Posted by Nels Johnson on December 20, 2016 at 1:30pm
I really liked Oscar's latest post. It got juices rolling about next year. Gas prices, soaring stocks, more disposable income, all great topics.Two things missing from this prognostic discussion ( good word to use in Scrabble, Barry).One, the factor of too many A/C shows everywhere.Two, the dumbing down of America about appreciating art. The present generation could give rats-doodles about art. Electronics rule, wall art comes a poor second. Craft always has a chance, especially traditional work.I started in the 70's, prospered thru the 80's, started to see the slow unraveling in the 90's.After the tech balloon bust in 1999, and the recession in 2008, it has been an uphill battle to keep one's head above water.Now we enter 2017.Here are some of my thoughts.Chew on them, then give us all some feedback. Our lives depend on it.First off, you can not go blindly and stick your head into the ground and ignore the fact that there are too many outdoor art/craft shows going on at any moment and in any community.To give you my basis. I know not everyone knows me.I do 33-36 shows per year nationwide. Have done so since 1974.I am a photographer.I dance to my own drum. I do not always do the cliche or the traditional.In the 70's, while I was mostly in Hawaii and had just returned to Florida, I showed mostly black and white images of: guys surfing in Hawaii, naked women posing in exotic waterfalls, and guys growing outrageous Ganga from Hawaii. My best sellers back then was "Billy Smelling the buds" and Fallen Angel ( a beautiful blonde naked woman lying on the beach).In the 80's I transistioned to flamingos and Art Deco. I started doing color images. I could barely make a living doing b/w. My name was not Ansel Adams.I took my little plastic flamingos and stuck them in railings overlooking Niagara Falls. I shot the Deco buildings on Miami Beach. This was the "Miami Vice Era at Coconut Grove". You could take the residue from $100 bills and snort a line.I transistioned into the early 90's by combining b/w images with color images in collage form. Then under the influence of my wonderful wife, Ellen Marshall, I started putting pastels on my images.Beginning the new century my eye was drawn to strong lines in architecture and shooting neon images in the evenings.Now I do the architecture, but I have a whole new portfolio that came out of my open heart surgery in 2012.With a new physical body, came a new body of work. I started looking for iconic persons who I rendered in black and white images and then hand colored them using acrylic inks and oils.I have won a lot of awards in my time, over 400 at major shows. I have always made a profit every year. I do 33-36 shows per year, and I will be 72 soon.I just say all this, not to brag, but to hope you will listen to your elder, he knows some shit.First off, the middle class is never coming back again in our lifetimes. They will not be spending like in the past. Technology and politics has changed all that. Sorry, Oscar. Get what you can, but the numbers will never be there again.Secondly, the number of art shows will only proliferate. They are not going away. Too much profit for the promoters. Within 10 years you will see a $60-$75 jury fee for the biggies. A thousand dollar booth fee will be the norm for big shows,Problem is, for most of you, your sales will not ride up too.Too many shows. None of them feel precious anymore. Not unless you are in the really biggies.If you luck out and get into Winter Park, the Plaza, St. Louis Art Fair, Artisphere, Coconut Grove, et al., of course you are going to make some serious bucks. The serious art buyers are there. They want something very precious, very special, maybe even a little out of the box.Nowadays, it is very hard for an artist who does "art from the heart" to make it on the circuit. There are not enough buyers out there for them.Because we have lost so many serious artists we have lost the same customers who no longer come to the second and third tier shows. Those artists have been replaced withe the more traditional and commercial artists. And also the rising plague of buy/sell that now inhabit our industry.This trend will continue in 2017. Only the strong will survive. Yeah, if you do out of the box, art, you might survive if you get into a lot of the top tier shows.If you do traditional art, you will survive more easily, no matter at what level you show.Unfortunately, the more commercial artists will continue to flood our arena, which only keeps us one scant level from the flea markets.Before you all get pissy and aghast with my last statement, let me expound.All I am saying is that the outdoor shows are becoming a difficultvenue anymore for a fledgling artist to try. Fees are very high. Failure, of sales, can easily set you back mucho bucks. The traditional and commercial will always surviveSo, 2017 looms ahead.Trump or not, it is a tough time to sell original art outdoors in America.My advice.Create your own unique form of art that lets you stand out from the herd.Be willing to try new areas to sell your work.Be flexible.It is a marketplace. Keep your prices realistic.Be willing to negotiate. Do not lose the sale. It pays the rentStay vigilant, learn from others.Read my blogs, check out my past ones. I have a lot of good info. I am still standing, I have seen hundreds drop off by the wayside. Gee, maybe I know something.Mele Kelikemaka everyone.Mat Hatala knows that one..
Merry Christmas from the proverbial optimist. Wind is howling in Battlement Mesa in wester Colorado. My son-in-law has to work today as gas wells just keep pushing out money and he has to monitor them. I'm looking forward to a great 2017. I am fully booked for trick saddles from riders in US and Canada and talking with prospects for 2018 orders. Straps used by riders keep coming in. I had a surge of late Christmas orders from folks who saw me at art shows- mostly more belts. I read an article in BBC news the liberals were buying guns. Concealed carry permits are way up in El Paso County (Colorado Springs south of me) and they are most likely up elsewhere. I will be well stocked with holsters and I will definitely have the handbags with built in holsters done for summer shows. Whoo Hoo. Stay tuned but I think the good times will roll. FYI I am a somewhat liberal Dem.
Hello everyone... good job Nels. Always a pleasure. However, here I go again covering the clouds with sunshine.... Math is the bitch we cannot slap away. Evidently mathematics (that only exact science there ever was). I have never in my forty-six years of doing shows been the one to ask to address the outdoor art shows because what I make is way more problem proof sales wise since people still have feet and need something to wear on the bottoms of their feet. Prior to 2007, America was a place where people had begun to believe that a 24% interest rate was not so bad on their credit cards and many people actually owed huge amounts of credit card debt but just kept buying our work and paying later. Home owners in some of our states (ie Florida and California) had been lulled into thinking that their house would always go up in value and sometimes double in value in just a few years and sell fast if you wanted to "move on up". Then math put it's foot down stronger than it had since the great depression and, I'll be damned, the possibility of simply loosing their house to foreclosure. Things had to change. First thing to change seemed to be the wealthy stopped buying anything... certainly stopped buying things that had always simply brought them artistic pleasure. The, regular people without wealth had to do anything they could to simply keep their house. I did a show in Miami Beach the year before the recession was visible to everyone and sold to a very happy bunch of folks that sometimes stood in line with their shoes and socks off and their credit card in their hand as they waited for their turn to be fitted. Well, I'll be damned again, I did that same show a year later and all people could afford to do in my booth was sit and visit and buy almost nothing. They told me stories about their huge equity they had in their condo and kind of all of the sudden their equity was gone and realtors were encouraging them to sell that condo for $90,000 even though they had paid $300,000 just a few years before. Only once in those conversations did I have the heart to tell a man that what he thought was a great deal when he bought had been forced by the power of simple MATH actually had to admit that the condo was built for very close to nothing and now had the actual value of a cardboard condo. I have not returned to Miami Beach.
We all need to realize that two wonderful things are totally invented in the Good Ole USA. They are basketball and outdoor arts festivals. Don't object... Europe simply had market days they were mostly crops they raised and I would imagine a few people selling the trinkets they made. That concept moved village to village day after day. Now basketball is a great game and has done crazy well. Yet, they still seem to spend millions reminding us to go to the game or at least turn the chanel to the game. Basketball will never die because it is a sport that makes one jump to your feet and scream "We Won" even though not one single player you came to watch even knows you exist and won't even hear about you when you die. Now, the other American invention, the outdoor art festival, has limitations that sports do not. For instance... when was the last time you made a sale and the person that just purchased began to jump up and down and scream... "I Won" and all the other people cheered and clapped their hands in helping the buyer celebrate the victory. Won't happen EVER. Perhaps our grand invention has simply run its course and will someday die a slow death. Perhaps that death is already happening. It appears that the great shows in America (I usualy get rejected by a lot of those) are spending or at least finding large sums of money to advertise and keep drawing a crowd that does not really come for the beer and music but for the art and fine craft.
My first suggestion to make things better is do what and I do. Do not encourage professional show owners to continue to ruin the real shows that may still be in a city or may comeback after the pro show promoters are forced out of business. This would be very simple... do what I do. Do NOT give them money. It's just like Walmart. I never give them money. For decades now the very artists and crafts people give them money over and over again and still wonder why the civic events went away. Real NON PROFIT shows can flourish as much as possible when they are back to being the show of the year in their region or at least in their city. Here is an example: Fort Worth Main Street has been better than ever each year when the weather does mess things up. They draw a crowd of half a million who pay zero to walk in and shop. Sure looks like Fort Worth could have at least one more show, perhaps two, each year and they would work well. Turns out when that was tried, that did not work.
There are, of course, other old shows that used to draw huge attendance of real buyers for years and then started making them pay to go shopping. Would ya really want to do that down at the mall or a world class art gallery?
Lets just get a grip... remember when a couple of shows called them selves "Starving Artist Shows" perhaps they are back.
I know, I know... we are selling less, life costs more than ever. I suggest that if you are under 65 you stop paying for health insurance and when you get sick, take a sack lunch, a new magazine and go to the ER, sit down and announce, I am sick and Ronald Reagan sent me and said it was free. Of course it will take a while unless no matter what your symptoms are... just yell "I have shooting pains down my left arm and it feels like there is a giant weight on my chest". Smile
This is a good and sobering post and I wish to throw my shabby and aging hat into the ring along with my fellow cultural brethren who continue to brave the odds and carry on. My brief history can be summed up describing a 1980s that saw a beginning and steady uptrend in my sales, a 1990s where the uptrend steepened (a lot!), and a 2000s where I peaked at around 2003 and witnessed a steady decline ever after that culminated with my leaving the active art show circuit in 2009 and took on various and miserable full-time and part-time work for the next 4 1/2 years to see my daughter finish college and begin her own journey (she's not in our basement)(so far). For various and subtle reasons, though, I believe the entire economy (world), and our field, peaked around 1998 and cracks and fissures have grown ever since, and will continue to for at least another 10 years. I am describing a giant topping process in the over all global economy with the USA the leading edge with our field a leading indicator inside this trend. We often feel it years before the rest of the people and this is true for the downtrend, and the uptrend which will arrive eventually. The economy has to get past a massive and historic problem before we see any sustainable recovery, to wit: The DEBT our society is carrying has to shrink one way or another and until it does nothing will change. Any uptick will be met with rising interest rates which will quickly kill the uptick as the weight of all the debt combines with the rising rates to suffocate any sustainable recovery. And this debt is individual right on up to national/global, it's everywhere, and isn't responsive to presidents or central banks or capitalist big shots or socialist saviors. In fact most of these creatures just make it worse. So,...after realizing all this I decided to re-enter the show world a few years back, and just do it anyway, come hell or high water, and so far the bills are getting paid, barely. Fortunately, I can do lots of different media and I have used my drawing abilities to market a series with subjects that celebrate our Great Mother, the Earth, and they sell okay, steady anyway, and I've come to realize people actually DO NEED ART, in the deep and soulful sense of the word, and people who are broke will still trade a few bucks to take home a prayer, a whiff of optimism, and a shared acknowledgement that we are in this together.
Tell us more gramps about A/C festivals before the advent of the combustion engine. Seriously Nels, you nailed it. Merry Christmas and we will see you soon on the golden road of unlimited devotion.
You are preaching to the choir ... I say again and again, there are too many shows. Pretty much any weekend I can hit a show going an hour in any direction. What I don't know is how to get around this. It is killing the market. They buyer does not need to buy, (actually let alone attend) as there will be another one next week they can go to .... so no shortage of opportunity to purchase handmade/art anywhere ! What do we do about this ?? Create a unique form of art... aren't we all trying to do that all the time? With the internet, it doesnt take long at all for someone to copy what you created uniquely ... its a struggle out there folks.. I can still pay the bills, but that's because I live simply.
Wow, your story is so familiar! Hubby is the artist photographer in the family. During the 90s he had a great run as one of the first to use 3d imaging combined with his photos as an illustrator and sold pics world wide, some for five figures. Then, royalty free stock hit and the whole industry just collapsed. And, I think the rise of royalty-free to free photos (and art) everywhere s is a factor in art sales, too, especially for photographers.
Before everyone was deluged by images from every waking minute on every venue, options for art to hang on your wall were limited. Now how many catalogs, online sites, Sam’s Club ‘print-you- own-canvas prints, etc. do you see offering images/prints etc. in just one day?
At the shows, we’ve seen lots of photographers selling great photos of old rusty cars. Well, Pixabay has 830,000 FREE images of them that you can download. So why in the hell would someone pay $400 for a photographic print? Because it has great lighting and composition? Maybe 5% of the audience seems to be aware of those characteristics.
After the stock photo “crash” hubby went with fine art aerials…that was different. As both pilot and photographer, he could keep costs down. And we turned the flying/photographing into coffee table books. Now we have to deal with drones, which to me, are going to be the equivalent of royalty-free stock = photos for nothing.
Wah, wah, wah! I guess every—scratch that MOST—industries, artists etc are dealing with this in some way. The challenges are many…to all of you having great sales at art shows, a big congratulations and Nels, thanks for your thought-provoking post and all the comments.
Comments
Go Richard Sherer, Go, I am loving it. When the going gets weird the weird get going. Find a niche and fill it, Have a great 2017
Hello everyone... good job Nels. Always a pleasure. However, here I go again covering the clouds with sunshine.... Math is the bitch we cannot slap away. Evidently mathematics (that only exact science there ever was). I have never in my forty-six years of doing shows been the one to ask to address the outdoor art shows because what I make is way more problem proof sales wise since people still have feet and need something to wear on the bottoms of their feet. Prior to 2007, America was a place where people had begun to believe that a 24% interest rate was not so bad on their credit cards and many people actually owed huge amounts of credit card debt but just kept buying our work and paying later. Home owners in some of our states (ie Florida and California) had been lulled into thinking that their house would always go up in value and sometimes double in value in just a few years and sell fast if you wanted to "move on up". Then math put it's foot down stronger than it had since the great depression and, I'll be damned, the possibility of simply loosing their house to foreclosure. Things had to change. First thing to change seemed to be the wealthy stopped buying anything... certainly stopped buying things that had always simply brought them artistic pleasure. The, regular people without wealth had to do anything they could to simply keep their house. I did a show in Miami Beach the year before the recession was visible to everyone and sold to a very happy bunch of folks that sometimes stood in line with their shoes and socks off and their credit card in their hand as they waited for their turn to be fitted. Well, I'll be damned again, I did that same show a year later and all people could afford to do in my booth was sit and visit and buy almost nothing. They told me stories about their huge equity they had in their condo and kind of all of the sudden their equity was gone and realtors were encouraging them to sell that condo for $90,000 even though they had paid $300,000 just a few years before. Only once in those conversations did I have the heart to tell a man that what he thought was a great deal when he bought had been forced by the power of simple MATH actually had to admit that the condo was built for very close to nothing and now had the actual value of a cardboard condo. I have not returned to Miami Beach.
We all need to realize that two wonderful things are totally invented in the Good Ole USA. They are basketball and outdoor arts festivals. Don't object... Europe simply had market days they were mostly crops they raised and I would imagine a few people selling the trinkets they made. That concept moved village to village day after day. Now basketball is a great game and has done crazy well. Yet, they still seem to spend millions reminding us to go to the game or at least turn the chanel to the game. Basketball will never die because it is a sport that makes one jump to your feet and scream "We Won" even though not one single player you came to watch even knows you exist and won't even hear about you when you die. Now, the other American invention, the outdoor art festival, has limitations that sports do not. For instance... when was the last time you made a sale and the person that just purchased began to jump up and down and scream... "I Won" and all the other people cheered and clapped their hands in helping the buyer celebrate the victory. Won't happen EVER. Perhaps our grand invention has simply run its course and will someday die a slow death. Perhaps that death is already happening. It appears that the great shows in America (I usualy get rejected by a lot of those) are spending or at least finding large sums of money to advertise and keep drawing a crowd that does not really come for the beer and music but for the art and fine craft.
My first suggestion to make things better is do what and I do. Do not encourage professional show owners to continue to ruin the real shows that may still be in a city or may comeback after the pro show promoters are forced out of business. This would be very simple... do what I do. Do NOT give them money. It's just like Walmart. I never give them money. For decades now the very artists and crafts people give them money over and over again and still wonder why the civic events went away. Real NON PROFIT shows can flourish as much as possible when they are back to being the show of the year in their region or at least in their city. Here is an example: Fort Worth Main Street has been better than ever each year when the weather does mess things up. They draw a crowd of half a million who pay zero to walk in and shop. Sure looks like Fort Worth could have at least one more show, perhaps two, each year and they would work well. Turns out when that was tried, that did not work.
There are, of course, other old shows that used to draw huge attendance of real buyers for years and then started making them pay to go shopping. Would ya really want to do that down at the mall or a world class art gallery?
Lets just get a grip... remember when a couple of shows called them selves "Starving Artist Shows" perhaps they are back.
I know, I know... we are selling less, life costs more than ever. I suggest that if you are under 65 you stop paying for health insurance and when you get sick, take a sack lunch, a new magazine and go to the ER, sit down and announce, I am sick and Ronald Reagan sent me and said it was free. Of course it will take a while unless no matter what your symptoms are... just yell "I have shooting pains down my left arm and it feels like there is a giant weight on my chest". Smile
This is a good and sobering post and I wish to throw my shabby and aging hat into the ring along with my fellow cultural brethren who continue to brave the odds and carry on. My brief history can be summed up describing a 1980s that saw a beginning and steady uptrend in my sales, a 1990s where the uptrend steepened (a lot!), and a 2000s where I peaked at around 2003 and witnessed a steady decline ever after that culminated with my leaving the active art show circuit in 2009 and took on various and miserable full-time and part-time work for the next 4 1/2 years to see my daughter finish college and begin her own journey (she's not in our basement)(so far). For various and subtle reasons, though, I believe the entire economy (world), and our field, peaked around 1998 and cracks and fissures have grown ever since, and will continue to for at least another 10 years. I am describing a giant topping process in the over all global economy with the USA the leading edge with our field a leading indicator inside this trend. We often feel it years before the rest of the people and this is true for the downtrend, and the uptrend which will arrive eventually. The economy has to get past a massive and historic problem before we see any sustainable recovery, to wit: The DEBT our society is carrying has to shrink one way or another and until it does nothing will change. Any uptick will be met with rising interest rates which will quickly kill the uptick as the weight of all the debt combines with the rising rates to suffocate any sustainable recovery. And this debt is individual right on up to national/global, it's everywhere, and isn't responsive to presidents or central banks or capitalist big shots or socialist saviors. In fact most of these creatures just make it worse. So,...after realizing all this I decided to re-enter the show world a few years back, and just do it anyway, come hell or high water, and so far the bills are getting paid, barely. Fortunately, I can do lots of different media and I have used my drawing abilities to market a series with subjects that celebrate our Great Mother, the Earth, and they sell okay, steady anyway, and I've come to realize people actually DO NEED ART, in the deep and soulful sense of the word, and people who are broke will still trade a few bucks to take home a prayer, a whiff of optimism, and a shared acknowledgement that we are in this together.
Tell us more gramps about A/C festivals before the advent of the combustion engine. Seriously Nels, you nailed it. Merry Christmas and we will see you soon on the golden road of unlimited devotion.
You are preaching to the choir ... I say again and again, there are too many shows. Pretty much any weekend I can hit a show going an hour in any direction. What I don't know is how to get around this. It is killing the market. They buyer does not need to buy, (actually let alone attend) as there will be another one next week they can go to .... so no shortage of opportunity to purchase handmade/art anywhere ! What do we do about this ?? Create a unique form of art... aren't we all trying to do that all the time? With the internet, it doesnt take long at all for someone to copy what you created uniquely ... its a struggle out there folks.. I can still pay the bills, but that's because I live simply.
Wow, your story is so familiar! Hubby is the artist photographer in the family. During the 90s he had a great run as one of the first to use 3d imaging combined with his photos as an illustrator and sold pics world wide, some for five figures. Then, royalty free stock hit and the whole industry just collapsed. And, I think the rise of royalty-free to free photos (and art) everywhere s is a factor in art sales, too, especially for photographers.
Before everyone was deluged by images from every waking minute on every venue, options for art to hang on your wall were limited. Now how many catalogs, online sites, Sam’s Club ‘print-you- own-canvas prints, etc. do you see offering images/prints etc. in just one day?
At the shows, we’ve seen lots of photographers selling great photos of old rusty cars. Well, Pixabay has 830,000 FREE images of them that you can download. So why in the hell would someone pay $400 for a photographic print? Because it has great lighting and composition? Maybe 5% of the audience seems to be aware of those characteristics.
After the stock photo “crash” hubby went with fine art aerials…that was different. As both pilot and photographer, he could keep costs down. And we turned the flying/photographing into coffee table books. Now we have to deal with drones, which to me, are going to be the equivalent of royalty-free stock = photos for nothing.
Wah, wah, wah! I guess every—scratch that MOST—industries, artists etc are dealing with this in some way. The challenges are many…to all of you having great sales at art shows, a big congratulations and Nels, thanks for your thought-provoking post and all the comments.
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