As we all adjust to the new normal after having been sequestered in our homes, we're all finding alternate ways to make the most of our time.So let's ask ourselves: How can we use this time to get better? How can we be of service and use? I know, without a doubt that great art is being created around the world at this very moment. Perhaps by you! Our entire team is focused 100% on whatever we can do to help you market and sell more art. With that in mind, we're focusing FineArtViews on sales and marketing ideas more than ever before. The following article was selected from our archives as it seems quite timely in the current situation and provides ideas we think you can use to improve your own art marketing.
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PART 4
Curation
"It's never been easier to publish online, and it's never been harder to get noticed." That statement captures the essence of a huge problem that exists online: the huge amount of information and noise. How is an art collector supposed to even find art to consider? You can't expect a collector to look through thousands and thousands of websites. Curation is and has always been the solution. If you've ever visited one of the big, online galleries you know the problem. I went to Saatchiart.com and chose "paintings." There are 627,460 paintings for me to choose from. I don't want to look through that many artworks!
How many individual artist websites exist? FASO alone hosts more than 10,000. Even if I want to purchase original art, where would I start? Some people suggest a good search engine. But what do I search for? I don't know. If I knew what I wanted to search for, then I wouldn't have a problem.
But I don't purchase art by color, size, price or medium, which are typical art search engine parameters. I buy art that I love. Give me a search engine with a checkbox that says "Only show art that you love."
What we need is a solution for the art collectors who are in "discovery mode." And when someone is in discovery mode, search is not a great solution. As Benedict Evans says "all search grows until it requires curation." And indeed, the answer is curation which, essentially, is the function at which art galleries have traditionally excelled. In fact, if I use the word "curator", most people will think of someone organizing an exhibit at a museum or gallery. When an artist decides to forgo the gallery route and sell online, this curation piece is lost or greatly diminished.
If the art industry is going to be disrupted, like other industries have been, then someone is going to have to come up with another way, besides traditional galleries, to solve the curation piece. Curation is definitely something collectors want. They want to focus their energies on artists who've passed certain milestones in the mastery of their craft, the quality of their art, and the likely track of their career. This mostly means "emerging artists" and above. And collectors rely on curators, mostly, but not only, traditional galleries, to help them judge when a given artist has passed those milestones.
Interestingly, even the curators look for curation. I had an interesting conversation with the director of a major gallery not long ago. He told me, "I look through the entries [of the BoldBrush Painting Competition] every month and watch closely who wins the awards. I know from my [talks with other gallery directors] that more and more galleries are watching too."
Curation is definitely a place where BoldBrush has tried to lead in the online space and it seems our efforts are being noticed. We can expand those efforts and play a bigger role in improving curation options for artists beyond the traditional gallery system. And we are working on that.
As an individual artist, the curation element is a difficult one to tackle on your own. After all, every, artist wants attention on their artwork. But that is the very problem that curation helps solve. I do think artists could work together to recommend each other to their followers. The sticky part is, to truly be curation, you'd have to only recommend your friends who were ready and who would truly appeal to your followers. You can't recommend all your colleagues, or it's not curation. I could see two benefits to this. If you recommend a colleague, perhaps you can negotiate a percentage of sales that come from your followers. That could help be a way to increase your income. The second benefit would be reciprocal - you would ask your colleague to recommend you to his followers - expanding your reach. The other thing you can do, if you're not in a gallery, is to work to get your art into places that naturally provide curation, such as the BoldBrush Painting Competition mentioned above. Collectors and gallerists pay attention to the winners and finalists. Obviously, such a strategy only works if you're fairly confident in your mastery of craft that you have a reasonable chance of being recognized.
