Where You Show Your Work Matters

Judging by the number of artists who are supplementing their income with teaching workshops, and by galleries that are taking on non-art merchandise such as furniture or clothes, I’d have to say that overall art sales have deeply declined. I’ve heard from several artists who haven’t sold a piece in many months. Some of them have lowered their prices and/or shifted their venues downward through various sales outlet tiers, meaning they are less fastidious about where they sell their work. A typical pattern of descent moves from a gallery to a restaurant or cafe to a bank or a retail store. Does it really matter where you show your work? I think it does. Remember the adage: “Presentation is everything”? That was instilled in me by both my elders and my experience over decades of pre-professional jobs as well as my long-term teaching career. Students are notoriously inattentive, and when you need to make sure they “get it,” the message you have to deliver must be presented in a manner that seizes their short attention span and compels them to focus on the information. In high school I was crushingly bored by the dry delivery of facts, but how my curious mind perked up whenever a teacher had a lively and imaginative way of explaining things! It's no different with art. Artists in San Miguel must display their work in a lively and imaginative manner in order to get the public to take note. Restaurants and retail stores are not only inappropriate places to hang serious art, they are dull and deadly, and a huge step downwards on the scale of seriousness. Sure there are and have always been exceptions, but those exceptions were usually unorthodox spots for bohemians and other intellectuals to meet and discuss. Sadly, that type of alternative venue, such as a bookstore run by book and art lovers, doesn't yet exist in San Miguel.

Evidently, there is a lot of new thinking going on about how to engage audiences by offering art in unusual spaces. I’ve just read a report by the James Irvine Foundation (irvine.org) on this subject, and they cite a group in Philadelphia that has pop-up gallerys. Engaging audiences for art is of course vital; however, I still have serious doubts that the way to do this is to put art into public venues without the right kind of preparation, by which I mean education. The old adage, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” applies here. 

"Spring" oil painting by Anthony Maulucci