While we're all sequestered in our homes, we're all facing the potential for lost or wasted 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 1
Here's a question worth pondering: What do art collectors want?
Before I founded BoldBrush, I was in the gallery business for more than 16 years. During that time, I developed an extremely strong implicit sense for what art collectors want. But what explicitly do they want?
On True Art Collectors
When I say "art collectors", I'm specifically talking about "true" art collectors: an idea similar in concept to Kevin Kelly's idea of "true fans." True art collectors go to art openings. True art collectors seek out and meet artists. True art collectors follow the careers of artists they love. True art collectors have relationships with gallery people. And true art collectors purchase works of art by artists they follow. In fact, they often purchase multiple works of art by the same artists. In the art industry, true art collectors are often referred to as "art addicts". These people, of which I am one, can form the backbone of an artist's career.
There are, of course, other types of "collectors." There are people who want a piece to go over the proverbial couch. There are people who purchase a new home and hire a designer to fill it with art. There are people who purchase art only when on vacation, in the heat of the moment. There are even people who look like "true collectors" while they're filling their new home with art, but disappear once all the walls are full. If you end up with customers like this, you might sell them a lot of art while they are filling their homes, or enjoying their vacations. But afterward, likely nothing else. True art collectors, on the other hand, don't let something as trivial as wall space stop them, and they generally keep purchasing art even when all their walls are full. We proudly rotate pieces in and out of storage in our home (and are now filling the BoldBrush offices as well).
Most major art galleries are supported by building relationships with true art collectors. These are the people that great galleries nurture and support when there is no traffic in the gallery. Add in designer purchases, tourism purchases, and new-home-buyer purchases and galleries can, if they hustle, do quite well.
Put all those types of collectors together, and there are a lot of people out there who buy art. And a big percentage of those art sales happen through traditional art galleries. Unlike many industries, the art industry has yet to be fundamentally transformed by the internet, which makes this the big question: is the internet ever going to disrupt the art industry?
