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EVENTS @ The Center for Emerging Visual Artists www.cfeva.org| 237 S. 18th St., Philadelphia, PA 19103 | 215.546.7775 |
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Your Art as a Small Business Thursday, January 15, 2009 @5:30 pm If you are looking to sell your art or make money from art-related practices or product, then you are in business! It is therefore important for you to know how to ‘professionalize’ your business including, setting yourself up as a business entity, filing taxes, and bookkeeping, securing insurance (business, studio, health, liability, disability), establishing proper checking and saving accounts, and understanding how to seek out and hire the appropriate professionals including an attorney, accountant, insurance agent, banking professional and financial planner. Come and join in the evening’s gathering for general conversation and questions. After all, it’s for and about YOU!
Susan Koblin Schear, President of ArtIsIn, founded the company in 1995 to offer comprehensive business development and management services to visual and performing artists, arts organizations and arts related businesses that have not recognized or have not yet chosen to apply business skills to their work. She brings more than fifteen years of management expertise to this venture. Ms. Schear facilitates arts entrepreneurship by providing business guidance, strategic business planning and marketing to her clients. This facilitation provides the necessary tools and resources enabling her clients to focus and be more confident in their business and more successful in their marketing. Each session begins at 5:30pm and will take place at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists (The Barclay, 237 South 18th Street, Suite 3A, Philadelphia PA). Additional 200/2009 Direct Dialogue topics include: Fiscal Sponsorship for Artists, Your Art as a Small Business, Marketing Yourself Through the Internet, Creating Opportunities through Collaborations and Cooperatives, Marketing Yourself to the Press, and The Basics of Arts Fairs.. The program fee is $12.00 per session or $90.00 for the 2007-2008 Season. To reserve a seat, please call (215) 546-7775 x11 or email Genevieve@cfeva.org. Please note: Seating is limited. |
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Twitter / ninaealvarez- ninaealvarez: Glad I'm not on twitter much. But it's good for things like this: http://bit.ly/nPNbm
- ninaealvarez: @bedasso That doesn't make sense. You need help with your dialogue formatting.
- ninaealvarez: @prepgroove Didn't we go there once to see stand-up?
- ninaealvarez: Why am I surprised that 'Movie Flick' wasn't all that funny?
You Art as a Small Business
January 7, 2009 — phantomcity
Brooklyn Museum Goes Web 2.0 with 1stfans
December 18, 2008 — phantomcity“Socialize at exclusive events during the Museum’s monthly Target First Saturdays and continue connecting online with access to artist-created content on our 1stfans Twitter Art Feed. This paperless Membership is only $20 for the year and is fully tax-deductible!” -about the Brooklyn Museum 1stfans program
This is fascinating. It’s social networking, but within a closed membership. You pay $20/yr and receive tweets from famous artists, join their facebook group, and get to be part of the special club.
It’s strange, because a lot of companies and orgs are using free distribution of info to drive interest in their products. I’d thought the days of paying for media were on their way out…I guess it would make sense for membership-driven orgs that have info you can’t get anywhere else to offer it for a fee. That’s the key: it has to be info you can’t get anywhere else. I am interested in seeing how this works out.
UPDATE: Brooklyn Museum responds!
Thanks for the shoutout! I think the reason we’re hopeful about 1stfans is because it’s an organization these Members are supporting, and not just a company. The idea behind 1stfans is that it gives people who don’t like the regular Membership structure (free admission, previews, shop discount, etc) a way to feel like they are supporting a Museum and can become part of that community. We’re not trying to trick anybody…just trying to get people who like Museums and like Twitter/Facebook/Flickr a way to get more involved with the Brooklyn Museum.
The technology stuff and the events every month at First Saturdays are a way for 1stfans Members to get some real value for their Membership dues. Plus, we’re not asking for the moon at $20 per year!
-Will
Philthy Friend: Sketch Theatre
December 11, 2008 — phantomcity
“Sketch Theatre serves to motivate and inspire artists from all walks of life. Here, aspiring artists are exposed to contemporary artists and the various career paths taken by these like-minded individuals who all began their careers with the primary process of putting ideas and expressions down with a pencil & paper. The brilliant myriad of artists featured on Sketch Theatre strip down and expose raw sketches on camera, never failing to captivate and inspire. Enjoy the show.”
How to Price Your Art
November 29, 2008 — phantomcityWhat would you say to a collector if she asked you exactly why each piece in your “Pastel Houses” series was $2,000? If you’ve taken a fact-based approach to your pricing, you should have no problem answering her. When galleries sell to collectors, they present documentation that a piece is comparable to works previously sold in its price range. If you have a consistent track record, follow the gallery’s lead. But if you don’t have a stable record of sales, then try some other options for assessing price. You can look at “comparables,” pricing out regional artists with work comparable to yours and then matching or lowering your own prices.
If you prefer a more tangible approach, assess each piece of your art against one set of criteria and stick to it. Your yardstick could be time spent, cost of materials plus an hourly wage, size of the canvas, subject matter, technique, etc. Avoid pricing based on your emotional connection to the art or subjective sense of its value. When raising prices, be consistent and only increase them when the demand for your work clearly outshines the demand for work by your contemporaries. Lower prices when you aren’t making sales but consult buyers and experts first to make an informed decision about how low is necessary.
Selling your art can be simple: just look at its cost to you in materials and time and weigh that against the price you can reasonably ask for. Following the logic of the art market will help you confidently tell that collector why all the “Pastel Houses” are $2,000 and why it’s such a perfect price for the value. That, in a nutshell, is how you make a sale.
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Oil, Art, and You: A Quick Look at the Current Art Market
November 27, 2008 — phantomcityWestern Art Markets Take a Hit
The effect of the current world economic crisis on the art market is fascinating, mostly because in the past, the art market tended to be somewhat immune to the ups and downs of the rest of the economy. This was because art is usually bought and sold by very wealthy people with some financial bufferinig. As well, it is usually held onto as a long-term investment. Art dealers aren’t exactly like car dealers, slashing prices when inventory must “go, go, go!”
But the times, they are a’changin’. At recent Sothebys and Christies auctions, only around 60%-70% of lots were sold which means they sold millions and millions of dollars less than the projected estimates. When you are selling Kandinskys for 6 or 7 figures and the wealthy person who would normally buy them is tightening her belt, you know the economy is bad. (The good news is that you can now get a Kandinsky for 25% off. If you’re a collector, now is that moment in history when you can snatch up work that you will feel smug about the rest of your life.)
No One Is Immune
For example, the Abu Dhabi art market, which had gone up 400% in the last 4 years suddenly dropped and the main reason was oil. Since oil prices have finally come down over here (something we are happy about) that in turn takes money out of the pockets of people in the Middle East (something they are not happy about.) Now, we normally wouldn’t lose sleep over someone in Abu Dhabi having less oil-sale spending money, but what if you are an artist, dealer, or auction house trying to make a big sale over there? Suddenly their pain is your pain, and vice versa.
I just read this article about a sharp decline in art sales in Russia. However, Paris’ art maket has been doing ok since the FIAC sales at the end of October. They say it’s because their buyers tend to be “true collectors” instead of investors. This may or may not keep them buffeted, but I sort of love them for saying it. It’s a very French thing to say.
How this Effects You
Check out the New Podcast
September 2, 2008 — phantomcitySo, finally, I have a podcast. And I’m talking about the thing that started with Philthy Art: online art marketing for artists. Ch-ch-check it out:
Also, I return to Philadelphia, after my year of exploring, in the beginning of October. Watch for more events here at Philthy Art and get in touch if you have any thoughts or ideas.
Yours,
Nina
Val’s Art Diary
April 14, 2008 — phantomcityPoem of the Day: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
April 13, 2008 — phantomcityA Valediction Forbidding Mourning
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control
A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
-Adrienne Rich
Nina’s Notes: When It’s Time, It’s Time
April 11, 2008 — phantomcityWhat do we need from each other?
I have been letting a deeper rythm sink in since I left that rapid hiccuping energy of Philly. It was what I needed. Sometimes the lull is too deep and I get restless. But the importance of place cannot be underestimated in the search for our own personal meaning, and the importance of place should not be overestimated in the search for community. With the internet, this joyous, strange, possibly dangerous tool that I offer almost all of waking hours to (besides the beach hours) I work, talk, share, create, think, speak, and help shape and shade the world.
It can be difficult to gauge how much my work online has shaped and shaded anything, but then again, how do we create the metrics of influence anyway? How do we measure if what we pour our hours into can echo out farther than the ends of our noses? I don’t know. Certainly, only time can tell what ripples are superficial and which ripples run deep and far. And since these truths remain hidden in the time being, I try to use a different measure to gauge my work: my daily happiness. If I am engaged and joyful in my daily work, then I consider myself ahead of the game, and ahead of where I could be.
But in being a conduit, a bullhorn to the world, a marketer/cheerleader/web 2.0 nerd like myself has to think strategically and methodically about how to take an idea, a piece of art, a service for artists, and make it ring. The process reminds me of the process of writing a short story. I must think through what I am attempting to portray, but I must not look at it too directly, too soberly. I must leave a window of accident, inspiration, and irrational belief open. Like the myriad possible flows of a short story, a marketing plan is fluid, dynamic, and by no means a perfect science. We can speak our words to the world, but will they listen? And how do we know that they should?
I believe in supporting artists, whether beginners or world-changing masters. I feel good when I help an artist talk about what they are trying to create. Our government, our politics, our society, our businesses put art in all its forms on the shelf. I want to be one of those people who push it back into the room, set it in the center of the table, or at least right next to the good china.
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Gordian Knot
Photography, drawing, and painting by Nina Alvarez
