‘Is there an audience for what I do’ is what any artist would like to know, but even if people are ready to respond how can I address them, what would be the point of contact, and how are they going know I exist? This is the existential dilemma above and beyond the assemblage of materials, the acquisition of skills, and scrounging for the economic space to practice art, ironically known as free time. The independent artist must emerge from a vacuum, art supplies and studio rent out of pocket and at sacrifice until a style matures and a statement can be made. Only then is it time to ask ‘where’s my audience?’ When that time comes for many there’s no point of contact and no way to even be seen.
Once their initial ten thousand hours are logged, the amount of time it takes to get good at anything, the artist encounters art’s turnstiles ten miles high. The galleries are essentially consignment shop enterprises and management is chronically over its head paying uptown rent, fronting lavish openings and courting critics. They don’t have time to look at art or even for personal taste, and are only interested in prior sales and what other galleries are showing the work. The non-profit public-funded sector favors a kind of art too advanced to have popular appeal, and its recognitions, grants, and awards are reserved for the private worm farms produced by artists with a regular paycheck.
Still the pressure builds. People are painting everywhere these days for fun and some become addicted, the act of painting even altering how they see the world. Disenchanted art students leave school and strike out on their own, working menial occupations while seeking their own visual identity on their days off. However they begin there’s lots of art being made in all directions, and if any of it started to sell it would suddenly all get better, like a drop of rain makes the desert bloom. It’s the other side that’s really unknown. Will fellow citizens, forcibly and suddenly weaned from the mind-numbing spectacle of media-hyped gladiatorial events interspersed with craven opiated commercials, begin to wake up to their own more subtle inborn potentials? Would they turn their attention to art?
For this to happen the public doesn’t need to improve, just wish for a better alternative. It’s up to artists to reach beneath the surface, to identify and make visible the points of common humanity we all share. For the artist it’s all part of the same quest and finding an audience, daunting as it sounds, is just the cost of doing business here. If ever enough original art is seen, not just in public venues but in the houses of friends and neighbors, artists might finally be welcomed into community awareness along with athletes and entertainers, and be recognized not in person but by the work they do. If there’s an audience out there for visual art it could wake up all over all at once as a grass roots movement beyond urban centers, and what fellow citizens value, talk about and think about, could turn out to be the pictures on their walls.
Once their initial ten thousand hours are logged, the amount of time it takes to get good at anything, the artist encounters art’s turnstiles ten miles high. The galleries are essentially consignment shop enterprises and management is chronically over its head paying uptown rent, fronting lavish openings and courting critics. They don’t have time to look at art or even for personal taste, and are only interested in prior sales and what other galleries are showing the work. The non-profit public-funded sector favors a kind of art too advanced to have popular appeal, and its recognitions, grants, and awards are reserved for the private worm farms produced by artists with a regular paycheck.
Still the pressure builds. People are painting everywhere these days for fun and some become addicted, the act of painting even altering how they see the world. Disenchanted art students leave school and strike out on their own, working menial occupations while seeking their own visual identity on their days off. However they begin there’s lots of art being made in all directions, and if any of it started to sell it would suddenly all get better, like a drop of rain makes the desert bloom. It’s the other side that’s really unknown. Will fellow citizens, forcibly and suddenly weaned from the mind-numbing spectacle of media-hyped gladiatorial events interspersed with craven opiated commercials, begin to wake up to their own more subtle inborn potentials? Would they turn their attention to art?
For this to happen the public doesn’t need to improve, just wish for a better alternative. It’s up to artists to reach beneath the surface, to identify and make visible the points of common humanity we all share. For the artist it’s all part of the same quest and finding an audience, daunting as it sounds, is just the cost of doing business here. If ever enough original art is seen, not just in public venues but in the houses of friends and neighbors, artists might finally be welcomed into community awareness along with athletes and entertainers, and be recognized not in person but by the work they do. If there’s an audience out there for visual art it could wake up all over all at once as a grass roots movement beyond urban centers, and what fellow citizens value, talk about and think about, could turn out to be the pictures on their walls.
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