A Vision for a New Type of Art Gallery
In this episode of the 'Art Business Morning Show,' host Patrick explores a revolutionary vision for a new type of art gallery. He discusses ten critical truths about the art and photography markets and outlines a reimagined gallery model that benefits artists. Key points include the importance of customer proximity, the failings of traditional galleries, the power of digital marketing, and the future impact of live video. Patrick also calls for artists and photographers to join this innovative initiative aimed at fostering symbiotic relationships and transforming the art industry.
Podcast Transcribe
Patrick Shanahan: All right, I think we're live. Okay, so big episode today. I'm excited about this: a vision for a new type of art gallery. Specifically, ten truths of the art or photography markets, an art gallery reimagined, and a call to action. Well, welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining me, for those that are on the live broadcast, and welcome to another edition of the Art Business Morning Show, the show that will put you on the path to a six-figure-a-year-plus art business. The title today is "A Vision for a New Type of Art Gallery," and it's going to be an interesting episode. I might ruffle some feathers with this one, but I want to start at the top with an iTunes review. I'm going to read one out, and it's by On the Wall Photo from March of this year. It goes, and I quote: "I've been listening to this for a couple of years, and they are very direct on explaining their methods. Of course, it's a sales pitch too for their service, but a lot of information is handed out for free to people who listen and are just starting to dip their toe into selling their own products. This is probably my most looked-forward-to podcast every week."
I love that review. First of all, thank you to On the Wall Photo, and thank you to any of you that have left one. If you are getting value out of the show, I would really appreciate a review on iTunes. I think, as I was checking them, I have like 178 of them on there. I would love to get to 200. That would be amazing. If you'd leave one, I would really appreciate you. But On the Wall Photo, that review that I read, he gets me, right? He gets us. Like, you know, I'm super aware that the podcasts are a subtle sales pitch for our service. It's a business podcast; those are the rules. But I also appreciate what he says about how much information we hand out for free, right? I 100% do feel like we can give away pretty much the majority of the store for free. Why? Because no one ever takes action on it. No one ever does anything about it, right?
You know, the way to think about it, it's like if I was a trainer and I went ahead and posted all of the workouts that I was going to run in my sessions online, how would I have a business if I did that, right? If I was a trainer, I could totally post 100% of the workouts online because I know no one is going to take action on them. It's the same thing, right? When you look at the fitness analogy, you need to show up, you need to have a trainer to say, "Yes, I'm coming." Then you're held accountable. Then you need to be yelled at by the trainer because that's going to get you working out ten times harder than you would left to your own devices, for most of us anyway. It's the exact same analogy. I do feel like we can give the store away, and thank you very much for that review, On the Wall Photo. True to today's form, today's podcast has a ton of value, a little bit of a sales pitch, but I think you guys are going to enjoy it. It's totally, totally interesting. I'm going to take a whack at things today, and I wanted to start out with some truths.
This one is just so profound: He or she who is closest to the customer wins. This is as true for Art Storefronts as it is for all the rest of you as well. The artist or photographer who is closest to their customer wins: better relationships, more loyal followers, a healthier collector list, and yes, ultimately more sales. The biggest trap of this truth is, as creators, both with us with our own products, me as a marketer, and you with yours, you have to resist this urge to create what you do in a vacuum. The closer you are to your customers, and the more feedback you get on what they actually want you to create versus what you want to create, man, is that powerful. So many of you, so many of us, are guilty of this. I can't even begin to tell you how many times you say you want to make it as an artist or a photographer to make it your sole vocation to support you and your family, yet you go and create what inspires you and what you want to create or find fascinating with usually little to zero feedback at all. You then go and attempt to sell those creations, right? They don't sell the way that you want them to, and oftentimes what happens next? You blame it on a myriad of different circumstances. Art doesn't sell online. It's a pandemic. No one's buying any art. You figure all these things to blame it on, but at the end of the day, you created the product that you wanted; you didn't create a product that the market wants.
Don't misunderstand; there's nothing wrong with that at all, but you have to make the distinction between being a hobbyist and being a business. The purpose of a business is to create a customer. If you're not doing that, then you have a hobby, and that's just the truth. That's the truth for us, that's the truth for you. A great way to go from hobby to business is to take into account what the potential customer wants and then go create it for them. I really honestly believe this is one of the most important truths, period. I think any of us that ignore it do so at our own peril. Oh my gosh, have I learned my lessons the hard way on this one. I feel like where we are now at Art Storefronts as a business, we're in a really, really good spot as a result of learning that lesson the hard way time and time again. Namely, as a strong result too of video for us, I mention this pretty much every episode, but I wouldn't do so if it wasn't profound.
On a week-in, week-out basis, I am, via live Zoom sessions, talking to artists and photographers, both customers and non-customers. I've been doing that for over a year, since February of last year. Boy, listening to the actual feedback of where you guys actually are in your journey and not what I want to create, the things that I think are going to help you, but what you want us to create that is going to help you and solve the problems that you have right now. My goodness, just operating under that framework, for lack of a better term, is a 50x improvement in terms of what we are doing now versus what we were doing before. What I've been able to learn as a result of all of these video chats with customers and potential customers, of getting closer to the customer, of being as close as possible to the customer, has been absolutely staggering. It has been absolutely staggering, and that is what is informing this list. I don't have a name for it. I think I'm calling it my top ten list of photographic and art market truths. I'm sort of stealing this from, you ever see that Jeff Foxworthy comedic bit, "You might be a redneck if..." The social stigma of whatever the heck that is aside, this is my spin on that. You might be an artist or a photographer if either all or some of these apply to you.
Number one. My number one of the top ten truths, or the ten truths of the art and photography businesses and markets: artists and photographers just want to create. They do not want to work on anything else. You want to paint and you want to shoot and you want to be creative, and you want somebody else to do everything else: all the marketing, all the selling, all of it. Profound truth number two: artists and photographers suck at marketing. The Venn diagram, right? That is the overlapping Venn diagram of creative brain and marketing and business brain, for whatever reason, do not overlap so well the majority of the time. Just like a blanket macro statement, that is just truth. Number three: a collector list. Both the size of it and the overall health of it, how often it's communicated to and made special, if it's a plant, how often it's watered, is either the number one or number two most important metric in the business in terms of long-term growth revenue potential. If you haven't heard me rant about the collector list, you can go back a couple of episodes on the podcast or go back on wherever you're seeing the lives, and I've got an episode on it a couple back. That's number three.
Number four: if the collector list is the number one metric or number two metric—I'm still out on these two—the second is the number of sales campaigns an artist runs a year. It is straight up directly proportional to the revenue of the business, either the first or second most important metric to the business, period. Number five. The vast majority of artists and photographers are solopreneurs. They do not have a staff; they do not have a sales team or a marketing team or employees. Usually, this one explains quite a bit of why it's hard to be both great at creating and marketing and sales for an artist or a photography business, an art or photography business. Number six: the gallery model. The gallery model, whether physical retail galleries or online galleries, they are absolutely exploitative to the artist. That business model is absolutely exploitative to the artist. Taking 50% of a sale, not giving the artist the information on who purchased their work so they don't have the ability to grow a collector list, for everybody but the top 1% of artists in the world, if that, this is devastating. It's just absolutely devastating, the fact that you can't grow a collector list. The analogy, it's no different than being a tenant farmer in whatever culture you want. It could be samurai culture and you're working for the daimyo. You're working somebody else's land. If you're involved in just a gallery-based relationship, you are working somebody else's land. You might get free lodging, you might make some meals and some money, but you will never be able to break out of that arrangement. You can be kicked off the land for any reason at any time with very little that you leave with.
That's number six. Number seven: there are next to none, none that we are aware of, artist or photography-based specific focused marketing agencies. Why is that? It's a number of reasons, but chief among them, selling art or photography is hard and not like other products. Almost no artist or photographers have the proper perspective of how long it takes to build an art or photography business. Combine those two truths and you have a really bad business situation, a bad incentive to want to launch one of those types of agencies. It's really, really hard to make it. That's number seven. Number eight: there are a massive amount of artists that understand all of those truths, all of those truths above. They're mega talented, they have a product that the market wants, they're listening to their customers, and they're working on their marketing. We call a great many of these customers and friends. The problem is still that they're solopreneurs and they just don't have the startup cash to invest in an agency, if one even exists, or quite frankly, the time to get there on their own. You don't scale, you're not an octopus, you have two arms and you have to sleep. So even if you are working diligently, it's really, really hard. The end result of that is you have a ton of artists and photographers with all the aforementioned incredible talent, a product the market wants, they're grinding on their marketing, and yet they're leaving a tremendous amount of money on the table. They could be selling a significantly larger amount if they had the bandwidth or the resources to 5x, 6x, 7x, 2x even, their marketing and sales initiatives.
That's number eight. Number nine: pricing artworks and prints and reproductions. The graveyard of hobbyist artists that could have a healthy business, slash become full-time artists, that struggle with pricing in every stretch of the imagination, that struggle with the reproduction of their art. You're pricing too high, you're pricing too low, way more common on the pricing too low. You don't have the proper range of pricing. Perhaps you're just selling originals, you don't have prints, so your prices start at a thousand dollars. Artists or photographers get dug in and entrenched about the type of print that they want to offer, so they don't offer the other prints. "Well, my work only looks good on this," and you decide what the market wants without ever getting any feedback. You become dug in, entrenched, recalcitrant, not willing to have these different offerings to give yourself the ability to actually grow a good business. There are massive struggles with this, massive amounts of money left on the table as a result of these beliefs.
Number ten: the future of selling art and photography is via live video, either in a one-to-one or a one-to-many fashion. This is just truth. It's profoundly changing everything. Let's say I take those ten truths and I put those ten truths and the corresponding artists and photographers they represent and I drop them into a blender. I hit the button, right? We let it blend. The resulting concoction, in many cases, creates a drink that is just chock-full of opportunity. Many of the blended drinks that will come out of that blender represent huge opportunities to turn artists and photographers from hobbyists into robust and healthy growing businesses, from good-sized businesses into much bigger ones, and in very few cases, big ones into huge ones. If only there was a way to create an entity that understood the truths and could align the best interests of the artist or the photographer with the entity for a mutually beneficial arrangement. We believe that there is, and we've started in on creating it.
I want to cast a vision for a new kind of an art gallery. We believe firmly that the art and photography markets, as they apply to the majority of the market—read almost all of you, aside from the top 1% of the market, which is in a different game—these markets are having their Blockbuster Video/Netflix moment. They're having their taxicab/Uber moment. The entire industry is being disrupted like it's never been disrupted before. Understanding that, and then when you combine an antiquated and exploitative business model of the brick-and-mortar galleries or online galleries, throw in a decade of e-commerce growth, of e-commerce penetration as a percentage of total commerce ushered in by COVID—essentially ten years' worth of normal growth took place in eight weeks over the course of the pandemic—and let me tell you, it's not going back. It's not going back to the good old days; it's here to stay. That one alone is staggering. We combine this as well: the overall effectiveness of modern digital marketing and all that that portends, and finally mix in the future of selling art and photography, which is live video. We believe that that represents just a huge, huge opportunity.
What would be the best vision for a new entity taking all of that into account, all of that into belief, and equally important, making sure it's truly a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the entity? Stated another way, making sure that the entity is not screwing the artist at the end of the day, which we believe the gallery relationship, for the most part, does. That's what we're working on creating. There are two fundamental levers to the art gallery business as we've always understood it. We are talking about a gallery here, and the two biggest levers are the commission percentage, number one, and number two, the ability for the artist to retain the customer information so they can build their own collector list, either the number one or number two most important metric for an art or photography business. You might even go as far to call those two levers the sacred cows of the gallery model as we understand it up until this day. We're going to smash both of them with a hammer to pieces. Those two aforementioned levers are the big ones. What about the third? My gallery does not want me marketing myself or selling online and competing with them. Laughable in today's day and age, that is a laughable one. When the collector info passes to the artist, that concern is going right up in smoke. Not only should a gallery want you marketing online, want you building your following, but in our case, we'll teach you how to do it.
Handcuffs and long-term commitments and all of that feel like you want to go out on your own? No problem. No contracts, no nonsense. If the relationship works, fantastic. That's amazing. If not, hey, okay. It's a partnership and a symbiotic relationship. Some relationships aren't meant to last, and you break up. That's okay. Some last a lifetime. Also okay. Obliterating those things that I just mentioned, we really believe that the incumbent galleries are not going to see this one coming. They're not going to see this one coming. They don't see that the writing's on the wall. They don't see that the art and photography markets have forever changed. I mentioned the Netflix/Blockbuster analogy, and I love that analogy. There's a story about when Netflix was competing with Blockbuster, and they were essentially competing with one another on the DVD rental business. Netflix, on the other hand, saw the writing on the wall. Internet bandwidth speeds were improving, and DVDs were going to go the way of the record. Hello, MP3, right? They were going to go away. Netflix was working very hard on developing this technology, the streaming technology, and Blockbuster was a public company at the time, so they would have their quarterly earnings calls. Netflix is on like the 99-yard line, they're getting ready to release this technology, and they're listening to the earnings calls of Blockbuster where you kind of have to let everybody peek behind the curtain because you're a public company. The Blockbuster executives had nothing to say about it at all. Nothing about streaming. It wasn't even on their radar at all. They didn't realize that the whole world was about to change. We know how that story finished out, right?
We feel that this opportunity, this disruption to the way that art and photography are traditionally sold, this disruption to how the artist and/or photographer is traditionally treated, is sort of that same type of an opportunity, albeit at a different scale. What if a gallery existed that smashed the antiquated and exploitative commission percentage of the traditional gallery, which is either 50/50 or 60/40? What if a gallery existed that allowed the artist or photographer to retain the information on their collectors, to retain the information on who is actually purchasing from them, either the number one or number two most important metric, right? What if a gallery existed that understood the nuances of modern digital marketing and how art is sold, or how to properly execute a sale, and then tack on to that the perspective of how long it takes to actually build a robust art business? What if you, as an artist or a photographer, could actually partner with a gallery that brought just a little bit more to the table than a single brick-and-mortar location or an online free-for-all marketplace with 100 million images uploaded and you're dying in a sea of competition? Or, you know, an art consultant or marketing agency that was actually not just telling you what to do but doing the right stuff, rather than telling you to boost it and post on Facebook. Don't ever do that. Or Facebook targeting. Look at this. Or SEO, which is nonsense. What if indeed, right? What if indeed?
It would be less about a typical gallery/artist relationship, and it would be more like
just hiring a full-time marketing staff that knows what they're doing and takes care of just about everything for you. Just about everything. If such an entity did exist, it would be remarkable. Everybody would want to join. Therein lies the opportunity. Assuming you give up, as an art gallery, the two most sacred cows of the traditional model—commission percentage plus collector info—what would the entity get in return? That's a massive disruption to the norm of doing business. Only taxi cabs can take you home from the airport or the bar until an app pops up in which you can call a personal driver, finish your drink, and then walk outside, right? It's night and day. It's not even the same sport. What that entity would end up getting, that potential gallery would end up getting, is their pick of artists and photographers to work with. The right fit in terms of relationship, really the most important, but also subject matter and flexibility and creativity and drive and ambition and vision. A gallery like that would have zero time to convince anybody of anything. Why spend the time when there are not tens, not thousands, not hundreds, not millions, but thousands—I got ahead of myself there—but there's thousands and thousands of artists and photographers that do agree with those premises if I just laid them out, and they're ready to dance, right? This is the dream relationship.
That's what we're launching. That's what we're going to do. Let me tell you, it's not going to happen overnight. Not even close. We practice what we preach here. What do we preach? How long it takes to grow a proper art or photography business in today's context, when you've never engaged in modern marketing? Three to five years. Three to five years. Longer sometimes. That's what it takes to really grow any sizable business in today's day and age, but no one ever talks about that because it's hard. So we know it's not going to happen overnight, right? We know it's going to take us a ton of time. It's going to take years to get this thing really humming and where we want it, but we're launching next week with our first batch of tests. From there, we're never going to stop testing. I can't tell you how excited I am about this one. Not only are we not playing by the rules in terms of commission percentage or the ability for the artist to keep the info on their collectors, but we're not playing by any rules at all. As a marketer and an entrepreneur to my core, that is just a really exciting situation. It sort of feels like it turns us into the artist. I've got my palette, my colored palette on the left-hand side, and in that is a stable of artists and photographers from every walk of life, every corner of the globe, every subject matter and material, every stripe of religious and sexual orientation and affiliation, etc., etc. Total mixed bag. Then in my other hand is every marketing hack and technique and tactic available to me that I've seen work in other industries. Boy, does it span the gamut. It's everything out there. The gloves are off. There's zero rules. It might be a flash sale or a live art show or a multi-artist show or just a bathroom sale that's just art for the bathroom. It might be grouped around subject material. It might be a website takeover for a day. I can use anything and everything at our marketing team's disposal to move art and to have that incredible symbiotic relationship. Really, the sky is the limit. That is an insanely, insanely exciting thing. Exciting times, I tell you. I believe it's really just liberating even thinking about it.
I'm going to end with a call to action. Yes, it's early days, but to borrow an often-used subject line from my good friend the Artsy Shark—shout out to Carolyn—she's got her email which sends like once a quarter or whatever. It says, "Calling all artists and photographers." So whether you are an artist or a photographer, an Art Storefronts customer or not, if the vision as I just laid out is something that sounds like a tune you like, we want to hear from you. I'm attaching to this live stream—I haven't done that for Instagram, but I will put it in the link tree in Instagram for those watching on Instagram. If you're watching on Facebook or you're watching on YouTube or you're watching on Twitter, there is going to be a link to wherever this post lives. If you're listening to the podcast after the fact, there's going to be a link in the show notes. It's a simple Google form. We want you to fill it out, show us where your work is, and we're going to start building the list. I can't wait to start talking about this more. I can't wait to tell you about the vision for it further, the name, the logo, the URL, what we're going to be contemplating doing. I can't wait to share the failures, of which there will be many. I can't wait to share the successes, of which we hope there will be many as well. But really just share a whole ton on everything that we're going to learn along the way. On that note, thanks for listening, and as always, have a great day.