I have been a life long advocate for the importance of original art in daily life. Of course that is a position that is nothing short of self serving, but it is also based on a very distinct experience from my own childhood. My parents were suburban middle class people who grew up on farms in rural Utah during the Depression. Once they moved to the Bay Area, their cultural exposure expanded to include the symphony, opera, ballet and theatre. But their participation in the visual arts was strictly museum fare. Contemporary, gallery-oriented art was a beast of a different color, so to speak. The edginess, occasional nudity and “in your face” imagery just didn’t appeal to their lingering Victorian sensibilities.
Three original paintings hung on the wall in our home, purchased by my mother before I was born. When examined with a trained eye, these small landscapes are ordinary and rather forgettable. But when I was a child, these paintings loomed LARGE in my consciousness. I memorized every square inch, examining the scumbling on the right, the heavy impasto to the left. Those paintings made me feel like there was something special about my family.
So anyone who is advocating for the buying of art is a good guy, right? After reading an article in last week’s New York Times Home & Garden section, I have conflicting responses to that question.
This piece, Easing the Pain of Collecting, features Jen Bekman, an entrepreneur who has successfully created an online photography gallery selling low cost photographs in various sizes. Her primary proposition was that most people feel intimidated by galleries and don’t know how to find, select and purchase quality artwork.
An excerpt:
But flipping through a Pottery Barn catalog, Ms. Bekman had another realization. Even though she had often longed to buy art, she had never bought anything from a gallery.
“I didn’t know how to, I was completely intimidated,” she said. “The only opportunities I saw for people like me,” she said, were the mass-produced stock pieces sold by places like Pottery Barn.
What she wanted, it turned out, was not just to produce a show but to change the way art is sold and collected.
Ms. Bekman immersed herself in the online world of art, did as much research as she could about the way traditional galleries functioned, and began reaching out to emerging photographers whose work caught her eye.
Today Ms. Bekman has relationships with hundreds of artists and photographers, represents 18 of them, employs a staff of four, and feels connected, she said, to every one of the 40 or so pieces on the walls in her apartment, like the large, provocative photograph of a woman brushing her hair given to her by Benjamin Donaldson, a photographer she represents. On March 15 her gallery will celebrate its fifth anniversary, and last week 20×200 shipped its 6,500th print.
The placement of this article in the Home & Garden weekly section rather than the Arts page is in itself an indication of how the Times is positioning Bekman’s venture. My issue is not stealth art elitist snobbery but a concern about the Pottery Barn-inspired business model approach to art. Outside the wealthy jetset world of art fairs, investment frenzy and fancy galleries (which do feel exclusionary and intimidating to most of us), what are the options? Is Bekman’s low-cost, non-threatening decorative orientation to “original” art the fallback position? Like a lot of art makers, I long to find easier ways for people to have a deep connection with art work on a personal basis. Neither approach seems to fill that requirement.
I think you mean Jen Bekman not Jan Bekman
I do. Thank you for the correction.
This is a toughie, Deborah. As long as art has “status signifier” usefulness, the debate cannot be easily settled. I have had first-time visitors to my house express their reaction to the ‘questionable taste’ of some of the things we live with and which give us daily doses of pleasure and stimulation. The question of “why on earth do you guys have this thing?” has arisen numerous times in the past. People, me included, use their possessions to signify their social, political and intellectual allegiances. I do not like things which have necessary stamp of approval of someone else’s decision as to what makes me a unique individual, so fashion purity does not influence me per se.
You have brought up a topic which has broad tentacles into all aspects of human behaviour and belief. i hope you get a broad range of responses to this. G
I was a painter in an earlier incarnation. I painted every day for many years, even while training for another profession (that I don’t want to specify). I have drawers and drawers of stored art, bins of paintings probably rotting in my damp basement. But I rescued a random few and keep them on various walls in my house. They are the only original art I own, because we have a little house and I have so much of my own art that I never even tried to sell to spare. I do enjoy having the few paintings up. Though I am critical of them, they are better than anything I could produce now, all these years later.
But what I have found, shockingly, is what suburbanlife mentions: people coming into my home who would never dare rudely criticize my furniture or architecture, feel perfectly free to offer their unsolicited obnoxious assessment of the art on my walls, whether they know I did it or not. I think this tendency of people to judge the personal art on people’s walls like they are in an impersonal museum makes buying art and hanging it intimidating to many people, not trusting their own criteria for beauty. I think it makes most middle class people, which I am, shun investing large sums of money in art. What if I don’t like it tomorrow? I have artist friends whose work I have loved and watched develop, whose work I never bought. What if I spent all that money and get sick of it? Now this is a crazy notion, mind you. Most people who think this way waste enormous amounts of money on disposable crap like clothes shopping sprees.
As a teenager I took a trip to Paris with a group and watched an artist put the finishing touches of a lovely little oil painting of Sacre Coeur. It was cheap. It was still wet. I bought it and carried it around carefully protecing it until it dried. It still lives in my parents’ living room among some art they bought and some I made. It’s the nicest one of all, in my opinion. I still love the little thing.
Trusting our own taste enough to invest more money than a piece of shlock that Pottery Barn has pre-approved is part of the problem. Rich people can afford to make mistakes. The rest of us can’t. Or, at least we believe we can’t.
Both of you have mentioned some of the hard-to-address obstacles that are part of the resistance that the general public has to making a commitment in the area of art. You’re right G, that art is a status signifier, and that opens up a whole set of its own issues.
I often tell people who buy my art that although I want my work to be compelling for a lifetime, they can always re-gift it if they lose interest down the road. There is an ever-present audience for art that you have outgrown.
And as for the affordability issue, the best advice I’ve heard on that score was from a big time collector who said everyone should have a price point under which they can feel comfortable buying art impulsively, on the spot, with no guilt. You love it, so you buy it. Maybe it is $300 or maybe it is (in his case) $20,000. But if you liberate yourself to respond to work under that price point freely and without anxiety, it makes the acquisition process much less fraught with discomfort.
These are tactics, and both of you have addressed issues that are larger than any of these can address singlehandedly. But I think talking through the nature of the resistance is useful.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments.
I think the story Jen Bekman tells (which might even be true) about having been “totally intimidated” by routine art gallery palaver, so that she was seeking another way of adding art to her life — and to yours, of course — is a marketing pitch, pure and simple. There are people who will not enter an art gallery for any reason — it lies outside their comfort zone, they wouldn’t know if they were getting rooked, but they have empty walls and some money to spend. Oh, man — get their business. Sell them something for their walls, make them feel good about themselves for buying it from a relatable vender who digs and even shares their reluctance to self-educate and misspend. Talk about a Republican cloth coat…
There are also people who don’t live in their imaginations anywhere near the art world, who are affluent and busy doing interesting and meaningful things that correspond to their values and comfort zone, who will not take time for a learning curve but who are smart enough to notice and start thinking if an apple falls on their heads. There are, I believe, ways to reach these people without dialing down the whole discourse. I’m thinking of the time an artist here in the Boston Area did a hanging of her paintings in the boardroom of the Wainright Bank, and sold all of them. I guess she had the right kiosk in the right hotel on the right conference weekend when the right people showed up, because she certainly found intelligent “instant clients” who were capable of making a fast decision in her favor as long as they were in the way of it. All she did was meet them on their turf not hers, on their terms not hers, taking advantage of an association (the artist in the boardroom at the Wainright Bank!) that spoke to their values — a three-legged stool of a strategy if I ever saw one, since if you eliminate even one component it collapses.
In her own way, Jen Bekman is speaking to middlebrow values — flattering those values, even, and reinforcing the middlebrow distrust of the art world while helping middlebrows to get stuff on their walls anyway. It seems to be working — but isn’t it better to use some creativity and some psychology to reach out to people who don’t self-select as mistrustful and uninformed? Who just, you know, have not really had time to “get” art in either sense? Their money is just as good, I would hope.
Elatia’s comments resonate with me.
Here’s something that has helped me open a dialogue and actually sell to first timers and timid purchasers at my Open Studios. I post a little sign that reads:
IF IT SPEAKS TO YOU, THEN SPEAK TO ME
Interested in one of these pieces, but uncertain? Think you can’t afford it? Let’s talk. I’d like to answer questions if I can. If there’s a piece you really want to own, we can probably work out a payment plan. One purchaser paid me as little as $25 a month. Don’t be shy!
One happy result was the sale of a chaotic tumbleweed of a drawing to a 14 year old girl who paid me a little bit every month from her babysitting money. Rewarding for both of us.
Elatia and Sally, Such helpful and hopeful additions to this ongoing and multifaceted discussion. Thank you for sharing them here. That should be a sign in every studio: If it speaks to you…