But there has always been this other story. The one where the couple at the art fair stands
in front of a truly amazing piece of artwork for nearly an hour, having a loud
disagreement as to whether that shade of green will even work with their sofa.
The one where a prospective buyer asks if you have a piece “like that one, but
horizontal” because he really needs to “just get something over the fireplace before
Sunday.” Impersonal, task-based, commodified. Not our ideal, but an element of
our reality nonetheless. People buying beans, not meaning.
That’s what the idea of selling artwork online felt like to
many of us on the first pass--impersonal, commodity-based, without the
opportunity to form any kind of artist/patron relationship. In reality, the “beanification” of artwork by
selling online is nowhere near a “thing.” In fact, if you work it right (and I
do mean WORK), it can be an opportunity to create an even stronger personal relationship
with people who do truly appreciate your art—but more about that in a later
post.
So. Should you sell art through one of the burgeoning number
of online galleries? The answer is “it depends,” both on the kind of work you
do and your goals.
Online sellers are constrained by the market, just as many
brick-and-mortar sellers are. Vango, a San Francisco-based online art gallery,
notes in its curatorial policy statement, “We want every piece to be successful
on Vango. To that end, we curate work based on whether we have an appropriate
audience to guarantee the work’s success … If your piece is not accepted, we
are not necessarily saying it’s “bad” or we don’t like it. We’re saying that we
don’t have the audience for it at this time and accepting it would harm the
overall artist community.”
Heather Robinson, a visual artist living in San Francisco,
maintains a very active gallery showing schedule for her work, but has also
ventured into online sales through Vango. “There is so much art there it can be hard to
be seen unless you spend a lot of time and effort pursuing it,” she explains. “I have sold a couple of pieces (through)
Vango, but it’s been a long time. I
think they are at least trying to be receptive to artists’ needs.”
Santa Monica, CA’s SaatchiArt and Vango offer artists 70% of
a work’s sale price and assist with shipping, marketing and record-keeping,
outstripping what many brick-and-mortar galleries are willing to do for the
artists they represent. UGallery, which
has offices in New York and San Francisco, offers a 50/50 split. All three make
a concerted effort to promote their artists within the confines of their online
homes. But all of the websites also offer
prospective buyers the opportunity to search work by generic theme, price, size
and shape. And Vango has an iPhone app for
collectors that lets them take photos of the areas in which they want to place
artwork and then search for work that … wait
for it … matches the color palette of the space.
In the final analysis, selling art online can possibly put
your work in front of new audiences that are primed and ready to buy, but there’s
no guarantee that your work will be an online success. Cutting through the noise
is crucial, but so is maintaining marketability. A “get rich quick” scheme it is not.
“I always hear stories of people selling
but I do not know any personally,” confirms Robinson.
So if your goal is to make lots of money easily … insert sad
trombone here. Not going to happen. But if you want another methodology to
potentially get your work in front of people who just might buy it, then an
online gallery could be useful for you. Your work is bound to come up in
someone’s search at some point, and who knows—you might be the exact fit for
their souls, or their sofas, and which it is might not actually matter.
In the words of the artist at the art fair who eventually
accepted a hefty four-figure check from the arguing couple in the first
paragraph, “I can appreciate a piece all
day long. But if it just sits in my studio forever, what good is that?”
Resources:
Vango Art
SaatchiArt
UGallery
“Art Galleries, Art Sales and the Internet: A Survey,”
ArtBusiness.com.
“Art Makes a Move Online,” by Scott Reyburn, The New York
Times Online, May 18, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/arts/international/Art-Makes-a-Move-Online.html?_r=0
“Small Retailers Get Good News as Online Art Sales Double, per
Hiscox Report,” by Annie Pilon, Small Business Trends, March 25, 2016. http://smallbiztrends.com/2016/03/online-art-sales-double.html
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