Happy Saturday. After getting the flu for two and a half weeks and being unable to do anything other than work through by TBR reading list and binge watch HBO’s The Last of Us, I’m excited to finally get back to work.
This week our top stories center around the current state of the creative economy and how artists can move on from failure.
What to do when your art career just isn’t taking off
It happens to all of us. You put your work out there, that thing you spent weeks of your life on, and what kind of reception do you get in return? crickets. No one buys your work, no one even looks at it.
You’re failing. And it’s terrifying.
Before the idea of starting a Youtube channel was even an idle fantasy in my imagination, I was trying loads of ways to get my art career off the ground. I was displaying in art galleries, in coffee shops, in art exhibits held in the dorm room of a friend of a friend, art fairs held above the cafeteria at my college, you name it, I was trying it.
And none of it was really working. Really working in a way that meant I could make art my job. It wasn’t until I started prioritizing my art skills and focused my efforts on building an audience that I actually started to see results.
Often times when we’re failing we get frustrated and overwhelmed, we convince ourselves that we’re doing everything we can and it’s the world that’s simply unfair.
The world is definitely unfair, that’s indisputable, but very seldom are we truly doing everything we can be doing, or at least we’re not focusing on doing the right things with our time.
If your art career is really going nowhere, take a minute to ask yourself the following questions:
Do you have a clear direction of where you want to go with your art career?
Are you getting ahead of yourself? Ie. trying to make $100k a year from commissions when your art skills are really the thing you should be focusing on.
Are there any weak points in your current marketing strategy?
Are you simply being impatient? Art careers take time to develop.
For more in depth coverage on this, check out this week’s video on my main channel :)
Industry analysis reveals artists are struggling to recover from the pandemic
A recent report as confirmed what a lot of artists have strongly suspected: fine artists and performance artists have consistently struggled to recover financially from the pandemic, at least in California.
The Otis College Report on the Creative Economy, completed every year, analyzes the impact of California’s creative industries on the state’s overall economy. The creative economy, which includes not just independent artists but things like the video game industry, fashion, and architecture, makes up 15% of California’s economy.
Unfortunately, the creative sector hasn’t experienced any job expansion over the past several years, and employment remains significantly below where it was pre-pandemic. If you’re an artist on the ground in any of these industries, you’ve likely felt the pain that a reduced investment in the arts has caused, even beyond California.
On this wide of a scale, the most effective interventions happen at the legislative and policymaking level. Things like tax incentives, apprentice programs, and increased funding, and cross pollination from other sectors will help get the creative community back on its feet.
The two hour long video of a panel discussion about the report is a fascinating listen. If you’re looking for high-level news on the creative industry as a whole, that is definitely for you.
It seems like a takeaway from this report for individual artists currently struggling is to be as flexible as possible, and focus on having a wide array of skills so you can bounce around various creative industries if you need to.
Keep your head up and hang in there, we’ll figure it out together.
That’s all from me this week :)
