"Don't aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally."
David Frost
Braving the Storm
Art critic, writer, curator, psychologist Brian Sherwin goes head to head with the excuses many of us make about why we are less than successful in marketing our art - or our writing as the case may be. I admit to using every single one of these excuses at one time or another. How about you?
"Lack of action is often fueled by excuses. We can find examples of this within every angle of life. With that in mind, I want to discuss some of the common excuses artists use to justify their lack of action -- be it failure to develop OR market their art. The tough love starts now..."
Read the rest of this reblog at Stop Making Excuses | The Art Edge
Mr. Sherwin covers the seven most prevalent excuses we generally offer for our lack of success and knocks those excuses on the head. I'd like to add at least one more...discouragement or feeling that what we're offering has been found wanting. I think it's possible to do everything right...at least in regard to Sherwin's excuse list...we can work at it daily, stop watching television, let the housework take second place, share care-giving responsibilities with other family and friends, go to gallery openings, stop worrying about whether or not we have an art degree, budget both our time and money so we have the resources we need to get it done and keep reaching out to contacts in the art or literary world both online and offline to widen our networks.
We can go further...we can blog, create forums of mutual support for other artists, master social media marketing (there's a great big book out there called Social Media Marketing for Dummies that I happen to have bought in the face of what seems to be a time consuming need to have a presence on a half dozen social media sites!) We can do all of that - stress ourselves out with the need to respond and reciprocate for every positive comment or share we receive - and at the end of the day...or the month...or the year, be completely and utterly discouraged because we've not only sold or shown very little, if anything, but the response to our efforts is unenthusiastic at best or downright negative. Galleries and art magazines turn us down again and again and rejection seems to be the common theme day after day. I've been there...and I'll bet you have too.
But like Sherwin's counterarguments to the excuses he discusses, I had to come up with a way to fight through that discouragement and the sense that my art or poetry had been found wanting and I do that by remembering that I don't just want a sale for the sake of a sale. I want my work to be bought and seen and read because someone out there recognized the passion behind the work, got what it was I was trying to say with it and one way or another shares those feelings. If that isn't happening, maybe I need to re-examine whether I've allowed my passion for the art to play second fiddle to the marketing of it. And then I need to honestly assess whether I've more to learn in terms of how I've expressed what I wanted to say - to get better at it every day.
Brian Sherwin concludes by saying, "In closing, as an artist you have two choices: You can continue to justify whatever it is that you feel is holding you back by spitting out excuse after excuse. OR you can learn from it -- get to the heart of the problem -- and change the way you approach art making / art marketing. You must make the choice." I say...choose passion.
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