let us try and create something which may give us at least some idea of how that market may look. First of all, and leaving politics out of it, but trying nevertheless to be as realistic as possible, it seems that by far the major purchasers of arts are still the whites. (It would be great if the market could be increased by even 10% more black people coming aboard and investing in the visual arts) At a very rough guess I would estimate that there are possibly 4 million people who would fall into the category of art buyers now. By simple and very unscientific process of elimination we can remove half of those as being children, so leaving 2 million. Again remove at least half of those as being married folk so buying as families leaving us with 1 million. You can lose half of that number as being people not interested in art. Can it be that we have a potential art market of only 500,000? This is as I said a very rough guess but without statistics we have little else. Let us be generous and say that black buyers and overseas collectors bring that up another 200,000 then giving us 700,000 potential buyers. This still leaves us with a very small market. It also gives us some idea of how wealthy that small market is. It is a miracle that we have any kind of sustainable market at all. As with a dearth of information regarding the market, so too is there virtually no information or statistics relating to the number of, as well as very little usable information regarding the artists in this country. Again galleries and the Industry are working in the dark and the whole market functions on guesswork. (One attempt to provide useable information has been Gabriel Clark-Brown’s ‘Southern African Art Information Directory’ (SAAID) but there is a huge sector that has never heard of it and even many of those that do have never bought the directory or used it. We need a comprehensive publically funded register). We need names and real information. There have, over the years, been attempts at providing such registers and Esme Berman’s book as well as Ogilvie’s book published by Everard Read were very useful, but they are now very out of date. There were other ‘registers’ but they appeared to be more interested in making money out of the artists and galleries than providing a real service to the public and industry. A national Artists Directory of this type is long overdue as is a comprehensive directory for the rest of the industry. How does a company selling products to artists forecast and price their products if they do not know who or what their market is? How does an art gallery source new and exciting art and artists if they are essentially sitting waiting for someone, both artists and customers to come walking through the door? How does a gallery or dealer market their art if they do not have the foggiest clue as to who, where or what that market is? In a discussion with a very experienced businessman who also happens to be a keen art collector, his observations were that the whole Art market and the industry serving the Arts was based on what he referred to as “The Shotgun Method” of doing business. That means you take a shotgun and fire into the unknown hoping to bag something if you are lucky. He said that no successful business would ever effectively work using this method and that the really successful corporations preferred to function under a ‘Laser method’. Meaning that they gather as much information and statistics as possible and then target that sector. Even our exhibitions are run on the Shotgun Method. If people arrive and more importantly if they buy is sheer miracle stuff. It is little more than groping around in the dark and perchance getting a hold on something. Like many aspects of our society, is this because the people who operate our market are ignorant of business methods, are not adequately trained, or are not really that interested, or are they (dare I say it) just too lazy? Who can say? It does however seem that there is a great deal of room for improvement. It is time for a real and prolonged wake-up call. I have been very hard on our artists these last few months and the spotlight has been shone on them constantly, but there is a limit to what they can do and I believe far too much is being loaded onto the backs of people who do not generally earn very large or stable incomes at the best of time. The poor artist has to endure the odious ‘consignment method’ of marketing No other business has this unfair system where, in essence, the artist is giving the retailer an interest free loan. Over and above this, all but the best galleries do not insure work any longer so it is likely that if a painting is stolen, damaged or lost in a fire it will be to the artist's account. To get back to the immediate subject; after the artist has delivered work to the dealer or gallery very little advertising or marketing takes place. If the artist delivers half a dozen paintings to a gallery, which can amount to some thousands of rand or even hundreds of thousands of Rands, how will anyone know they are there unless they are ‘marketed’ or advertised? Again the shotgun method of doing things. Only this time the shotgun has no cartridges so no-one will know that they, the gallery or dealer, has those thousands of Rands worth of new work. In most cases the insinuation is that if a painting doesn’t sell then it is a bad painting. This may be the case, but how can one come to this conclusion when only very few people get to see the painting? It is left to those who perchance stumble through the door of the establishment to decide. With the artist providing the galleries / agents / dealers with essentially ‘free stock’ can they then also be expected to advertise and market their own work on behalf of the galleries as well? Before I am drawn and quartered by the Galleries and others in the marketing sector of the visual arts let me tip my cap at those who do an excellent job in nurturing, advertising and promoting their galleries and their artists. There are some who go to the extent of producing a monthly newsletter marketing their artists work and others have produced websites as well. (Is that sufficient though?) Many, I have to concede, do not use the ‘Shotgun’ and are in fact being as creative as their artists and are instead using the ‘Laser’ to good effect. Sadly they are a very small minority. The marketing side of the industry, not only in the creative arts but even on the materials side, are sadly lagging very far behind other industries. There is no reason for that as far as I’m concerned. The media’s role in the visual arts is a disgrace and besides one or two academic Glossies that are aimed way above most people’s heads and besides again Mr. Clark Brown’s ‘S.A Art Times’ there is virtually nothing or nowhere the public, or even the Arts Industry can turn to and learn what is going on. The national press and electronic media should be ashamed of their generally pathetic contribution. The current trading system with its built-in insecurity is keeping many excellent artists from taking the big plunge into becoming full time professionals. I know of a number of such artists. This is creating an industry of part-timers, semi-pros or in fact amateurs, both on the creative side and on the marketing side. That it works at all is a miracle, but there is little doubt that the full potential of this market is being sorely undermined! It seems to me that for this industry to prosper and create stability and professionalism, there needs to be some compromises across the board and some creative thinking and long term goals set. I hate conspiracy theories but one has to ask why some in the industry are so reluctant to meet with or talk to other sectors. Surely we are all in this and we all need to drive our industry forward. It is to our mutual benefit. If one sector or the other feels badly done by, we will never create a stable, growing visual arts industry, and the market will never grow as long as we use’ shotguns’ rather than ‘microscopes’ Till next month.... |
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