I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Marketing, I research, plan, and evaluate my marketing and promotion activities.
Art business coach Alyson Stanfield’s advises that artists should write about their work as a foundation of marketing it for sale. In her article The First 4 Steps Toward Selling Your Art, tip four is, “Develop a habit of writing about your art.” She elaborates:
You will need words to share your art with others.
Ever heard of anything anywhere being sold without words? You need words to talk with interested buyers, other artists, curators, and arts writers. You need words to fill up a website or blog.
You need words to add to your images on social media or to speak in a video or artist talk. And you need words to write your artist statement, press releases, grants, and newsletters.
You can’t suddenly sit down at your computer or stare at a blank sheet of paper and expect to come up with a brilliant artist statement, bio, press release, or cover letter. You have to work at it….
You can’t promote your art without words, so you might as well start now. Writing might also make you a better artist because you’re exploring art at a deeper level.
As my art practice evolves, I identify more and more as a conceptual artist. Today I’m going to write about conceptual art so that in the future I can communicate about it better. As well, I’d like to start thinking about how one goes about marketing conceptual art.
What is conceptual art? From Wikipedia:
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns.
My essay-plus-painting pairing project Things Men Gave Me, to me, qualifies as conceptual art. The idea of inspiring paintings by essays is as important as the manifestation of the work in the real world.
And, the paintings I’m creating are conceptual in nature, some more than others. The most conceptual so far is the painting I’m working on right now: I Ruined: A Road Trip to Santa Fe. The concept is that I paint a nice representation of a road trip to Santa Fe. And then I ruin the painting, with scribbles and a big X and drips and scratches. In this way I can communicate something from the essay it belongs to. I was told, during a road trip to Santa Fe, “You ruin everything.” And so I’m taking that and showing that yes, I can ruin everything. I can ruin this lovely painting I just created.
I did begin ruining the painting yesterday. It was quite upsetting to do so! But the value in the artwork, to me, lies in the concept behind it, not the aesthetics of the painting that results.1
Importantly, conceptual art is not primarily concerned with aesthetics and beauty. From the Stanford Encyclopedia:
Conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s sought to overcome a backdrop against which art’s principal aim is to produce something beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. Art, early conceptual artists held, is redundant if it does not make us think. In their belief that most artistic institutions were not conducive to reflection but merely promoted a conservative and even consumerist conception of art and artists, conceptual artists in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s instead tried to encourage a revisionary understanding of art, the artist, and artistic experience.
Conceptual art is anti-establishment and anti-consumerist. It’s not about creating art that people want to hang on their walls. It’s art that makes you think.
My painting “I Ruined…” is not as commercial as the original painting. In fact, I’m not sure anyone would want to hang it on their wall. Maybe I would, as a conversation piece.
An example of conceptual art I often share with people when I’m explaining what it is: Tracey Emin’s My Bed, a sculpture that she created out of the bed she remained in for four days while in a depressive state. During that time she didn’t eat or drink anything but alcohol, but she did have sex. So the bed includes bodily secretions, condoms, and more pretty awful stuff.
This is not the kind of conceptual art I do. But it does show you one of the primary criteria determining whether something counts as conceptual art or not:
First and foremost, conceptual art challenges our intuitions concerning the limits of what may count as art and what it is an artist does. It does so, on the one hand, by postulating ever more complex objects as candidates for the status of ‘artwork’, and, on the other hand, by distancing the task of the artist from the actual making and manipulating of the artistic material. [The Limits of Art and the Role of Artists]
Is an unmade bed art? That’s a question that conceptual art brings up again and again: but is it art?
Conceptual art is “art of the mind rather than the senses”:
it rejects traditional artistic media because it locates the artwork at the level of ideas rather than that of objects. Because more weight tends to given to creative process than physical material, and because art should be about intellectual inquiry and reflection rather than beauty and aesthetic pleasure (as traditionally conceived), the identity of the work of art is said to lie in the idea at the heart of the piece in question. [Art as Idea]
This has implications for the role of the artist:
It not only affects the ontology of the conceptual artwork but also profoundly alters the role of the artist by casting her in the role of thinker rather than object-maker.
I am more a thinker than an object-maker, but I am an object-maker too. Object making, in my conceptual art projects, is secondary to thinking.
My project Snow Bound was a conceptual art project. The way I thought about it and the idea behind it was more important than what resulted. What made it cool, I think, was that I started with abstract paintings, and then I created digitally modified photos of a ski day that were inspired by the paintings.
Usually abstraction goes from representational subject to something more abstracted, not the other way around. That I could go the reverse way was strange and beautiful… to some people, like my photography instructor, who “got” what I was trying to do.
It just confused other people. One viewer became upset when I told her that the photos came after the paintings. The paintings weren’t created as abstractions of the photos. The photos were created as representations of the paintings. She said, “you cheated!”
That’s so funny to me, and I think it may be some evidence I was really doing conceptual art with that project. Conceptual art should provoke reactions, I think, and not “wow, that is beautiful!” but something more unique and unusual.
Conceptual art seeks to transmit a specific meaning rather than depicting a scene, person, object, or event. This is the heart of it, and this is where my Things Men Gave Me paintings might be identified as most conceptual. In each, I seek to convey a meaning from the essay.
For example, in I Wanted that Ring, I put a large white ring on the painting. I want to say two things: (1) as a romantic, I wanted a ring from my then-lover, and (2) as a painter, I wanted to put a white ring on my painting.
In As Many Glasses as I Want, I added multiple wine glasses to the painting. And I wanted to communicate that when I was living with David, the man from the essay this painting belongs to, I didn’t want to have the number of wine glasses he thought I should have. I wanted to have however many I wanted.
For each painting I do, I want to express some idea with the painting itself. I think as I go forward with this I will get better at coming up with such ideas, as I did with I Ruined: A Road Trip to Santa Fe.
In this way, I want to construct layers of meaning. I want there to be something in the essay plus the painting that says more than the painting alone.
Even in cases where a work makes use of illustrative representation, conceptual art is still putting that representation to a distinctively semantic use, in the sense of there being an intention to represent something one cannot see with the naked eye. Accordingly, the conceptual artist’s task is to contemplate and formulate this meaning – to be a ‘meaning-maker’. [Semantic Representation]
My conceptual art doesn’t neatly fit into the schema of shows that I’ve been submitting work to. I’m thinking that in the future, I will really need to have my own solo art shows (for example, one for Snow Bound, one for Things Men Gave Me) that can be structured to communicate and transmit the ideas I’m attempting to communicate and transmit.
As individual pieces, my Snow Bound and TMGM paintings are probably not that interesting. As part of conceptual art projects and presented as a set with communication about the ideas behind each of them, they are much more interesting.
Holding solo shows doesn’t sound very feasible unless my Bitcoin holdings take off. The website (actually a Substack newsletter) I’m building that includes essays plus images of the paintings could be conceived of as a solo exhibition though. I’m planning to publish the first essay later this week.
I may add an article about conceptual art to the website based on what I’ve just written here.
- Although I do intend it to also be aesthetically pleasing. ↩︎