Marita Holdaway of the Benham Gallery in Seattle posted a comment today (see below), as follows:
“I think a dialog about better preparing artists for the business of being an artist while in school would be great. I have interns and new employees come to me recently graduated from schools like Seattle Art Institute and Rhode Island School of Design without a clue of how to represent themselves, who to approach about their art or how to talk about it.
“A semester-long course on the business of being an artist would go a long way in helping artists become more successful in their efforts to get their art out there in the world.”
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I’m experimenting with how I and my subscribers can use this blog as a forum. One method involves putting up a new post on a particular theme, so that’s what I’m doing here. You can add your own comments below.
I have uploaded an essay from 1987, “Identity Crisis: The State Of Photography Education Today,” that provides some background on the evolution of the university, the art institute, and the polytechnic institute. And I’ve added the previously unpublished text of “2020 Vision: Photojournalism’s Next Two Decades,” a talk I gave at the World Press Photo Awards Day in 2000, because in it I envision the education and post-graduation professional practice of a young photographer. The combination will give you some of my own reference points, at least.
My own immediate response to Holdaway’s suggestion:
From visiting art schools and photo programs around the country and internationally over the years I have the distinct impression that many already offer such courses. They include such subjects as preparing the portfolio, writing the grant proposal, writing the artist’s statement (usually with disastrous results), and other aspects of “getting your work out.” Some schools that don’t offer such courses within their curricula bring in outsiders like Mary Virginia Swanson to teach short, intensive workshops on these subjects. And of course one can take Swanson’s workshops independently; she presents them regularly in a variety of settings and locations. Others offer similar opportunities: key into Google the words “business of art seminar” and you’ll see some of the options.
So I’m not convinced that the need Holdaway perceives results from a widespread shortage of such instruction. Certainly there’s more information about “the business of art” out there now, in the form of workshops, seminars, books, websites, and other media, than ever before. And some schools clearly excel in preparing their students that way. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the Yale School of Art turns out grads with ample self-promotional skills, given that the Yale School of Management offers one of the world’s most prestigious MBA degrees.
Nor am I convinced that such instruction in practical business matters belongs within the pedagogical structures of higher education. None of the hard sciences, none of the social disciplines (economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology), and none of the humanities offer courses in self-promotion, marketing, and business strategies as part of undergraduate or graduate curricula. It’s surely no easier to “get your work out there in the world” as a PhD in comparative religion than it is as a newbie MFA. Why should student artists get special tutorials in “the business of being an artist” when no one seems to think that student anthropologists need special instruction in the business of being an anthropologist? Do we assume that young artists, as distinct from young physicists or historians or literary scholars, are special-needs cases meriting the pre-professional equivalent of training bras to ready them for the elementary truth that once they leave school they’ll have to earn a living somehow?
Art School Confidential (2006)
We live in the first culture in recorded history that has dramatically overproduced both art and artists — more art than we can possibly exhibit, purchase, conserve, and otherwise consume, more artists than we can possibly employ or otherwise subsidize. Granted, I’d rather see tax monies and discretionary income spent on art than on neutron bombs, stealth fighter planes, and junk food. But that will simply aggravate the art glut. If some young artists fall by the wayside because they get out of art school unaware that they’re entering a business environment and unprepared to do so, that’s life. As my late colleague Richard Kirstel was wont to say, “Those who can be discouraged, should be.”
Don’t just take Kirstel’s word for it, or mine. I give you the wisdom of Prof. Sandiford, the art-school faculty member played by John Malkovich in Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 comedy, Art School Confidential. On the first day of the fall semester, Sandiford tells the entering freshmen in his life-drawing class, “Don’t have unrealistic expectations. If you want to make money, better drop out right now. Go to banking school, or website school, anywhere but art school. And remember, only one out of a hundred of you will ever make a living as an artist.” Amen to that.
I welcome other voices to a dialogue, pro and con, on this subject.
— A. D. Coleman
I think a dialog about better preparing artists for the business of being an artist while in school would be great. I have interns and new employees come to me recently graduated from schools like Seattle Art Institute and Rhode Island School of Design without a clue of how to represent themselves, who to approach about their art or how to talk about it.
A semester long course on the business of being an artist would go a long way in helping artists become more successful in their efforts to get their art out there in the world.
Hi Allan, and Marita,
If I do agree that some preparation and training on how to market oneself as an artist is a necessity I would rather see it as part of a broader course about the art market, pointing out its history, advances and pitfalls. I do think that marketing is a job of its own, whatever one may market,the “artist” is there to produce art and dedicate its time and attention to it. What they should learn is how where and when to approach people who will market them (and whose job it is otherwise what’s the point of their commissions ( ? ;o) ). I do not expect a dealer or curator to tell me how to deal with my medium, master my tool and create work, these are my responsibilities as a photographer and that may be why some of us went to school (to get knowledgeable feedback, perspective, insight into our work from different points of view by practitioners like us). Nonetheless some insight about presentation are definitely a necessity as content without form makes its access difficult to others, but form without content is pure empty decoration.
Bruno
In other words a whole course and semester dedicated to form outside the work (presentation) might be a little over the top.
There is already too much crafty packaging and playing games with the marketing aspects of things (art) these days that conceal bottomless pits (my name is Koons).
Best,
Bruno
I think we need to make a distinction here between several usages of the term “presentation.” One usage applies that word to the process of resolving the form/content relationship and determining the final version(s) in which the completed work will seek to engage its audience(s). Along with the transmission of craft skills, this has become an established aspect of art-ed/photo-ed pedagogy, integral to the curriculum.
The other usage of “presentation” concerns such matters as editing and designing your portfolio, organizing your CV, styling your slides (if you still use slides, handwritten titles are apparently a no-no), writing your artist’s statement, networking, and such. These are all aspects of marketing.
Nothing shameful about marketing; in one way or another every field or discipline requires it. But that doesn’t mean that it therefore should become integrated into the curriculum in art/photo school.
It also seems to me that if you argue that student artists and photographers need such instruction, you have to broaden it to encompass students in all fields. Otherwise you have implicitly proposed that art/photo students have a specific incompetence in their relationship to professional life after school that requires particular corrective coursework.
So I’m ready to hear someone make the case for a course in “Getting your work out as a philosopher” or “Survival tips for the ESL teacher.” The fact that most people (including philosophy and ESL students and faculty) find such ideas laughable should tell us something about equivalent proposals for art/photo classes.
Something to consider in relationship to the career paths and professional practices of those in “social disciplines (economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology)” is that artists are manufacturers of a commodity that represents a significant % of this nation’s gross national product. This is commercial business that art school simply does not prepare the art manufacturer/practitioner for participation in at a level adequate to achieve financial self-reliance. The only ‘artistic’ discipline that is treated as the real business that it is, is architecture.
Making and selling art is a sophisticated enterprise in which the profit center (artist) largely remains at the tail end of the food chain. So-called ‘business training’ is not really about making one’s production into a going concern, but all about patronage and supplication, art market-targeted PR, and manipulation of a self-enclosed, exclusionary art-world controlled by an academic elite and a mafia of canny purveyors of art product. Art students should look into the life of the great British painter William Turner to understand that the old system remains intact and in order to profit from one’s gift, one must take control of one’s own business and reach the wider audience directly.
But market ‘glut’ is indeed a serious problem these days. The internet has made economic survival more challenging, albeit without the artificial distribution constraints of the existing elitist system. The difficulty of survival, much less of economic success, is compounded by the reality of competing with the availability of both living and dead artists’ work en masse. In the end it’s always all about hitting the ideal ‘price point’!
I agree with much of what Thornton says. But I think a comparable case could be made that, for example, graduate psychology majors are purveyors of a a combination of services and commodities that “represent a significant % of this nation’s gross national product.” When you factor in not only clinical psychologists but psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and social workers, who not only engage with patients but write books and magazine articles and produce DVDs and run radio and TV shows (think Dr. Phil) with often extensive product lines, you certainly have a substantial economic force.
So one could say, with equal accuracy, “This is commercial business that psych school simply does not prepare the pysch manufacturer/practitioner for participation in at a level adequate to achieve financial self-reliance.” And if that’s true of psychology then it’s surely true of such other disciplines as chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine, to name a few of the hard sciences, and literature, theater, music, and dance among the academicized arts.
So I’d rephrase and refine my question this way:
• Does instruction in the business aspects of professional practice have an appropriate place within an academic curriculum (college, university, art institute) devoted to a specific field?
• If so, why?
• If not, why not?
• If so, should such instruction be made available to pre-professionals in all areas (science, social studies, humanities, arts) and all disciplines therein (with some courses calibrated to the particular issues germane to doing business as a practitioner of a given discipline)?
• If not, why not?
• Might it make more sense, in either case, to offer such instruction as either an optional minor (e.g., in “the business of art” or “the business of psychotherapy”) or as optional seminars held during winter break and/or summer session?
Two points.
I think there is quite a dramatic difference between the preparation needed for a an academic career – presumably one in which success is judged by the acquisition of tenure – and the “independent contractor” model that will be for better or worse await the graduating art student. The proliferation of art programs and opportunities in teaching art don’t really change this essential character, as the positions in secondary school teaching are still too few to employ graduating artists.
Most artists, unless they are independently supported, will need day jobs in addition to making and marketing their own work. Nothing wrong with that, as you said, but adopting a sink or swim approach in what is in fact an increasingly competitive business makes it much more likely that those most talented at self-promotion emerge as winners, rather than the most accomplished artists. Maybe this sits well with you, but I think most people find that outcome – which in fact can be seen all around us – the reason why so much art seems so mediocre.
My second point concerns your dismissal of career preparation in the humanities and sciences, etc. Besides being untrue – there are in fact such courses in graduate schools, many added after pressure from students – it is most definitely not “laughable” to the thousands of Phd’s who are unable to find work in their field due to the implosion of the tenure system and the proliferation of adjunct work, as well as general changes in our economy. Just as in art there are many more Phd students and scholars than academia is willing to employ, and this has also given rise to new models that attempt to prepare students for lives outside the old academic structure. This has sometimes happened after many years of denial on the part of academic committees.
Having said all that, I’m not sure what model such progams should follow, how to strike the right balance between encouraging innovation while understanding the framework we all operate in. I can say that the wider and more inclusive the education, the more interesting the human being – artist or not – that emerges into the “real world”.
I certainly didn’t mean to treat the challenges of earning a living after graduation dismissively. No question that it’s no easy row to hoe, whether you opt for the path Colleen Thornton describes above as “patronage and supplication, art market-targeted PR, and manipulation of a self-enclosed, exclusionary art-world,” or the alternative of supporting your creative work with your craft skills, or the third option — making custom furniture, selling real estate, or otherwise subsidizing your creative work with some unrelated means of generating revenue.
I’ve made my living as a full-time freelance writer and teacher since 1968 — never on staff, never salaried, never on a contract that couldn’t end after completion of the current semester or the current writing assignment. I know the pitfalls and perils of that professional choice all too well, and take them very seriously. Here’s a link to an essay I published in 1981 about that very subject, “Damn the Neuroses! Full Speed Ahead! Or, Thoughts on the Free Lance Life.”
And here’s a link to my 1978 keynote address to the Society for Photographic Education, “No Future For You? Speculations on the Next Decade in Photography Education.” I hope the combination makes it clear that I understand the issues of post-school survival, and empathize with the plight of those whose higher education results in a degree in the creative arts.
Some background: I’ve taught (as adjunct faculty) in post-secondary photography and art programs across the US and elsewhere in the world since 1970. So I know this environment well. My academic credentials include a BA in English Literature and an MA in English Lit/Creative Writing. The latter, for a writer, is the rough equivalent of an MFA — except that, as it’s not a terminal degree, it doesn’t fully qualify you to teach on a college level. If I’d wanted to go tenure-track with it, I’d have had to earn a PhD or demonstrate “equivalent professional experience” (meaning a bunch of published and well-regarded works). Otherwise my degrees qualified me to teach high-school English, and would probably have gotten me an entry-level editorial job at an ad agency or a publishing house, a copy-editor slot at a newspaper or magazine.
At no time during my undergraduate or graduate education do I recall any of my faculty so much as mentioning the issue of how any of us students would make a living when we left school. Certainly no one offered us courses, or even short intensive seminars, in “the business of writing” or any other discipline. Nor did we expect them to. And this was true of everyone I met in college studying any subject at all. We came there to get a general education and study at length the content of our chosen major subjects.
So I have something akin to the experience of going to art school and then striking out on my own, following the “independent contractor” model. I do wish that someone in the writing program at San Francisco State College, where I got my master’s degree in the mid-’60s, had offered an evening seminar on copyright law, contract negotiation, and subsidiary-rights licensing of the sort I’ve taught for the National Writers Union and other sponsors. I’d have found that useful, and it would have saved me some time and some grief.
But — and here comes an important question — who would have taught that seminar? I studied with some very distinguished writers at both my alma maters, but only one of them (the late Albert Goldman) ever sold enough books that he could have lived off the proceeds, and that didn’t happen for him in the early ’60s when I had him as a teacher. My other faculty were often people who had grown up during the Depression and World War II, and might well have worked various jobs while earning their degrees or before entering the teaching profession, but none of them had been self-supporting in the discipline they taught. By definition, they all used their academic positions to subsidize whatever scholarly or creative work they produced. Few if any had proven or would ever prove that they possessed employable professional-level skills in whatever field they presented to us in their roles as teachers.
So what qualifications would you require of someone who set out to teach “the business of art/photo,” and who do you know on any art/photo school faculty who meets those qualifications?
Most of the people I know currently teaching either full-time or extensive adjunct hours in undergraduate and graduate art and photography departments, as well as in art history departments, have stayed in school all their lives. They simply exchanged student status for faculty status as soon as possible after obtaining their degrees, and except for brief periods of unemployment when “between positions” have fed off the academic teat their entire lives.
They’ve never made a living from the sale or licensing of their intellectual property. They’ve never supported the production of their creative work with revenue earned by using their craft skills as artists and/or photographers in some applied aspect of their medium. They’ve never supported the production of their creative work with revenue earned by working some other kind of job outside the academic setting. They’ve survived via their social and political skills at negotiating the academic-art bureaucracy, landing (in the best-case scenarios) one or more teaching sinecures.
They may have something to teach the young about craft in their chosen media, and about the making of art. I have little confidence in their ability to provide substantive guidance in re “the business of art” that’s grounded in extensive, direct personal experience.
Art schools used to consider prospective faculty on two grounds: academic certification or “equivalent professional experience.” The latter meant tangible, measurable professional accomplishment, such as running a successful professional studio, earning a living as a working press photographer, etc. “Equivalent professional experience” no longer counts as a qualification for a college-level job teaching art or photography; you won’t find a field for it anymore in applications for teaching jobs in the art/photo realm. That’s in large part because few people currently teaching have any way of assessing equivalent professional experience, since they have little if any such experience themselves.
Who then do you charge with the task of conveying the basics and the nuances of “the business of art” in the classroom?
Individual artists have a product, their imagination. In reality the artist is an independent producer/contractor. Thinking of oneself as a small business is a healthy approach in our capitalist society. All artists armed with the entrepreneurial spirit improve their chances at making a living.
I agree entirely with Chester Higgins on this. If you’re earning your living as a producer of creative work or maker of intellectual property (or both), not as a salaried employee but as a self-employed/freelance independent contractor, you’re an entrepreneur running a small business. That status doesn’t change because you also decide to do some equally freelance teaching or consulting or lecturing or other activity. You’ve simply diversified your line of goods and/or services.
Even if you’re doing that as a sideline, while deriving your main income from a teaching job or a staff position as a photographer, you’re still an entrepreneur running a small business in that aspect of your life. “Everyone lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it,” as Robert Louis Stevenson said.
This isn’t just a skill set, it’s a mindset. I’m not convinced that you can transmit either to students in a school setting. I’m reasonably convinced that you can’t transmit it effectively in a one-semester course. Which leads to another question: If you propose that fine-arts programs, and photo programs — maybe also philosophy programs and creative-writing programs and physics programs — should take responsibility for teaching a basic business component to their students, where do you suggest they squeeze it in?
Undergraduate and graduate programs have fixed numbers of credits required for a major. Within those degree requirements, departments have specified numbers of required courses and elective courses. Add a required course and you have to drop another one from the requirements — and you have to produce a formal rationale for each of those acts. Add an elective course and the student has to choose between, say, advanced studio lighting and “the business of photography.” Which choice best prepares her or him for professional life after school?
Moreover, few students today can afford to take extra courses and stay in college for additional semesters (and those who can, of course, are the wealthy, presumably least in need of business savvy) . . .
So I’m not questioning the assertion that today, perhaps more than ever before, students in all disciplines need business smarts in order to survive once they graduate and enter the workplace. I’m questioning the proposition that therefore this should come from “the schools,” and specifically from the art/photo schools and departments, with their faltering enrollments and overburdened faculties and underfunded programs.
We live in the first culture in recorded history that has dramatically overproduced both art and artists — more art than we can possibly exhibit, purchase, conserve, and otherwise consume, more artists than we can possibly employ or otherwise subsidize.
I’m not so sure about that. In the census of Amsterdam of 1650 it was discovered that there were more painters than bakers in the city. I don’t think anyone’s complaining about too many Dutch masters from that time.
Interesting fact re the Amsterdam census. But I’m not sure what point you intend to make. Presumably those painters learned both their craft and their trade by going through long, difficult apprenticeships in the ateliers of other painters — the process I describe in my essay “Identity Crisis: The State Of Photography Education Today.” There, working for minimum wage for years doing the mundane tasks of prep work for the master painter’s commissions, they’d have had ample time and opportunity to absorb the principles underlying the business aspect of life as a professional artist in mid-17th century Holland.
Eventually, if they had the skills, they’d graduate to journeyman level, which meant better pay and more sophisticated tasks for their masters. Some would stay in the workshops they’d apprenticed in; others would shop themselves around for better opportunities. All, apprentices and journeymen alike, were painters’ assistants who would get described by a census taker as “painters.” Most of them would never set up their own ateliers or make paintings of their own to sell.
Could be that, once they reached journeyman level and struck out on their own, they went around the Amsterdam art world whining about how hard it was to make a living as a painter, how they hadn’t known there would be so much competition, and how someone should have better prepared them for the harsh economic reality of earning a living with their craft. Somehow I doubt it.
In 1650 Amsterdam far more people knew how to bake than knew how to make a painting. Which meant that most households made their own breads and pastries. I’d assume that, in terms of supply and demand, Amsterdam had enough bakeries to serve its population; we have no historical record of a bread shortage there. By the same token, I’ll bet that the city’s residents (and those from elsewhere who bought there) supported its painting industry, by and large, and that those painters who couldn’t find work there moved elsewhere or went into another profession.
Let’s also keep in mind that these weren’t artists concentrating on “their own work” and expecting financial support for it. They were painters for hire, hustling commissions from the wealthy and the new bourgeoisie for religious images, portraits, landscapes, and the emergent form of the “still life,” cranking out such work for the tourist trade and the international market. Genre painters doing hackwork, for the most part, the bulk of their output at best a footnote to art history. Much closer to commercial studio photography than to the garret where painters pursuing their own personal way of seeing often ended up.
There were a lot of painters and painters’ assistants in Amsterdam in 1650 producing a lot of paintings because there were a lot of people buying paintings there. Most of what got painted was produced to meet a specific demand from the market, and most got made to the exact specifications of its clientele. If the patron wanted a lobster in the still life, and some pearls, you gave him a lobster and pearls. The painter either produced for that market or went hungry. A very different set of assumptions from those presently rampant in New York, or Seattle, or Vancouver.
Here’s a pertinent news story from CNN.com: “Alumna sues college because she hasn’t found a job.”
Yes indeedy. “Trina Thompson, 27, of the Bronx, graduated from New York’s Monroe College in April with a bachelor of business administration degree in information technology. On July 24, she filed suit against the college in Bronx Supreme Court . . . for $72,000 — the full cost of her tuition and then some — because she cannot find a job.” She graduated, I might add, with a 2.7 grade-point average (GPA), or a B-, one notch above C+.
So a student with an April ’09 B.A. from a not especially prestigious college, who had an academic career no one would consider remarkable, feels entitled three months after graduation to demand a full tuition refund plus $2K for job-hunt stress because she she’s having trouble getting employed in her chosen field in the midst of an international financial crisis and the worst U.S. economic collapse since the Great Depression.
Now, you may find this comical, as I do. Or pathetic, as I also do (between attacks of wild laughter). You may wonder how she earned a college degree. Or you may “feel her pain.” But you have to admit that her claim represents the logical consequence of the assumption that your college education is supposed to ensure that you’re employable immediately upon graduation. Because if you graduate you’re qualified, and if you’re qualified you’re employable, yes? And if you’re employable then you should be employed, right? And if you’re not employed then the school didn’t do its job, no? QED. Who would argue with that logic?
Were I the dean of an art school or art/photo department in a college or university, I’d be shaking in my boots and watching this case very closely. Because, whatever I may estimate as Ms. Thompson’s level of smarts, she did in fact earn a college degree in two fields involving quantifiable skills: business administration and information technology. Presumably she has acquired a skill set that can get tested objectively, and that an employer might find it profitable to have available. If she wins this case, and the past three decades’ worth of art and photo students who haven’t become art-world and photo-world successes get wind of it, there’ll be hell to pay.