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Artists often wonder if, in today's world, they should work with brick-and-mortar art galleries, or, instead, do their own marketing and sell online, directly from their websites.  For any given artist, there are a lot of factors, both professional and personal, that play into that decision.   I owned a gallery for more than a decade, have worked with thousands of artists in building their websites, and have spent over 15 years marketing our services online.  Having worked professionally on all sides of this question, I thought it would be helpful to share my thoughts on what makes a great art gallery.   Should you decide to work with art galleries, it's critical that you work with galleries that have the right mix of attributes that lead to selling artwork.   Here are the three pillars of a great art gallery:

1. ATTENTION

In the pre-internet days, the attention formula was often this:  ATTENTION = LOCATION.  That's why the most successful galleries were usually situated in prominent locations in high-traffic art towns and resort areas.  But today, while having a high-traffic location is still a huge asset, garnering attention has more to do with building a savvy online presence and a well-executed permission marketing strategy.   After all, people spend more time on their smartphones than they do visiting resorts.  As the world's greatest marketer, Seth Godin says, "How many eyeballs are passing by is a useless measure. All that matters is, "how many people want to hear from you tomorrow?"

Our modern economy has been dubbed the "attention economy", and for good reason:  In the modern, and often online world, the party who controls the customer interface and the attention is the one who brings the most marketing value to the relationship. This is why Uber, despite their recent scandals, is such a valuable company.  They are, essentially, "only" a middleman.  They don't own any cars.  They don't truly employ any drivers. As far as "physical" assets go, they're nothing but a smartphone app.  You could create a clone of their app in a few weeks with a few thousand dollars.  But...and this is important....Uber controls the customer interface with millions of riders, via their smartphone app.  And this makes Uber valuable because he who controls the customer interface, has the customers' attention.

Great art galleries control the customer interface and thus have the customer attention:  they build, maintain, and nurture qualified lists of past and potential customers.  The best galleries, via their mailing lists, have access to thousands and thousands of art lovers and buyers.  Most individual artists don't have the reach to build that kind of list.  

Intuitively, artists understand that to sell their work, they must garner attention and, in fact, the number one reason artists cite for working with art galleries is that "they reach people I can't."  And since the best art galleries control the customer interface with thousands of qualified art buyers, that brings a ton of marketing value to the relationship.

2. MARKETING SKILL

Selling art takes skill in marketing.  Like any skill, learning and mastering marketing takes time and effort.   If you truly want to sell art, someone on your team must master marketing and do the tremendous amount of work that it takes.  It can be you, it can be your spouse, it can be someone you hire, or it can be an art gallery.  But someone must do the work.

Great art galleries have mastered the skill of marketing.  They know that it's not enough to simply possess a great customer list.  But that what breaths life into a marketing plan is utilizing your customer list.  The best galleries segment their customers by interests and invest a lot of money and time in communicating, conversing and sharing images and information with those people.   They employ skilled marketing and sales people who build and maintain relationships with their best customers.  Every time they receive new art works, they have the data to know which customers would be most interested in the new pieces.  And they contact those people.  They know that art sales is a long-term game that it often takes a person seeing dozens of pieces over the course of months or even years, and they don't give up too soon.   They share interesting art information with their customers.  They plan and host fun and engaging events for their customers.  And, in many cases, they become trusted friends with their best customers.  It's not simply sales, it's a relationship.  And like all relationships, it must be continually nurtured to build trust.

3. CREDIBILITY

The Achilles tendon of any marketing program is credibility.  You can place advertisements in magazines and all over the internet.  You can shout from mountain tops.  And you can tell everyone you meet how great your art work is.  But the problem, even if your the greatest artist who ever lived, is that you are the one saying it.  And we're all smart enough to know that you are biased and have a selfish interest in convincing us of your credibility as an artist.  It's a fact that people trust what other people say about you much more than what you say about yourself.  That's why people trust what the media says about political candidates more than they trust the advertisements those candidates run about themselves.

While there are several ways to establish credibility, being represented by a great art gallery is a major one.  If you tell me that you're the greatest western painter to appear on the art scene in a decade...I'll take it with a grain of salt.  If Trailside Galleries tells me you're the greatest western painter they've seen in a decade.....I'm going to sit up take notice.  Great galleries establish an artist's credibility.

Think about this:  Thousands and thousands of artists have their own websites,  show their works on Instagram, post regularly on Facebook, and post their works to myriad of art sites.  The amount of noise in today's world and the sheer number of companies and people trying to get our attention, especially online, is overwhelming. The best galleries help collectors cut through that overwhelming noise.  Great galleries encounter thousands of artists, and they do the work of reviewing, selecting, and curating that staggering number into a manageable few that collectors can reasonably devote attention to.  They provide a stamp of credibility that helps "guarantee" that an artist is worth our attention or that a particular painting is worth purchasing.

This credibility issue is why many artists find it easier to sell lower priced artworks directly from their websites, but struggle to sell the higher priced works without the services of a gallery.  A collector can part with $500 for a painting that she simply "Likes" without worrying too much about if it's a good "investment."  However, if she is going to spend $10,000 on a piece, it helps immensely for her to see that the artist and his work are "endorsed" by a nationally known gallery, a museum, a well-known collector, or a magazine.  Social proof brings credibility.  And a great gallery, while not the only way,  is a great way of solving the credibility issue.

Put these three elements together and you have a great gallery that brings a ton of marketing value to the artist/gallery relationship.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson

FASO Founder, Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic

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Footnotes:

1.  The photo is from my (much younger) days as an owner of Greenhouse Gallery of Fine Art.  I found this old article about the gallery in the San Antonio Business Journal.