Communicating eco-art 2010: The race is on!
January-March focus
Publicité 2.0 galerie at artdesigncafe.com | January-March 2010 focus.Co-partnered with Sculpture magazine.
Page 3 of 4
The partnerships
A point of inspiration from the What is Missing? project is the visibility of the team’s structure—as a point of reference for entrepreneurial brainstorming. One sees the formation of an art-design, exhibition, and media partner team which individually reflects elements of power in their respective fields. On 22 April 2010, Earth Day, MTV is scheduled to debut a five-minute video on their billboard in New York’s Times Square, which suggests that fine art can gain access to a wider audience, when it can deliver the populist goods like the UK’s School of Saatchi BBC2 program. Okay, so maybe 0.5% of the world’s artists can naturally witness—through their unique and attractive production—this kind of resourced army formation, but one assumes a lot of real, hard work went into this. But for the remaining 99.5%, the eco-artist must partner up entrepreneurially like a self-made business, and discover creative incentives when cash is low at hand.Higher education also should play a role in this, but practically speaking, it’s safer and faster to speak directly to the source—entrepreneurial artist-students. As two lecturers in media/communications, we find these programs always have some talented students already engaged in entertainment spheres and fine art. There also are the alumni networks—but again, any partnerships without paying full-rate requires creative solutions. So this means lining up interests; planned visibility for eco-projects can help attract resources from various participants. In fact, we propose an additional year of practical communications/entrepreneurship/project management training—and a real intern-(entrepreneur)ship—unless the artist otherwise has the means or funds to outsource these things over the long haul. For those emerging artists-teams that don’t feel like waiting, Jackie Battenfield’s The Artist’s Guide: How to make a living doing what you love (2009) spotlights real artist-entrepreneurship.
It is through training, partnering, and developing a dual discourse—a standard feature in any specialism looking to communicate to a general audience—that eco-art can be communicated through the panoply of mass media outlets. The fact is many art projects don’t warrant national or international generalist attention, because they were never designed to achieve this. So when a project does come along that speaks to a wider audience, it appears more compelling amid its comparatively weak competition.
The Internet
While everyone has access to it, many artists struggle with Internet visibility and communications and one could argue that art magazine print—and Internet—media still reign even with new competitors and high-volume blogs popping up continuously. Others understand this is just one step in a comprehensive communication strategy. In this regard, we’re quite excited about a recent viral video featuring a graffiti artist, D*Face, organized by professional surfer and MTV-host Peter King and Roger Klein at Pat’s Management Company, which represents the rock bands Green Day, Goo-Goo Dolls and Weezer, and have been signing on visual artists to represent. To learn more, just search ‘ridiculous pool’ on Google. There is an angle for communicating an art event that built its own media audience without relying on gatekeepers (like us) of specialist and generalist media. These kinds of results can compel others to take a second look.
Right: LA Times. (12 September 2009). "Artist Bruce Nauman skywrites over Pasadena".
The market
For artists without a set brand that leans structurally towards the Hirst or Bruce Nauman models, we recommend the strategy of The Brand Artist, who secretly sells artwork under six artist names internationally. Flying under the radar, The Brand Artist is testing out personae and styles, while selling the works and allowing for experimentation, he says. In music, various artists change bands and test them in the market, while simultaneously pursuing solo careers under their own or main “names”. Why should visual artists be trapped in a box? If some in the art world look down off their perch at it, the response is simple: they don’t need to know about it.Like Lin and The Brand Artist, the artist who sees boundaries not as opposites or contradictions but as spaces of opportunities between those two points will find the balance between branding and genuine artistic expression, business entrepreneurship and originality that resists becoming sterile.
Another point to consider is sales channels. How many art shows at a small gallery have sold 5000 catalogues, and 2000 posters, in two weeks? The Green Day art show in London, led by Pat Magnarella of Pat’s Management Company did last fall featuring a range of graffiti artists, says Roger Klein. Partnered with Verizon, a “virtual art gallery” toured the US with the band and the art was exposed to thousands of fans. In this visual artist-signing initiative, they are looking at marketing and merchandizing art in a rock music sort of way. In a previous interview, Magnarella told Preece, “We don’t want it to be elitist,” and “Like anything else, if you have something great, but no one knows it exists, then what’s the point.” From our web traffic stats, we are seeing a growing army of aspiring arts-entrepreneurs who get this message; but very telling is that while Magnarella is totally new to the art world, they are searching to locate him!
Hopefully Pat’s Management Company will expand an art market away from one dominated by well-intentioned, but oppressive elites, as shown in Sarah Thornton’s Seven days in the art world (2008). Haven’t we heard about elite oppression before in art history? While we appreciate several “elite” art practices, we find the developing PMC models are a viable option for interested artists, not to mention a way to possibly pay down excessive BFA/MFA debt while utilizing some amount of invested talents. More university programs should openly support—and invest—in developing these initiatives as recipients of expensive educational investments.
Page 1: Intro | Page 2: The opportunities | Page 3: The partnerships & market | Page 4: The race is on!
© 2010 Publicité 2.0 galerie at artdesigncafe.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.