alexandraerin

Author M.C.A. Hogarth (haikujaguar) has a series of posts on her LJ called "The Three Micahs", referring to herself as Artist, Business Manager, and Marketer. A new installment just went up, and it's on 99 cent e-books and the pricing of art products as separate from the value of art.



It's good, good stuff and I would recommend it (and the earlier posts) to anyone who's in business as an artist or trying to go into business as an artist.

A lot of what Micah, Micah, and the rest have to say about pricing is stuff I happen to agree with, so of course I enjoy reading her saying it. However, there is one part of the new column that jumped out at me, in light of what I've been wrestling with recently:

Let us put paid to the myth then: artistic merit and money are not equivalent. When you approach the question of pricing, you must set aside passion (the Artist's driving attribute) and turn instead to issues of setting buyer expectations, deciding which markets to compete in and gating customer demand. Pricing is the realm of Marketer and Business Manager, so send Artist back to her easel.

The emphasized part jogged a memory. I'll confess to having mostly skimmed the original columns to get a sense of them, with the idea that I'm already doing my thing and doing pretty good so clearly I'm beyond this 101 stuff. Right? But here in the first column, when she's defining the Artist:

Facing: Internal
Your creative self should be quieter than your other selves when interacting with people; by nature most people's inner Artists are passionate and that passion can often clash badly with your need to be an empathic salesperson. A lot of artists also find that talking about their work gets in the way of them doing it: they lose their interest after discussing it, or they find themselves discussing it as a way to procrastinate.

The last sentence is very true for me. I figured out years ago that if I basically tell someone a story, the drive to write it is gone. It's the first part that's news to me, but that's exactly what I've been doing wrong.

Passion is like explosive fire. Contained and directed passion can accomplish incredible things. Undirected passion not only fails to accomplish anything, it can be horribly destructive.

People who've watched my blow my top at people I think are being rude or obtuse would probably be surprised to know that I've been a top-notch customer service agent and a tech support agent in my life. How did I manage that when I can't handle a single trouble commenter without losing a night of sleep and a day of productivity? Well, because that was my job. I was following the requirements of my job.

And then there's my other problems... Passionate Author Alexandra collapses into a bowl of jelly when faced with having to pick up a phone or deal with the post office or anything touching on any sort of Officialdom. And yet, both of those jobs I mentioned above were phone jobs. When there is no other choice but to pick up a phone to deal with something, I still have my customer service phone voice and manners to call upon. In the course of doing various office jobs, I had to deal with mailing things out and things with various levels of officiality.

Really, before, I looked at the "Three Micahs" lens as kind of an interesting quirk of the author and a good metaphor for breaking down the different kinds of things that must be Got Done, but after really noticing those lines about internalizing passion and keeping the Artist quiet when dealing with the public (for the mutual protection of both, no doubt)...

This all kind of meshes nicely with where I've been heading towards anyway... it's like I've been stumbling in the general direction of something and now someone's handed me a roadmap. I've talked about switching off my writerbrain to deal with things before, I had worked out on my own that I need to start thinking of the comment box as my "workplace" and let that guide my interactions with the public through it. In the past, when the comments were too much to deal with, I just didn't look at them. At all.

So the stuff above the box ads, that's the Writer's domain. The stuff below, the Writer doesn't look at. The stuff below, that's the Marketer's turf: customer relations, market research, the public face of "the company".

It might take some time for me to internalize the distinction, but the fact that this fits in so well with my own instincts should help.

I'll be writing more of Little Aidan's story in a bit. In fact, I've written a little bit more since the construction post started... I've had a bit of a personal breakthrough when it comes to writing on my phone, which is nice as I'd almost given up using the virtual keyboard for that purpose. Unfortunately it came when the battery was almost dead, and when I was spending some quality time with my parents.

We drove to St. Petersburg to see the Dale Chihuly collection on permanent display there, and then had lunch at a nice restaurant with outdoor seating that had a view of the water across a little park area. It was very pleasant. I'm a big fan of Chihuly, ever since the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha hosted a traveling exhibition and acquired a couple of his pieces, which you can get a distant view of on the museum's Wikipedia page. I have a recollection that there used to be a better picture of one of them on Chihuly's page, but all art is ephemeral and wiki art is especially so.

I enjoyed the chance to walk among Chihuly's sculptures up close very much. I wish they would have allowed photography and/or electronic devices... I found my muse moved at several points and really would have liked nothing better than to plop down on a bench with my laptop and spend the afternoon there in the gallery writing... or failing that, taking some reference pictures and notes on my failing smartphone. At least I have the website to refresh my memory.

The blue chandelier piece, Azul De Medianoche (visible in the right of the exhibition page), in particular is the sort of thing I could just stare at for hours, but it was other parts of the collection that really fired my imagination. Chihuly and his team possess a real genius for creating organic looking shapes out of glass with the illusion of life and movement, and near the end of the gallery walkthrough there was a veritable forest of their creations placed on a reflective surface that added whole new layers to the presentation. I have in my head now images of a forest of glass, grasping and reaching tendrils swaying in the breeze, flower blossoms sprouting from a wall and locking together like gears in an intricate machine... I don't know if any of it will go anywhere, but it's there.

I'm having an actual conversation on the io9 article I linked to the other day. I wasn't sure that would happen, since I found the article a couple of days after it went up. I'm having a polite disagreement (no, seriously) with another author about the meaning and implications of "neo-patronage", and he linked me to an interesting page that I actually find to be more in support of my feelings than his, but anyway, I want to share it.

It's from Another Sky Press:

Neo-patronage is an (r)evolution of patronage enabled by the connectivity between artist and audience offered by today’s technologies. At its core, neo-patronage is an honor/trust based system of financial support for an artist that comes from the artist’s collective audience, rather than a single individual or organization. The sum of all patron contributions becomes the means and incentive for the artist to continue his or her work.

This multitude of patrons is responsible for the two most important differences between patronage and neo-patronage:

1. The sense of ‘ownership’ the patron wielded over the artist is completely diffused. The artist is free to continue creating as he or she sees fit, and isn’t beholden to the vision of his or her supporters.
2. Spreading the cost of patronage over many patrons means anyone can become a patron simply by contributing to an artist based on their interest in the artist and their own financial ability.

In practice, the money the artist receives via neo-patronage serves two purposes:

1. It is payment and ‘thank you’ for work already completed.
2. It is the funding that allows the artist to continue to produce new works.

It is essential to understand that there is no line between these two purposes - if, for example, the artist decides to retire and pursue other activities, all future contributions would fall firmly into the first category by default. That said, if an artist is receiving contributions they have a strong incentive (both financially and artistically) to continue to create.

This duality of purposes for a contribution is a significant improvement over traditional patronage where the patron essentially became lord over the artist. Under neo-patronage, there is no longer a power dynamic between artist and patron since everything is voluntary on both sides of the equation. Patrons simply support artists they like and artists simply continue to create in hopes of further support from both old and newfound patrons.

Everybody wins.

That really says it.

I'm also a big fan of their stated beliefs, which, in brief, go:

1. It makes sense [to embrace technology and the free flow of information instead of raging against it]
   
2. The audience is the sole arbitrator of value.
   
3. Art for all.
   
4. Support the artist.
   
5. Dreams come true.
   

Or, as my father put it on the last one: "If you spend your time making it possible for the best things to happen, sometimes they do."

(Naturally, having found someone doing something on the internet, I'm off to offer them advice on how they should be doing it.)