The internet, especially social media, have given us an incredible tool — we can now potentially reach anyone in the world. If before you had to go through all the gatekeepers of the art world, now you can do everything yourself and have full control over every aspect of your art, including profits. 

But it does come with a price and it’s probably not what most of us think it is, when confronted with the myriad of things we have to set-up to get our art business started.

The issue isn’t that we need a website or an Etsy shop to sell our work, the issue also doesn’t lay in us having to talk to potential collector ourselves (instead of the gallery representatives taking care of our sales for us).

I bet we all know that being our own representative will take up a lot of our time — time that we could be using to create more art or to just let our thoughts and imagination wander, searching for the next big art project. 

The real problem is marketing.

All the tools that we have at our disposal are great and with nothing more than a couple tenners we can get all of our social infrastructure up and running. Not only running though, running automatically; platforms like SaatchiArt take care of our shipping, Etsy takes care of our payments and Patreon automates the way people can become part of our creative endeavours like nothing that’s been done before. 

But we can set up all of these and still arrive at the troublesome trough that — even though we have 15 social platforms and we’ve automated our crossposting so that we only have to post 3 or 4 types of content and all of it gets delivered to each and every platform we’re on — our followers, fans, potential collectors and random buyers still have no idea that we exist.

The main strength of a gallery isn’t that it’s a physical place. It doesn’t matter how big it is or how many shows they open each year. The only thing a gallery does, that no-one else can do for an artist, is to provide them with a customer base that is ready to buy the next big thing.

It’s so easy to get carried away with the technicalities of setting-up ones web store and social presence, that we can sometimes get carried away. And if we do, we might just forget that the main aspect of going solo is taking care that we actually have people to sell our art to.