Probably the best way to sell art today is to get an influential patron with lots of friends to buy your work directly from a big name gallery somewhere in Hong Kong, New York, Paris or London. 

It’s just easier if you have skilled sales people, art theoreticians and curators giving your work the best presentational environment it can have and to actively expose it to the wealthy and eager-to-buy 0.5% of the upper echelons of society. It’s just too bad that most of us don’t have that luxury in our lives. So what can we do?

Let’s observe how this old yet tried and true method of selling art works. In the end it boils down into a simple, but profound equation: With every product, including art, you have production and distribution. 

And if you look at the production side, everything is more or less in our own hands; we are in charge of the quality of our work, the quality of materials and process used to produce it and the regularity of production itself.

If you want to make prints of your work for example, you can now do so online and on demand; there are no initial investments for buying an expensive A3 or even A2 printer, fine-art paper or high-quality ink. 

The same goes for book publishing on Amazon, t-shirt printing on Teespring or just getting incredibly cheap or overly expensive painting materials for your work. From no-brand acrylics to the best pigments India and France can offer — they’re all available to everyone with an internet connection. 

But the point of why galleries still work isn’t about production, but about distribution. Even just 10 years ago, you had no convenient way of buying fine art by means other than through a gallery or art broker. Now there’s Saatchi Online, Fine Art America and even eBay!

If before provenance was a tricky topic, now Verisart are implementing block chain technology, so that every art piece sold could be tracked back to its original owner by anyone with a 0% chance of mistake or fraud.

And the holy grail of the gallery system — the insider connections and large amounts of steaming-hot leads? People now sell their work on Instagram (sometimes for even 20.000€ and more)! And the only thing we as creatives have to do to start is to DM a few people ourselves.

Why not take an hour or two a day and message 30 or 50 people on Instagram, if they would be willing to showcase your work on their channels? Do the same for YouTubers, maybe contact people on Twitch — cooking shows are popular now and do lots of live streaming on Twitch, why not send them some art to show?

The point is, distribution was once an impossible feat to accomplish; many creators, who produced the most amazing and beautiful works you could have ever seen, just didn’t know enough people to spread the word and thus barely made enough to survive.

Now, both production and distribution are in our own hands. And while everybody else has a barney about how artists now have to do everything themselves and how it was better in the good old days, you can embrace the new world of infinite opportunities. Only you can decide to see it for the magical place that it really is and start working on your career with tools that creators in the good old days couldn’t have even dreamed about.

People will always bicker and whine, but at the same time, there will always be those of us, who show up and do the work. And now, through the powers of social media and those small metal and glass devices in our pockets and bags, we can become our own gallery representatives, our own brands and do so while on our daily commute. How fantastic is that?!