I haven't not been making art as much as I've been figuring out a better value proposition.
This might best be explained via Urban Farm Syndicate, the project that's taking most of my time right now. UFS offers land owners an Onsite Farming Maintenance Service for free, twelve months out of the year. We take control of their vacant land for a short period of time as a closed, strictly agricultural venture that is not community-based, like a garden. We farm intensively and sell the produce locally. In exchange for the land, we shovel snow, clean the site, make minor repairs, ward off illicit activity and dumping, and otherwise raise property values. We leave when the owner wants us to leave.
Urban Farm Syndicate mostly consists of meetings, because we are actively looking for land and other resources. This value proposition sounds fantastic to everyone we meet with who is not a land owner, and has yielded a ton of support from influential people. And that support, along with a couple of bucks, can get me a cup of coffee. All land owners can see is how limited this value proposition is in comparison to the liability they perceive. They want to know how they can trust that the Syndicate won't squat forever, how I know that the community won't love the farm too much and raise a stink when it's time for an apartment building to go up instead. The status quo sucks, and land owners acknowledge this. But they know exactly how much it costs, and they want to know what I can offer to make injecting uncertainty into the equation worthwhile. We have no choice but to figure out how to sweeten the pot.
To anyone who hasn't been to art school, value probably makes a good deal of intuitive sense. You trade time, dollars and other resources for goods and services, and the whole point of this is to get a good deal--to get more value in return than the resource you traded. Business is all about listening to your audience or customer base, figuring out what's valuable to them, and overdelivering that value, consistently, while maintaining a reasonable profit margin. It's true that limited value propositions abound. Wal-Mart forces manufacturers to accept insane price controls. You pay a lot of money for a crappy sandwich in an airport. Credit cards are evil. But for every crappy value proposition, there is an opportunity to create a better one.
As someone who's actively creating value in the face of a lose-lose status quo right now, I can attest that this is profound, creative work. It's art-like in many ways.
But it's about getting what I want by looking at the world in terms of what other people want. I don't know about you, but my BFA and MFA didn't prepare me for this. School taught me some real bad habits about seeing everything in terms of my own vision, at the expense of context or value, and much of what I am doing is overcoming those bad habits. And as I do, as I get a clearer sense of how powerful it is to create value, the easier it is to see that the value proposition for art has a rather oppressive quality for artists.
Art has no inherent value. It gains value by imprimatur--as it gets noticed, recognized, passed around, purchased, written about and so on. There is no better value proposition for the people who are doing stuff with art. It's nothing less than alchemy to lay your eyes or hands or checkbook on something, and in that moment bestow value to that which was valueless. In valuing a work of art, the collector, gallerist and curator become powerful, and this power has nothing to do with objective assessments about the meaning, beauty or interestingness of the art.
I know of a collector who also happens to be a hedge fund manager, and what's funny about this fellow is the way he doesn't look at anything he buys. The art matters way less than the value proposition. He pays very little for emerging artists others find relatively worthless, not because he loves art or artists, but because he loves being regarded as a Visionary and a Kingmaker, and he sees that he's getting a good deal at the same time because his Seal of Approval raises the value of the art. It's like playing the stock market, except that your act of buying the stock always makes its value go up.
If you're reading this blog, you're probably a relatively unsuccessful artist who's trying to Make It. You want to contact the hedge fund manager and dog him for a studio visit, because you are intimate with the other side of this value proposition. You know you can't value your own art, that you have to allow other people to value it for you. And this creates a sensation of pressure, and forces you to make bad decisions. How many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of sunk costs do you have in graduate school, a studio, materials, marketing, postage? How many big envelopes do you put in the mail (or tedious online applications do you submit) every year, and how many rejections do you receive? When you get an "opportunity," how much does it usually cost?
Forget money. The kick-in-the pants questions are: what do you do as an artist to deplete your value, and what can you do as an artist to add value? You can't value your own art, and are ultimately beholden to a set of gatekeepers who need to value it for you. You are intimate with the protracted begging process, in which you compete for the limited attention of these gatekeepers with thousands and thousands of people who are making mannerist crap that's very similar to what you're making
(except that, of course, yours is better)
and you've tried begging politely as well as insistently. You've followed the rules to the letter. You've had Diva Fits. Perhaps you've gotten a little stalky. You know how to beg for attention, and you are pretty sure that begging for attention decreases your value. But what can you do to add value?
This is not a trick question. You can make your art into making your own weather, like Banksy, so that people follow you. You can make yourself socially useful, becoming a connector of people and giver of favors. You can define and cultivate a different audience. You can also work on mitigating your own risks and sunk costs by finding free graduate school, working on the street, or cultivating a practice that accommodates your dayjob. It might be a good idea to write art reviews, so that you can spend some time on the other side of the proposition.
When I was an undergraduate, I assumed that my art was so good that it would simply be valued. But very few artists are just catapulting over the value proposition by making art that's so good that people just have to have it. And as I sit quietly with myself after meeting with the umpteenth land owner who can't buy into the Syndicate yet, I sit with this same arrogant assumption and see that nothing moves forward until I get a clear sense of what other people want, and work toward a more mutual win.
