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GETTING YOUR STORY ACROSS (MARKETING AND BRAND...

It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO of a design studio, a student at the Academy or working retail by day and creating art by night — a day only has 24 hours. If then you want to make something out of your life, time management is imperative. While all of the people who work a 9-5 job have time management enforced into their lives by their workplace, those of us who are self employed don’t have a boss to tell us when to work and when to have our lunch break. And with no HR person breathing down our…

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POLISHING YOUR STORY (THE ARTIST STATEMENT)

Artist statements, even though they might appear like a load of pretentious art-talk (which many of them sadly are), serve a very important purpose: presenting your passion in a bite-sized package, to be easily consumed and understood by the reader or listener (you can, and should know how to pitch them too). But what many of us present as an artist statement is usually exactly the opposite of what it should be; we focus on intellectually sounding words and sentences like this: “As wavering phenomena become rediscovered through subversive personal practices, the observer is left with an awareness of the…

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STORY IS EVERYTHING

Be it online or in person, there’s a lot of competition in the arts. And the fact that the art world is much smaller compared to the world of business, law or medicine, only makes it harder for any one artist to succeed. While everybody online is telling us to “niche down”, and explaining why it’s so important, usually no specific tactics are disclosed, and the how is left for us to figure out for ourselves.  This blunder is intended for anyone who wishes to find their focus and stand out in today’s oversaturated creative market by understanding the immense…

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PRICING YOUR ART THE RIGHT WAY Part III:...

In the last two blunders we discussed the importance of calculating ones base expenses and all-around financial needs on a monthly basis and the concept of added value. Today, I’d like to combine the two and take a deeper look into how various models can help us to set fair and consistent prices for our work. First of all, we need to acknowledge a very important fact; the pricing model we use to determine our value shouldn’t necessarily be the same one we use to communicate that value to others. Not to be misunderstood, I don’t mean that we should…

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PRICING YOUR ART THE RIGHT WAY Part II — Value...

Oscar Wilde once wrote: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.”  A true artist therefore should be the exact opposite, but not due to ignorance towards the ever-present concept of money; the real truth of the matter is that putting a price tag on an embodiment of love, hate, reminiscence or longing (and all the other messages that art can communicate) just isn’t as easy as adding up ones material and overhead costs and slapping a 20% markup on the sum. At least not to those that really understand the depths…

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PRICING YOUR ART THE RIGHT WAY Part I: Expenses...

Creating a beautiful work of art is hard by itself, but when it comes to putting a price tag on whatever we made, it does tend to get even harder for most of us artistic types. The question for today (and a few future blunders) is therefore: How much is creativity even worth? If you ask somebody on Fiverr, well, it’s about 5 € give or take, on UpWork they’ll probably up that excuse of a pay-check to about 10€ or 20€, but I reckon (or at least hope) we can all agree that making whatever it is one does…

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NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL SYMBOLS

Just as with sweeteners and coffee, you have natural and artificial options to spice up your art, too. Both sweeteners and symbols are created by moulding reality to our will, but unlike aspartame and the like, artificial symbols don’t have negative health side effects (unless we count war and propaganda, of course).  It does though open up your work to the possibility of being misinterpreted, and in today’s blunder, we’re going to take a peek at how we can at least guide our audiences into the right direction as well as take a jab at the underlying question that many…

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ART AND ENTERTAINMENT

More and more you see art shows being coupled with support programs that, to an art goer from a couple of decades ago, would resemble more a visit to the local club than an actually gallery — albeit a club that, for whatever reason, seems to also have some “art” on the walls. But why is that? I hear a lot of people in the business say that the market has shifted and that — just like with any other commodity in today’s competitive business environment — the target audiences have changed, so the products and presentation have to change,…

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ART HAS NO PURPOSE, ONLY CONSEQUENCES 

An interesting sentence, uttered by a friend of mine while we were chatting over drinks, was that “Art has no purpose, only consequences.” and these six words really struck a chord with me. In today’s blunder therefore, I’d like to explore this statement, because I think a lot of us may posses a misconstrued understanding about our artistic production that could (and probably does) influence our ability to reach the right audience and consequently grow as artists. But why does art not have any purpose? If you’re a regular of this blog, you’ve probably noticed me state several purposes pertaining…

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HOW TO MAKE ART THAT TRANSFORMS PEOPLE

Creating art is a two step process; first you obviously have to make it, but then you also have to show it and present it to the public, and hopefully leave an impact on the world (preferably for the better). But these two steps could not be further apart in both their methodology and all-around nature. The real problem is that making art is a predominantly personal and intimate experience, but showing and presenting it requires an entirely different skillset. So, in today’s blunder I would like to explore the act of creation and presentation and — with a little…

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