Live Art Shows: The future of selling art & photography

In the third episode of the Art Business Morning show, Patrick dives into why live art shows are the future of selling art and photography, post-pandemic. He emphasizes the shift from traditional art markets to direct-to-consumer online sales and outlines the major benefits of live art shows, including cost-effectiveness, audience engagement, and bypassing middlemen. Patrick provides a data-driven discussion with real-world examples, touches on the importance of building technical skills, and unveils several key strategies for artists to capitalize on this trend. He also discusses the broader implications for galleries and the art show circuit, highlighting the necessity of virtual innovation in today’s market.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Morning, everybody. All right, coming up on today's edition of the Art Business Morning show, we're talking about the top 10 reasons why live art shows are the future of selling art and photography.

Patrick Shanahan: So the pandemic hit, the world changed, and the art market changed massively. Offline shows and fairs are toast. They're not coming back anytime soon. Many, many galleries closed and many sadly are not gonna open up again. Can an artist or a photographer catch a break here or what, right? The good news, though, remains that art and photography sales have basically been booming throughout the pandemic, along with all home decor. Very, very good things. So this is a good time to be selling art. There's a huge shift that's happening in the market. Obviously, you've seen the title: live art shows. The live art shows are quite literally that shift, one of those shifts anyway. So the question is, how do you put yourself in a position to succeed given this is the case?

So welcome, everybody, Art Business Mornings, show number three actually. Just got the first two in the can, really kind of excited about it. So I'm gonna give you today—let me just, well, it's streaming, yeah, okay, good. I'm gonna give you today—I'm in a solo show today 'cause Nick's on a much-needed vacation, a couple of days off. And I'm gonna give you my top 10 list, okay, the top 10 list of why live art shows and correspondingly, video, really, why it's the future of selling art and photography, why I'm so just insanely excited about it. And I would say that I'm gonna go through this list, and there's gonna be some basics in there, and the basics, you're gonna go, yeah, okay. You'd be nodding your head. But there's some subtlety too that probably most people are not aware of. They're not immediately aware of.

Number one, top 10 reasons live art shows are the future of selling art: it works. It just works. You know, we have some amazing data on this already. We're seeing crazy Mickey Mouse numbers on some artists that are really successful. I keep citing Laca's numbers, but he did 30,000 Canadian, 65 pieces sold over two shows. He had some other promotion there too, but did that all on his own. All the way down to shows that have gone so completely sideways in every tech capacity imaginable—errors, dropping things, crappy audio, anything in between. And even those, I'm seeing sales. So the data is clear as day. This is totally a viable way to sell art. I've seen the highs. I've seen the lows. It's crazy. And if we're drilling for oil, and we find black gold, what do we do? We keep drilling, same with success, right? You saw the last episode of the show, the same with success. We're seeing success. And so when you're selling art, if you find it, you keep getting after it. You keep iterating, right?

Number two, it lets you go direct to consumers, DTC. You see us talk about that all the time. But there's no middlemen involved in this action of selling art. There's no one in between you and your customer. You are going directly to them. There's no 50-50 split, no 60-40 split. Amazing, amazing aspect of it without question.

Number three, it will make you, (chuckles) make you work, make you work on your merchandising. What do I mean? How to show off your art. What does it look like in the camera? The sun glistening off on it? The detail, ooh, the detail. All of those things that artists, no disrespect, are usually pretty crappy at. You need to get at it. You need to get some practice. You need to attempt to start selling your art directly. A lot of you are uncomfortable with that. I get it. I hate being on video, but you need the reps. You need the sets of doing this. If you start getting them, you have an opportunity to be incredibly successful doing so. It's gonna take some time. And if you didn't need any more motivation, you're keeping all of the revenue. There's no 50-50 split with a gallery. You're not paying a booth fee at a show. So that should be the motivation, when you're keeping all of the revenue from your sales, of why you wanna start doing this, why you wanna get started immediately, why you need to practice.

Number four, okay, it costs next to nothing to do. It costs next to nothing. All you need to have is the phone to do it to get started. You can do them as many times as you like. So the fact that it doesn't cost you anything, the fact that you can do it with a phone, i.e., equipment you already have, and the fact that you can do this from the comfort of your own home, amazing anytime, imperative in a pandemic situation, right? So that's number four.

Number five, it takes all the digital aspects of selling art, i.e., your static, boring, 2D website, okay. And what does it do? It turns it into a dynamic thing. It takes digital selling and gets it just one step closer to in-person selling. It's an amazing hack. Now this one's fun for me.

Number six, okay, and for the very near term, at least, read till the rest of the art world and just world, period, figures this out, okay, there's a huge arbitrage in it, okay. This is always how marketing works, and if I have one talent in my life, and I don't have many, it's I see trends before they're about to break. I get in, and I master them, and I benefit as a result of that arbitrage. And I'm telling you, this is it, okay? In live video streaming, it's interesting because there's this hype-curve analogy, wherever it's like early adopters, and then why I can't remember the name of it? I used to have it memorized. Anyway, it's like early adopters. It goes really, really slow, and then it dips down for a little bit. And then all of a sudden, mainstream catches it. And then it just takes off, that Gartner hype curve or something like that, I don't know. If I had show notes, I'd put it in it, but I don't care, whatever.

Larger point is live video and streaming, nothing new, nothing new, didn't get invented before the pandemic, been around for a long time. But it was so fraught and is so fraught with technical difficulties and issues and streaming and distribution and where you do it, and hard drive space, all these various different things, lighting, sound, that it sort of was just waiting for its moment to just go choo-choo, its hockey-stick growth. And we're at that moment right now, okay. We are literally at that moment right now, and this is it. This is it. And what's more, when the rest of the art world, let alone the rest of the selling-anything world, figures it out, a lot of this arbitrage is gonna be gone, right. That the opportunity is not gonna be so great, so incredible.

And let's talk about it in terms of, okay, the art show circuit and fairs. Now, necessity is the mother of all invention, right? The show circuit is toast, okay. It's toast, it's not coming back. Can't open, low attendance. I didn't think it was gonna last this long. I'm an optimist. It's lasted a long time. It ain't going away. It's sad, it sucks, right? So turns out the folks that are running those shows, okay, they're actually humans. They have overhead. They have jobs. They have food to put on the plate. So necessity is the mother of invention. So what are we starting to see the emergence of? Right now, what are we, I think started five months after the pandemic started, the, air quotes, virtual art shows, I hate that name by the way, virtual art shows. But the premise is all of these shows and fairs and galleries, they've got your deposit for the booth. Many people have been going to the same shows and exhibiting year after year after year. It's a circuit traveling around, the traveling road show, all the rest. They have all these deposits down, and they're figuring out, they're scrambling. How can we keep these deposits, right? And so what are they saying? They're saying, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna do a virtual art show for you guys. We'll set the whole thing up. We'll keep your booth fee, and we'll do one giant virtual gallery show for all of you. And we'll bring the attention to the customers and the clients, right? These are starting to emerge all over the place and pop up.

And by the way, if any of you were involved in one and have a link, send it to me. You can send it to me on Instagram, send it to me on Facebook, email it, pigeon mail it, snail mail it, whatever, messenger pigeon, all works. I'm really curious to see them. The ones that I have seen though, #dumpsterfire, most of them. Why? Turns out just a single art show, okay, just a single art show is actually really, really hard to do, just one, just one, okay. Doing it with five people? Even harder. It's even harder doing it with many, many people. Good luck, okay. This is just the tech piece too, internet connections, keeping viewers engaged. How long is the session? Who films it for the artist? By and large, artists and photographers, no offense, are

not the most tech-savvy people to begin with, okay. (chuckles) You know, it turns out, turns out Morris from Philadelphia, in addition to being a talented artist, keeps cockatiels, beautiful birds, right? Sure, but boy are their cables squawking at a high pitch, okay. Can somebody shut that bird up, please? Morris does that. There goes half the audience for that particular show, right? There are so many moving pieces between the tech and understanding how to do this and having the reps and sets and being comfortable and background noise. So you add all of that out, that's the tech piece, right? It turns out, though, that's an impossible thing to solve, difficult, not impossible. It's a difficult thing to solve, but that's not the only hard part about it. It turns out you gotta get the attention, okay. So I don't care if you're running a virtual show or you're running a live show, whoever's running the show and charging for it better have some foot traffic, right? So all of these art shows that are out there, and I'm not knocking the shows and the fairs. I love the fact that they're doing this idea, but let me tell you, you'd better have kept a big, you better have kept a big email list if you're a show trying to charge for this. You better know how to market on Facebook. You better know how to hype things up. You better know how to capture some percentage of that foot traffic and get them to actually show up at that show because if you can't do that, and there's no attention, and you charge all these artists for a virtual show, and it's crickets, big failure there.

So I love the idea. I love the invention. I love the necessity that precedes it, right? I don't love the necessity, but I love the creativity that comes when your back's against the wall. Hate the virtual art term, show. The term, virtual art show, is like virtual reality (scoffs). It's just a live art show, but I know, being how many of these I've run, hundreds, since before the pandemic hit, I saw the writing on the wall a long time ago. It's hard. It's an uphill battle even now. Even today, right now streaming, I'm running into some issues. So there's the tech piece. There's the attention piece. There's getting good at it. And so even if these guys start running these things all the time in the show circuit and get better and better and better, sadly, it's gonna be years. And you need the artist to get good at it too. So the arbitrage is there. It's absolutely there, but it is interesting to see other segments in our industry starting to wake up to the necessity of this and how important it is in getting good at it.

Number seven, that was number six, number seven, audience size, okay. Difficult at first, for sure, clearly. If you're gonna have a live art show, you're gonna need to have some people on it, right? Good news, bad news here, under cook, over cook. And the good news, cousin, let me just tell you, far, far, far outweighs the bad. The bad news is you need an audience to sell art, right? The bigger it is, the more you're gonna sell, way of the world, no different than our businesses. The good news, though, is the MVA, acronym time, right, out there in start up world, buzzword du jour, MVP, minimum viable product. The idea of the quickest dirtiest thing that you can build to take your idea to market to see whether or not it's gonna sell, in our context, how quickly you can get what you've painted, what you've photographed, on display and see whether or not it'll sell, the quickest way to do that without any other nonsense, MVP. A twist on it is the MVA, the minimum viable audience. Loosely defined, the minimum size audience you need to make the endeavor worth doing, to prove the concept, to provide an ROI on your time. Guess what that number is? It's the good news, okay. It's one person. Just one, that's it. That's the minimum viable audience for a live art show. One person, okay. What can I oftentimes be found saying? Our job is to take the online art selling experience and make it as close as possible to the offline in-person selling experience. The rabbit hole goes deeper, though. If you worked in a gallery, let's just say, and your job, okay, your job was to sell art, if I walked into that gallery, and I wanted to talk to you about a piece, would you take the time to talk to me about it? Yeah, you would, right? Okay, okay. If you have an online art business, and I contacted you in some fashion via the socials or via your website and wanted to see some of your pieces over a video chat, would you take the time to talk to me? Yeah, you would, or you should. Let's go deeper. Let this one spin your noodle a little bit. What if I said that potentially, potentially, or #potentially, the most important metric in your business right now is actually the number of one-on-one video chats you can have with potential buyers? That's it. What if that was the single solitary biggest lever in your business right now today, whatever today is, Thursday? It's a very good question. It's a question we're endeavoring to answer, and I'm not certain it's not the most important. If you could schedule seven, 10, 15, 20 one-on-one live art shows with potential customers, who cares about the technology? It doesn't matter about the technology. Where you're showing me your pieces. You're merchandising them. You're building a deeper, emotional connection. I'm getting to know you, understand your nuances, who you are as a person. Could that potentially be the most valuable metric in your business? Good question, right? Gonna be delving into that one in future episodes, let me tell you.

Number eight, this one's gonna be fire. I can't even believe I'm gonna give somebody my idea here because I think it's that genius. So you're an art gallery, let's just say, okay. Times are tough. I feel terrible. I mean, I feel literally terrible for you if you're an art gallery right now. What would I do, being in your shoes? You'd better figure out a way to give value. Having your doors closed is not gonna do it. And, you know, it's funny because I actually had this conversation with Nick. And I'll say that, like probably, I don't know, two weeks ago now or whatever, one of the artists on our platform, long time close friend of mine, Mathieu Laca, actually had an art show in a real gallery. And, you know, it was masks and limited capacity and social distancing and all of that. But it was a real art show, and we ran a live art show after the show was over inside the art gallery. And even before that, I had this idea in my head, but let me, So for after it all, after it all kind of percolated and bubbled up in my head, I talked to Nick, and I was like, "Dude, we gotta buy an art gallery. " He's like, "Dude, what are you talking about?" I'm like, "I'm dead serious. We've gotta buy an art gallery. We've gotta buy an art gallery right now." He said, "What are you talking about, what?" And I used the term, buy, loosely, mind you, because all I would do is take over their lease, much negotiated, lower rate given the times, but I would take over their lease, and I'd make them a pennies-on-dollar offer for all of the decor that they have inside because I wanna see how beautiful it is. I would inspect their socials. If they had massive followings on their individual gallery social pages, I would negotiate for those. Otherwise, bye-bye. And then I would, doors are closed anyway, but I would go inside, and I would rig that gallery up nine ways to Sunday. I would sort the lighting. I would sort the sound. I would lay down railroad tracks with a camera dolly. I would nail my camera angles on all the positions. I would upgrade the internet connection to 121.2 gigawatts of bandwidth in there. And I'd get ready to go. And I would start running virtual shows for artists, and no one knows how to do it. No one is really good at it. I would stream it all on my own individual social sites, whatever the gallery name was. If I didn't have them, I'd build them up. Then I would also stream concurrently at the same time on all of the artists' social sites. I would charge the artists upfront a onetime appearance fee such that I would not take a bath no matter what. And I would take as much as I could get, probably 30, 40, 50% of the sales that we generated as a result of it. After the show was over, I would instantaneously be available for a live one-on-one show to re-see any of the pieces for my collectors and high-net-worth individuals. I would have the artist ready to go to talk about any of the pieces, all on the video chat all at the same time, all with a glass of wine if we see fit. And some of you are hearing that, and you're like, wait a minute. I'd probably actually sign up for that. And many would, many would because it's a viable alternative. And that's an insane one. I can't even believe I just gave away that idea, even just articulating it out loud like that. That is a damn good idea.

Number nine, reps and sets, right? Getting good at these art shows, in my

estimation, despite the fact some strong early wins I'm seeing from Laca and from some others, it's doing 100 pushups in one sitting. How many of us can do 100 pushups in one sitting? Not many. If I said your goal is to do 100 pushups in one sitting without stopping, what would you start doing? Five pushups every 10 minutes, 20 pushups, 30, 40, 50 at a time, try doing 60 at a time, practice a whole lot. So if the potential outcome of being really, really good at this is an incredible ROI, what I'm telling you right now is the future of selling, not just art and photography, but probably so many, so many items online, why wouldn't you go getting the reps and sets you would? It's the future, and it costs nothing to do it. And if the minimum viable audience is one, why wouldn't you be doing them all the time, by which I mean all the time? I mean, what do I tell the Art Storefronts' customers? Great, so happy you did that. You sold a couple of pieces? Amazing, now go do 1,000, 1,000. Why? Since pre-pandemic times, if someone like me, a director of marketing, CMO, I don't even have a title, marketing guy at Art Storefronts, and Nick, the CEO, doing these things five to six days a week, okay. Practice what you preach much? Yeah, we do. Absolutely, it is the future, and absolutely getting good at it is not easy. I mean, I'm sitting here, and I'm streaming right now this thing, which is a live show, which in the past would have been a podcast, which I would have had to record and upload and send to the editor. And the editor would send it back and then upload to the Patricking service and then email everybody out. Nope, right now live on Twitter, live on Facebook, live on YouTube, live in our Facebook group, live on Instagram. I'm still figuring things out. There are a lot of moving pieces to this. There are a lot of moving pieces to this. So reps and sets, that's number nine.

Number 10, okay, this is not-so-subtle one. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, okay. The socials are at war with one another, okay. Google is at war with Facebook. Facebook is at war with YouTube. YouTube is at war with Instagram. Instagram's even at war with Facebook, even though I know they're owned by the same company. What is winning that war? It's the war of attention, okay. And what all of these socials want is they want us spending time on their platform to the detriment of spending any time on any of the other platforms, okay. This is an extremely important concept. So how is that attention measured? It's measured with metrics like time on app or platform or site. How much time are these potential users spending on your site? Is it going up or down, that's number one. Number two, they measure it with a term we like to call engagement. Are these people that are spending time on this platform, are they liking, are they commenting? Are they sharing? Are they having a good time? Okay, they are, right? So let's rewind. Let's rewind. What is it now, seven years, eight years, nine years. 10 years ago, okay. And we could call them the good ole days with old spelled O-L-E, #goodoledays. Remember when you'd have a Facebook page, and your friends would have a Facebook page. Years later, you'd have an Instagram account. Friends would have an Instagram account. You'd follow them, and you'd see everything that they posted, all of their updates, all of the videos, all the little text things, everything. You could even follow a brand and see all of their stuff. Awesome, right? That was amazing. The sheer amount of comments that I have over the years on ads of people complaining when that was taken away is comical. But I digress. Back then, the equation was in a different place than it is now. The equation back then was in a place where the socials needed us and our content more than we needed them, okay. And so they were willing to do whatever it takes, i.e., give us a tremendous amount of free organic reach because we were giving them content. We were getting our friends to join. We were building up their ecosystem such that they could eventually monetize it with ads. As such, the reach was free until they didn't need us because they had critical mass. Then what happens? At that point in time, they start taking away that free reach. They start showing ads. That's the game. That's what they were able to do. We were on those platforms for free. We still are. What I'm telling you now is because these platforms are all at war with one another, because a certain thing called live video does a few things, one, keeps you glued to their platform for way longer than if you were just clicking around with your thumb and getting bored, okay. You're locked in 15, 20, 30, 45 minutes, an hour, okay. Number two, you're commenting. You're liking, you're sharing. You're having a great time. So the engagement metric is there. So the socials' oar, your oar, in the same boat, rowing in the same direction. I can't believe I just did that. Rowing in the same direction, okay. You do that, stated another way, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, okay. So you do that, and the socials reward you with free attention. Now, am I saying it's as good as it was back in the day, good old, #goodolddays where you could post everything and everyone would see it? No, it's not, but it's a close second. It's a close second. The socials will reward you with extra free organic reach. More people will see your content because they want people on their platform for longer. So if you strategically think that way, get that figured out, you can benefit.

That's number 10. I think it's a good list. That's gonna wrap up episode number three. How can you watch the show, stay caught up? One, binge watching on IGTV, one of my favorite things. You can just go to the Instagram profile. Go to the IGTV tab. Click the series, and all of these things line up into one, and you can just press play, and it plays all the way through, which is a great little hack. YouTube playlists, also a great hack. If you're gonna do YouTube, subscribe. Smash that like button. Hit that bell. I hate that terminology, but yeah, that would be nice. You can get notified when these things drop. We're gonna start dropping them, I think, twice a week, try to try to a time schedule, which will be good. If you are already a customer, then I'm gonna see you soon on a live workshop, AKA office hours, Ask me whether or not we're gonna be talking about live art shows, huh. If you're not a customer, you wanna get a taste of what office hours are like, then you can join us for a free art business workshop, thrice-weekly Zoom calls. We'll bring you guys in, rant a bit, and then you can get your questions answered and find out about what we do. There's details of that all over our website, details of all the above on our website. And thanks for watching and have a great day.