Sell Me a River
I’ve never been good at selling. A skill, I was told was useless to have, that I should have been sent to a military-style boot camp to religiously engrain into my data. Anything worth doing requires selling of some sort.
I discovered this first in my BFA program. I left my perfectly respectable Art Education major with the intention to stop focusing on kids, and instead to think about the conceptual happenings on my insides. There was nothing wrong with this considering I was 19 years old. I didn’t, and still don’t, want to think about what it takes to make a living, with money, in the world. My professors of Fine Art were, either way, hell-bent on drilling the revenue-making process for working artists. I just wanted to have a studio where I could spend 9 hours a day making bullshit. I didn’t actually want to sell it to… collectors.
That was a rude awakening. Important, however. It explains why there aren’t many successful working artists under the age of 60, or even alive. I have seen what it takes to consistently put your work out there as only a way to define oneself as an artist. I don’t particularly think that is the path for me at this moment.
For instance, out of my 24 hours in a day, I choose to prioritize 8 hours of unconscious sleep. As I’ve mentioned previously, I don’t necessarily get all of those 8 hours every day, but I strive for it! I’ll do my darndest to ensure I am cozied up under the covers with my eyes closed for 480 consecutive minutes. This, I learned, is likely to be detrimental to an artist’s career. Not only do you need to sell your soul self to collectors, but you’ll also need to have a full-time job to support your art making. This requires at least 8-9 hours, potentially more depending on a commute, toward a job that will probably allow you to do the work you set out to do in the first place. In my case, I only have less than 7 hours left of my day to eat, meditate, exercise, socialize, learn, post on Instagram, scroll through Tik-Tok, yell at my family, walk the dogs, and accommodate any other mundane request not described here that will typically fall into the lap of a modern human. I love to make art. As anyone could imagine, there’s not a ton of time to sell it.
I still call myself an artist because I still do a lot of the things I did when I was getting my BFA. I might not have the work to show for it or have submitted for a show in several years, but I’m starting to redefine why I would want to do that anyway. When I graduated, it was just because it was the thing you had to do if you wanted to be an artist. And then, I needed to get a job. And then, I burnt out because there was no way for me to continue with making, selling, working, sleeping, eating, exercising, scrolling, etc. all at once.
I’m okay with how this part of me, the part of me that made art and needed to try to sell it (not for money), needed to rest. I didn’t enjoy making art after college because the goal for the end of its life was not part of the whole. I was following the direction of how to be a career artist. I stopped doing it because it wasn’t the career for me.
As I said, I’m still an artist. I am a potter, a writer, a thinker, and trying to be a “do-er.” I’m defining what that means in my life now, but it’s starting to take the form of, “get out of your head and into the things that bring you life,” or “ignite the spark in yourself.” This feels closer to the inspiration I had for creating when I had not been tainted with the idea of selling.
I’m not convinced that I’ll never need to learn how to sell. I’m assuming it will be easier to learn when I have mastered bringing my life to the world in an authentic way.