I am self-employed, and I make my living through an approach I call "Patchwork Economics."
That basically means that I have a bunch of different small projects that I am constantly tinkering with, none of which are economically significant enough to offer me an actual living, but when added together at least allow us to scrape by.
As part of the patchwork quilt of things that I do, I consider my artwork to be at least a sort of part-time job. Sure, it's primarily a creative outlet, but it's also a source of income.
Because we materially count on the income from my artwork — as well as my wife's creative endeavors — to come from the attendance of arts and crafts fairs, festivals, ghost and paranormal conferences and more, that particular stream of income all but completely disappeared when Covid shut everything down starting immediately after the close of the 2019 season.
There quite simply were no event during 2020 and 2021, and then there were only limited shows (with restrictions) in 2022, and it really wasn't until the middle of 2023 that we returned to any semblance of what might have been considered relatively "normal" before. Even so, we have only recovered two a point of being at about 70% of where we were before Covid.
Anyway one of my challenges has always been to find viable ways to sell my art online. Sure, I have Etsy and eBay shops and my work is represented on Amazon Handmade and I have my own website, but it hardly amounts to more than a handful of small sales per year. Invariably, I end up feeling like it's a lot of effort for very little in terms of results.
Of course most of the fellow artists I know who have an interest in the online world, as well as blockchain and cryptocurrency keep saying "oh, you just need to turn your work into NFTs!".
Which brings me to that interesting line of contemplating the difference between actually adding value, and simply trying to extract money from something.
We talk a lot about a future in which practically everything's going to be tokenized, but just because you can turn a photo of your nose hair into an NFT does that mean it's the right thing to do? What's more, is it in any way meaningful to do so... beyond the fact that maybe if you'll get insanely lucky and find the next idiot you can collect a few dollars for having done so?
Maybe I'm a bit of a purist — and a bit old fashioned — but I am definitely interested in selling art and creativity but I am less interested in slightly scammy gimmickry.
And yet, it seems like very few self-professed artists who claim to be "successes online" are actually successful at selling their art; they're more successful at talking about their art, and having instructional videos on YouTube about their art, and selling mugs and t-shirts with their art, and selling people programs about "how to be successful online as an artist," which seems to basically constitute telling other people how to be successful as an artist online even though nobody's actually selling any art and everybody's just selling instructionals in a huge circle jerk.
And yes, that was a very long sentence!
I struggle a little bit to escape the seeming duality of where it almost feels like you can either ou t your energy into creating art or you can use the same effort to make money but you can't expect to make both. Is that really true?
But let us just move into an imaginary world where are we — for example — take one of these objects above, which is a stone that I have hand-painted. It is unique and original and it exists here in 3D space.
So when somebody says "turn that into an NFT", what does that really mean?
Does it mean that the NFT is a photograph of the stone that exists separately from the stone? Or is the NFT more like the "certificate" that documents the authenticity and ownership of the stone, and in some ways makes the stone more tradable? In other words, if you buy the NFT you get the the digital proof and the stone that goes with it, in physical space... and the NFT primarily represents documentable ownership of the stone and that it is this particular stone.
And then, should you ever decide to sell it or trade it, the stone has no value without the NFT, and the NFT has no value without the stone?
Or do these become two completely separate and unconnected things? As in — like with a painting — the stone is the original, and making prints of that original represents the NFT?
None of this seems particularly clear to me.
In truth, I have somewhat run into this before with marketing organizations that have contacted me insisting that they could do a great job of putting my art online and making it "highly successful!"
Whenever I probe that situation a little further and get back to them, it inevitably turns out that there entire experience is in dealing with painters and photographers whose work can easily be photographed and scanned and then transferred onto everything from coffee mugs to t-shirts to shopping bags to mouse pads. Heck, you can even get a copy of their artwork put on curtains or couch pillows.
Ironically, just about the only thing you can't actually get is the art, itself!
A painted rock isn't exactly like that.
Of course, there are those who will come back and claim that either I "don't have a very popular type of item," or I "don't have a marketable item."
And I'm going to call (at least partial) bullshit on that, because if that were actually true how do you explain that I can take a selection of these stones, set up a vendor booth at a show, event or conference that's somewhat related to what I'm doing, and sell dozens of these for maybe $2,000-$3,000 for a weekend, and then return home only to find people in my email insisting that such things are "impossible to sell..."
Without a doubt, there is an interesting challenge here.
Just to add further cause for speculation, some 10 years ago — when I first seriously started to offer this work for sale — there was actually a fairly substantial upward trajectory of sales of these stones online, particularly from the Etsy marketplace!
The piece of context I can write wrap around that is that when my work was doing well on Etsy, Etsy was purely a marketplace for individually made hand created goods and art, whereas today it has devolved into yet another giant circus of resellers that often offer little more that the same cheap crap from Southeast Asia, over and over again.
Regardless, it's a tough nut to crack... and one I am always turning over in my head.
Thanks for visiting, and have a great remainder of your weekend!
Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — NOT posted anywhere else!)
Created at 2024-04-13 16:53 PDT
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