philip tinari

This came across the transom earlier today, and it’s so amazing that I have just anonymized and posted it deadpan, à la Harper’s Readings. Meanwhile I have been writing a bit about Yan Lei, who has done more work than just about any Chinese artist on the actual mechanisms of the art world and the individual artist’s place therein. The painting below, for example, is from the moment of “Alors la Chine,” that grand Pompidou spectacle of Chinese contemporary art back in the summer of 2003. The idea is that this other (also Chinese) guy, who has just painted the portrait (of Yan Lei, at least five pairs of glasses ago) which we see at bottom, will always remain outside, while Yan Lei himself is about to show on the other side of the Richard-and-Renzo escalator tubes. Maybe if this Beauborg portraitist had just read the below. Because “Nothing says ‘new artist’ like a low inventory number.”

Detail, Yan Lei, Climbing Space--Pompidou, 2003. Acrylic on canvas.

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from             [redacted]@[redacted]gallery.com
date             Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 4:29 AM
subject        Little Thigs Can Make a BIG Difference in YOUR Art Career!

Have you ever stood in an art gallery and said to yourself: “My work is better than the art in this gallery. Why are these artists selling in galleries and I’m not?”

I have spent the last several years helping artists answer this question. I have discovered it is the little things that can make all the difference in an artist’s career.

Before I share some of these little things that add up to make a big difference, let me introduce myself. My name is [redacted], I own [redacted] Gallery in [redacted], Arizona. I have owned the gallery for over eight years, and have been in the gallery business for 17 years.

You may have read my emails over the last several weeks. I am preparing to give an intensive workshop in your area to help artists, like you, become focused, organized and successful. If you are hoping to attend, I encourage you to sign up today before the class fills.

Can little things make a difference in your career? I invite you to ponder the suggestions below, all ideas I will expand upon in my upcoming workshop. These little ideas, put into practice with your marketing plan will help you present your work more professionally. They will help you get into galleries and sell more of your art.

Quality Check. I have known and worked with hundreds of artists over the years. The most successful  artists are devoted to high quality. They have the ability to step back from their work and look at it through their buyer’s eyes. Art collectors are picky. They demand attention to detail. Their homes are immaculate. You must create work that will fit seamlessly into their homes.

Your medium doesn’t matter – sculpture, jewelry, paintings, photography or fiber art – the presentation must be flawless.

Think of each work you create as a masterpiece. Treat it as such.

One small thing to improve the quality of your work: Invite someone you trust to evaluate the quality of your art. You should invite an artist you admire, or a designer, or a gallery owner over to the studio for coffee. Present 5-6 pieces. Ask the question “what are three things I could do to improve the quality of my presentation.”

An objective observer will see your art in a way you never could. Repeat this process every 1-2 years and make a commitment to constantly improve your quality.

Read a Book. Collectors and dealers love to talk history. As you begin to show in galleries and interact with collectors at shows you will find they love to talk about past masters. Your relationships with collectors and dealers will deepen if you can converse fluently about art history. I suggest you strive to understand the major art movements from the impressionists through the present day. This understanding will also enrich your work as you are inspired by the great artist’s lives and works.

One little thing to work on: Visit your local book store or Amazon.com and order a biography of one of your favorite artists. Commit to read 2 artist biographies per year. Don’t limit your reading only to artists you like. I wasn’t a fan of Willem deKooning’s work until I read about his life. He is now one of my favorite artists.

Analyze your Competition. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to marketing your work. With a little work, you will find hundreds of artists whose work is comparable to yours. Learn from them. Do what they do.

One little thing to work on: Every week, devote one hour to researching your competition online. Type keywords describing your work into a search engine and you will quickly encounter your competitors. Develop a list of 10 artists you feel are closest to you in style, genre, subject, and/or experience. Analyze them.

The insight you will gain through this weekly exercise will prove invaluable to you as you develop your marketing plans.  By understanding your competition you can better tailor your work to the market. You can price your work competitively. You can better understand the types of galleries you should approach.

Use an Inventory Number. As you begin to experience success, organizing your inventory becomes critical.  Using an inventory number is an easy way to start to control your inventory. As you move artwork from the studio to your galleries, and from gallery to gallery and inventory number will make it easy to track your work. Titles can get mixed up, but inventory numbers are almost infallible.

If you don’t already have an inventory numbering system, start with a high number (3000, for example). Nothing says “new artist” like a low inventory number.

Send a Thank-you note. As you begin to work with collectors and galleries, your goal is not to sell art. Your end-goal is to create relationships. Relationships will lead to a lifetime of sales. You will be amazed what one simple thing like a hand-written thank-you note can do for your relationships. In this age of digital communication and voicemail interaction, a hand-written thank you note stands out.

When a gallery sends you a commission check you should immediately sit down and write a thank-you note. Keep the note simple:

Spend Some Time on Marketing. I am amazed at how many artists will spend long days in the studio, weeks in workshops, but then wonder why their work isn’t selling. Often, these same artists are devoting very little time to marketing. You should be spending 10% of your time marketing. You will be amazed by how much you can accomplish in this small amount of time, and this is one small thing that will make a huge difference in your career.

My upcoming workshop will give you concrete, actionable guidance in organizing the business side of your career. I will also give you an understanding of the art business from the perspective of a gallery owner with 17+ years experience in the business.

If I can give you one idea that helps you sell one work of art would it be worth $59 and four hours of your time? I am going to give many more ideas than just one. If you are ready to put your art career on track and start selling your work, sign up now, before the class fills.

The other night I went for one of those countless lunar-new-year dinners with our extremely Modern upper management, to Bei in the Opposite House, not such a bad place. The subject was an artist, Cantonese like our beloved Chairman, who has a very good exhibition opportunity in front of him in New York which needs a funder. His gallerist and I think it would be fun to have that funder be an enlightened Chinese collector, that the p.r. value of such an intervention would actually do a bit of cultural work, in that 2011, subvert-the-dominant-yellow-peril-narrative sort of way. So we all had dinner, and then the Modern Media cadre left, and the three of us–the artist, the gallerist, and I–went upstairs to Mesh. The gallerist (a lapsed Hong Kong M&A attorney), and the artist (a veteran of the Guangzhou avant-garde of the early nineties) get to talking about when they first met. And what do they talk about? Paul Simon.

The mysterious missing Paul Simon Guangzhou and Hong Kong and Guangzhou concerts--perhaps in the space between Hollywood and Nagoya?

Yes, that’s right. Apparently the Born at the Right Time tour stopped at the Tianhe Coliseum in Guangzhou back one night in that key reform-era interregnum between the trauma of Tiananmen and Deng’s Tour South. Amateur online research reveals very little, but oral history suggests that after an appearance in Hong Kong, the tour, with its revolutionary entourage of Brazilians and South Africans, followed the only living boy from New York up the (Pearl River) Delta, shining like a national guitar, to what was still the coolest city in China. The Simon fansites can’t pinpoint the date (they make reference to only one China concert, in “Peking,” in October 1991), but the timing suggests that it happened sometime between an appearance on September 27, 1991 at the Hollywood Bowl and another on October 7 in Nagoya. Air China already flew the PEK-LAX route at this point, but I prefer to assume they arrived in Asia by way of the old Kai Tak, and then went CAN-PEK before hopping over to the land of the rising sun.

The standard inside view of Tianhe Coliseum, a 65,000-seat stadium built for the Sixth National Games in 1986, an underrated monument of the first decade of reforms.

Graceland has always loomed for me as a canonical text of “globalization,” the album we listened to after our first-year seminars with Michael Hardt and Walter Mignolo, even if it was already ten years old by the time we got to it. The mature Simon articulated the sort of beneficent American cosmopolitanism that we could aspire to mainly by doing our nightly readings on transnational logics of capital–even if we didn’t yet realize how those logics structured the “Chinese reading room” where we did most of those readings, kitted out with the spoils of BAT’s man in China. “Aren’t you the woman who was recently given a Fulbright?” we hoped to one day be able to ask each other. And of course we ultimately were. What we didn’t realize in the fall of 1997 was that we lived at the height of the American Empire, which would reach its cultural zenith with the release of Titanic over our first winter break.

Lin Yilin, Safely Crossing Linhe Road, 1995. Performance.

The Tianhe Coliseum sits right off of Linhe Road, the street which this artist’s longtime collaborator Lin Yilin would “safely cross” a few years later, moving cinderblock after cinderblock in a wall formation from one side to the other, as the skyscraper you see through the stadium rose behind to his right. The Guangzhou concert ostensibly happened just a few months after the legendary “Concert in the Park,” August 15, 1991, in turn just four days before the Avgustovsky Putch. Twelve at the time, I vividly remember one of the lifeguards from our summer swim club leaving work early that day and making the trek from the Philly suburbs up to New York City for the show–a mass gathering weirdly mirroring the energies that loomed elsewhere in those few fraught world-systemic years. If asked, we couldn’t have found Guangzhou on a map. Now I work for a company that got its start there, a few years after that concert. Twenty years later, the fact that these same songs, then, appeared both over here and back there, heard by folks on this side and that, seems to count for something.

Album cover, Paul Simon's Concert in the Park, August 15, 1991.