Patricia

I think you are smart to worry about your future. For a short time after I quit my day job I decided to earn my living as an artist. I sold about seven paintings in one year before quitting the job and thought it’ll be a piece of cake if I do it full time. Boy was I wrong! I lost my contacts, didn’t know how to approach my friends from work. I was miserable. The saddest part was I didn’t even feel like painting. I’ve grown up since! I still am not making a profit even though I am selling but I feel I am going in the right direction promoting myself.

Getting back to the topic, I strongly feel that somebody somewhere has to take the responsibility of teaching artists to make their own living when they graduate! They should at least provide the tools to do their own marketing. I think it should be one of the core courses in the curriculum. Almost all other fields have a clear cut path to follow after they graduate. Sounds like artists everywhere are sent out without any tools to survive in the real world. It’s as if everyone wants artists to live a cliché artist’s life as a penalty for doing what they love.

I am so glad I found Alyson’s site. I got my contacts together and have informed my list about my upcoming shows and have had a great response. Let’s see how it goes.

All the very best to you Matthew and all others!

Kushlani Hall

I have BA in Communications from a VERY old University on the East Coast. Do I use it in my day job as a graphic designer? Maybe a little. I started taking photography classes junior year and one day when I grow up (I’m 48) I want to be a fine-art photographer. Over the past 28 years I have been in over 30 exhibits, won awards, and my work has been published a few times and it has been well received by those I respect.

I do NOT have a BFA or an MFA. My art heroes didn’t have them either (Weston, Tice, in particular, and many other great photographers). Today, you get nowhere if you don’t have an MFA, and to tell you the truth, most of the stuff I see coming out of the “art” schools, especially in photography, is, yawn, boring (I have better words for them but I’ll keep them to myself). Everything looks the same… boring people in their boring lives. No composition, no line, no tone, no form. It’s all “look at me and my boring friends”. Or there’s a gimmick. Pick a place or an idea that no one else has done and do a project. Or, yikes, I even saw at a major city art museum the other day, where they are “re-purposing” other photographer’s art (with permission – not like Prince or Fairey). And even with the “gimmick” it still all ends up looking the same. Kind of like what happened to music in the 1980s.

I have a friend who is completing his MFA in photography. I am going to his exhibit tomorrow. We joke around. I ask him to teach me all the “tricks” that only MFAs learn. He teases me and says that my work is “interesting”. I feel “that’s like telling someone they have a nice personality.” I jab back asking him what “MFA” really stands for. I saw some of his work yesterday… it was photographs of dirt… OK???

It will be interesting tomorrow night.

Matthew: Yes, it was your email that started this whole thing! Thank you for sharing it with people here. I didn’t ask to name you or use it because I wanted it to be a more philosophical discussion, but I do appreciate your participation.

We’re not done here. This has to continue in some form. It’s going to require a lot of brain power.

1) Most artist are self-employed or working an entirely unrelated job to “support” their art career. This is simply a fact of the profession and some basic entrepreneurial and business/accounting skills would save a lot of trial and error and anguish for beginning artists. There is no IBM cube hive or Ford factory floor full of artists being trained in “real-world” art sales.

My husband (software engineer) thinks this is a fundamental problem across the board for universities. Lack of real world training leaves the student unprepared regardless of their field of study.

2) This neglect of real world application on the premise that it is not the role of the university widens the divide between people who talk about being artists and people who DO art in some way as part of making their living.

3) If more artists that were professionally trained were also trained to make a living from their talent, not only would the quality of art rise, but so would the respect level for artists who have chosen that career path. (Self-trained artists..please don’t flame me for that one..I know there is plenty of untrained talent and trained garbage, but this is a separate topic altogether.)

For myself, I feel I’ve wasted a lot of time through my naivety about art as a business since graduating.

The best artists I know are extremely well educated in all matters. Some may be self taught while others obtained degrees in art. But all of them continue life-long learning about much more than art. And it has also been my experience that those artists who are the most successful are also great marketers and money managers. Skills that are learned.

I am also involved with several arts groups and the ones that are the most successful are those which have members who understand business and have a business plan for their management and success.

It is sad to send a young person out into the world without giving them all the tools they will need to make it in this competitive world. Just like beauty is not enough to pay your bills, neither is talent and great artwork. If one does not know how to market it, price it, sell it and manage the profit from it, where does it end up? In your closet? A storage unit? Something for someone else to profit from when you die?

Think about it! Creating art is a career choice and we train for other career choices by having a well rounded education including all the business basics. Why should art be any different?