Paul Klein on How to Succeed as an Artist

you know first of all i think it's really exciting to be in this museum you know so many i live in chicago and so many of the museums i go to are in big cities and everything let's back up ninety percent of what i see in all of those big city museums is the same you know and here i mean upstairs you could look at am i all and this jon stewart curry in the same view and for me that's absolutely fabulous you understand all these different dynamics you see how artwork relates you understand some of the vision of the director of the museum you understand how it relates to the community you understand how it has some kind of didactic purposes and it isn't all you know best of but it's you know things that illustrate and demonstrate to students and the community you know how art functions and what its power can be i really love good university college museums this one's exceptional um what i've been doing for the last three years and i'm having an absolute blast is teaching an online course to empower visual artists and you know it's a lot of demystifying and i do it by the 12-week program and i bring in guest experts every monday night and we do two live webinars where all these artists in the course who are paying me money to do this can ask questions in real time and have a discussion with significant art world people and you know it's been an eye opener for me i've learned a lot i've been involved in the art world since 1973. you know and a lot of it is finding ways to share what i've learned over that period of time you know as an aside one of the things i've noticed is that there's a lot more people who are interested in being mentors than there are people who are interested in being mentees you know and a mentor is someone who's willing to show you the ropes tell you how it worked for them what worked and what didn't work and enable you as a young artist or a young person to not have to reinvent the wheel every time you know you do something in chicago people have been graduating from the school of the art institute for over 100 years all of those artists say to themselves should i go to new york or should i stay here or should i go back home and all of them try and figure it out for themselves as if they were the first person to ever have that issue to deal with and it's so much better and easier and wiser to ask someone who's had to make that decision before you asked three people who went to new york three people who went home three people who stayed in chicago how it worked for them you're gonna have a whole lot of information so that you don't have to spend five six years maybe doing the wrong kind of thing um this talk is about how to succeed in the art world and i'm totally of the opinion that every single artist can succeed everybody part of the reason i do this class and do this discussion is because you know i think there's lots of problems confronting the united states and the world and i think by definition creatives artists and people in the art world have greater access to problem solving and problem creating and that with more respect given to artists and more empowerment of artists the whole damn world gets to be a better place ultimately success is about relationships and you know what i'm going to say is particularly applicable to visual artists but i think it's exactly the same thing for every other kind of work business endeavor that other people that people may undertake i was interviewed last week and somebody said you think it's different for artists than it is for accountants i said you know not so much you know i mean i think it's important that artists be honest and vulnerable and that they pursue their career and their endeavors on a daily basis pretty much 24 hours a day whereas an accountant can put on the green cap right and the um and the three-piece suit and go to work and push numbers and then come home and put their sweatpants on and be somebody else you know for artists it's more like be yourself all the time regardless um so i want to try so we're going to talk about how it's about relationships and then we're going to come back to that as a conclusion i believe that for all artists there are you know we we talk about the art world but there really isn't that much of an art world there's much more a lot of different art villages you know and you can take a look at these different art villages the artists must figure out which art village or villages they want to be in and which art village or villages they probably belong in and then try and find a synergy as an example of villages you could take tandem press as one you could take pace gallery in new york galleries and you know and or other printers as examples of two different kind of villages another village might be working with or through art consultants the gallery system is another village not dealing with galleries is another village doing large-scale public sculpture is as a village doing private commissions as a village doing portraiture solely is a village doing duck stamps you know and hopefully selling your stuff to the united states post office you know there are lots and lots of different kinds of art villages those are all for artists you know then you could throw in being a professor you could throw in being an arts administrator working in a museum you know a lot of times there's atrophy in terms of people who are making art and they're not make the less art being made after five ten years after you got out of school but you know there's still plenty of other kinds of art activities you can engage in the point is that there are lots of different art villages you know somebody once asked me or said to me if i could only get past the next obstacle i will be a success and i said there are no obstacles you know and that's really true except for one thing the only obstacles that exist are the obstacles we put in front of ourselves you know there's a lot of artists who are a little bit negative and the art world sucks and everybody's picking on me bs you know this is about the stuff we create and the barriers we put in front of ourselves that you know the the only obstacles that may exist in the art world are the obstacles you put in front of yourself or the lack of knowledge you know and that's where the part about mentors come in or do you know this course that i'm teaching it conveys a ton of knowledge about how the art world operates that information knowledge is available to everybody who wants to get it there are different people who are conveying it there are different ways to experience it there are different ways to work through the process you know it's available in a lot of different kinds of directions the obstacles you know that one puts in their own way you know we need to confront that all of us put those obstacles in front of ourselves among other things i'm a ted mentor of ted fellows you know the ted group and i you know they have like 2 000 people a year apply to be ted fellows and they pick like 10 or 12. so these pieces are people are like we are like one out of several hundred and i work with them and every single one of them i've worked with so far is insecure and you know it's it fascinates me because it's sort of like on a level of a macarthur prize or grant you know with the genius awards or getting a nobel prize you know and i have to believe that if these ted fellows are insecure so are those folks and if they're you know we all know we're all insecure right so probably the point to the matter is that if something someone says something to you that's positive you should probably try and find a way to believe it as opposed to dismissing it and going oh no you know my socks are dirty i couldn't be any good um or whatever right you know i mean maybe when somebody says negative stuff to you you can dismiss that but the positive stuff you know their perspective their objectivity is probably closer to what the truth is than our own self-awareness you know as an artist i think it's important to be self-aware but it can be it can be challenging you know and difficult to have a kind of honesty and openness i think it's important to know in my mind there are three key ingredients to having a successful art career and i'm reluctant to admit that i think they're in this order number one is be distinctive let's go back to the other end number three is make good art i think these other two are more important number one is to be distinctive be yourself be who you are be honest dig down inside yourself reveal who you are all of us on this planet as human beings are unique you know there is nobody that's quite like us we probably have more than one soul mate but there's nobody that's you know identical to who we are okay so that if you are yourself you know like there's that little quote or sign you see on facebook it says be yourself everybody else is already taken um you know it's kind of like that as an artist you don't really want your work to resemble somebody else's art if your work looks like i was walking around the museum if your work looks like sam gilliam's work you know and you're doing doing a good job of getting it out into the world you're promoting sam you know it's not so much about you you need to find what makes you distinctive from everybody else and you need to focus on that and expand upon it number two is that you've got to get your ass in the game you've got this is it back to the relationships thing you've got to get engaged it is no longer sufficient to sit in your studio and expect the world to come to you i have heard artists say it's all about the art if you make good art opportunities are going to come you know that's true but not so much in that little teeny microcosm you've got to still give it the opportunity to get seen dawood bay d-a-w-o-u-d bay b-e-y writes a wonderful blog based on a song by marvin gaye called what's going on so if you google marv dawude bay what's going on way back i had him he was on a panel but he was the most prepared and had this list of 10 items of advice for young artists you know one of the items that he put in there is associate with people better than yourself you know it's sort of like if you want to learn how to play tennis or yeah that's a good enough one i was going to go to a winter example but i'll stick with the tennis um you know you're probably better off playing against someone who has some experience as opposed to a fifth grader who doesn't have experience fifth grader with experience might be just fine but you know you you learn better you associate better with people who are better than yourself the other thing you need to do is create opportunities where your work gets seen if you're making good art and you're getting it out into the world that number two hustle you know and to get seen then you're going to start getting some attention number three is make good art you know and good art for me means it's distinctive take a look around can't all of us name artists who are doing really really well monetarily whose work we think sucks you know don't we all know and maybe we could point out ourselves artists who are making fabulous work that nobody's paying any attention to you know all of this stuff what makes the art world so wonderful is that all of the stuff is subjective it's not like it's objective you know you can take a look at a baseball team you know and you can like or a football team and you can look at the stats and you can you know you can say that aaron rodgers has got a really great arm he's completing this number of percentages he has only this number of per touch interceptions and this many touchdowns you can put it on a graph and you can say he's number two in the whole league last year he was number one what a great athlete and you don't know anything about his personality except from those ads and you don't you know there's all that other stuff you don't know the art world is totally different you know i mean you can say this artist has sold this much for this much money but you go fine that doesn't mean i like it you know it's about it's subjective how people respond to your artwork is an emotional visceral personal thing experience that they have okay so it doesn't mean you need to train so that you can run a hundred yards faster than somebody else or jump higher than somebody else what you need to train to do is to be more yourself then it's a question of numbers getting your artwork out into the world so that more eyeballs see what it is that you're doing you know if you can get you out in front of some thousand people you know the objective is to find 25 35 people who will buy your art and you know you don't even i mean think about it five more decent sales a year as an artist could totally change your life you know i'm a big supporter of shopping locally wherever local happens to be if i'm buying something from artists who are from my extended community i'm helping them i'm putting more money you know i'm enhancing not only my life by the art i've acquired but their life by you know improving the quality of their life giving them more sales giving them more confidence giving them more money that they spend in the community you know it all stays it all sticks around it's it's a really nice you know feature i think of um being able to support yourself individually you know locally so the point is again that it's subjective okay different people you need to show it to people nobody's gonna you know i mean we've all heard the discussions that sort of go nowhere this piece is better than that piece you know okay prove that to me mathematically or using physics or something quantitative can't be done it's emotional it's visceral it's my response as opposed to your response and if my ego's bigger than yours i'm going to say i'm right and you're wrong you know and if your ego is bigger than mine i'll probably bow in your general direction but it's still you know totally individual and personal so you've got to focus on getting your art out into the world i think it's important to differentiate between vision and strategy they're two different entities vision is the stuff that your art is about vision is the stuff that makes your life tick vision is the stuff that distinguishes you from everybody else whether you're an artist or not we all have our own visions and things we believe in okay some of that we could even construe to be like politics strategy is the other stuff the stuff that is negotiable the stuff that influences how you get your strategy out into the world do i use hire somebody for public relations do i want an art gallery how big do i make my art what colors do i use do i work square or vertical or horizontal do i do roundos you know round things um do i um what how do i price it do i do prints do i do paintings do i do dimensional things what's the relationship between you know perceived relationship between works on paper and paintings do i want to mount my paint paper pieces on canvas you know i mean certainly worked for rothko to take all of his you know a lot of his paperwork and stick them on canvas it add perceived value increases all of those kinds of things are about strategy this course i teach is about strategy and how to get your art out into the world and find more success for yourself i think you need to adjust your strategy to your objectives now i'm trying to teach artists how to succeed and for a lot of people one would assume that's money but that isn't the case for everybody and i don't i want people to be successful on their terms some people want to get attention for what they're doing some people want to communicate some people have enough money they want to be able to make art and see people enjoy it and appreciate and you know whatever so that there's there's lots of different kinds of objectives that an artist can have i think you need to know what your objectives are what is it you want and then sort of methodically you know try things that move you into you know a greater proximity to what success is for you i believe that give or take twenty percent fifty percent of an artist's efforts should be outside of making art that means 30 to 70 percent of an artist's time and efforts should be about focusing on their career that's a lot you know and it depends how long it takes you to make art what the relationship is of yourself to your art but you know you need to spend more time doing that you know as an advanced idea and this one i'm convinced that you know more and more artists can benefit by having business partners the same way you know a corporation would have business partners and people who share the the artist's intent of seeing success for that artist team you know it's almost like the business partner has a 49 interest i mean i think still think that the artist needs to maintain control and responsibility is a big one for me you know even if you're an artist and you have a gallery i don't think you relinquish all authority and responsibility to the gallery because you have a gallery you should respect them and their input and their ideas and how to hang things and respect them it's your career though you know you should have that kind of responsibility for your career and even if you have a business partner you know it's not a studio assistant it's a partner and because a lot of us you know as i said you know there are no obstacles but some of us have a real problem doing certain kinds of things like speaking publicly or talking about my art or selling and maybe it's better to have you know to have somebody else who does some of that for us but that doesn't mean we should relinquish responsibility i think it's really important that artists apply the creativity that they bring to their artwork also to their career those of you in the room who are artists think about it you know maybe you know how many people i'm not i'm not really looking for the answer it's a rhetorical but how many pieces do you have in line that you have some sense of what they're going to be about you know maybe three maybe you have a series and you know it's going to be 15 but you know and maybe that's three years of work but most of us or most artists are looking one like chess you know one move ahead the good chess players are looking further ahead two three more moves but you know most of us and maybe we work on five paintings at a given moment but we still don't have what i would call the long view the big picture about what the art's gonna be looking like later because it's a dialogue between you and the art and it takes that kind of time but regardless you are creative i think what you want to look at in terms of your career is the 10-year picture and i believe that the bigger you dream and the bigger your aspirations are and your expectations the closer you're going to get to them you know so you need to say to yourself where do i want to be in 10 years what do i want to accomplish would i like to have you know a one-person museum show would i like to be you know i mean like carrie james marshall is a fabulous artist his intent is to be in all the major history books art history books you know i mean that's a really nice goal and you really got to apply yourself to have that kind of focus and endeavor to get that you know accomplished also you know if you're looking at the 10-year picture you don't you can revise this every five minutes you can revise it every month i encourage artists to write artist statements not so much that they're going to be used or put out there because when i had a gallery i didn't really care about it much i could figure out what i wanted by looking at the art but i think it really helps the artist focus and figure out what's you know where they are at a given moment and if they look at that artist statement every three to six months it sort of becomes like a diary or a journal and you can track your progress the only point i really want to make here though is that you need to apply creativity to your career okay you know we talked a while ago about how arts artists would graduate from schools in the midwest and then try and figure out um where to take themselves i think as an artist it's wise to have a role model or several role models and these role models don't have to be following the same career path you did you you don't have to follow their path per se but you can see what worked for them and what didn't work for them there's a fabulous book there's a fabulous movie about that i just finished recently about thomas hart benton who you know was a midwestern artist who was really not interested in playing to the new york school or playing to the west coast and was really about the honesty that we in the midwest take for granted but you know that other parts of the world find remarkable or something you know and he wasn't very popular on the east coast during new york during his career but he stuck to his guns now you know some of that made him bitter some of it made him too outspoken and too honest you know you can look at that and you can say whoa what a brilliant move or oh that's too bad or you can look at frida kahlo as an example you know i mean or you can look at artists who've graduated from the university of wisconsin and where they've gone and what they've done you know they may be closer to home you know and another thing is that do not assume that you cannot pick up the phone and call thomas hart benton and frida kahl would probably be tough but you could call somebody from madison you know who graduated here five years ago 10 years ago 20 years ago and say hey i'm wondering how it worked for you when you did this or that you know my experiences as a if you can get them on the phone if you can get them to answer an email they will be really generous with their information and share it you know i mean look at this all of you know that it helps to be a nice person and to give of yourself and to you know make somebody else better it feels good why wouldn't somebody want to do that for you they would um i think attitude is really really important one of my favorite quotes somebody once asked george burns the secret to acting he said sincerity if you can fake that you've got it made now the idea is that people want to associate with people who they think are upbeat positive successful i've heard the term in my course you know having a rising trajectory you know i kind of like that concept as opposed to the woe is me i'm a sad sack i haven't sold anything in three years i don't even think i've had a date in 10 years and you know my mother doesn't talk to me anymore and god i wish i could sell just one work of art you know that doesn't get you very excited about spending money with that person does it attitude you know have a good attitude even if you're not successful today have an attitude that conveys my trajectory is rising i am going to be a success you should know me because i'm going to be there and you're going to say i knew her him i knew her when um almost lastly you know i mean i teach all this stuff and then i see sometimes that people balk and they back at getting their art out into the world and the one thing i say is that if you believe your art if we want to get more general if you believe whatever you're doing has any value but even more so for art because it's like we're creating babies you know we're creating something that's of us not us but of us if you believe that that thing you're creating is any good you have an obligation to get it out into the world and again now back to the relationships ultimately i believe that this is all about relationships you have very little idea about where good news is going to come from i love going to things like this because i don't know where good news is going to come from one of you may change my life if i don't put myself out there if i don't take the opportunity to grow that relationship i'm closing the door on that potential good news so that it's about relationships you need to talk you need to be personable you need to be affable you need to have some images of your art on your person on your phone counts you know um so that you can talk about it you need to be able to have the elevator pitch you know or you know where somebody says well what does your art look like tell me what it is you do you need to be able to say that in 20 seconds or less you know and to have something to talk about to to to grow those opportunities and continue the dialogue that's about it i'd be glad to take questions for a few minutes i um i don't know together we know a lot of stuff let's find out yes i have a question um what what can you offer for um as advice for uh our students who are going to school now are being faced with tremendous debt lows the question has to do about art school students and debt load um no you know most of the people that i'm working with are between 30 and 80. and i mean i designed the course initially for art school students and they were too self and motivated inspired and loaded to want to take on more and i think by the time they get to be 30 they realize that many many art schools are not doing a great enough job of teaching artists how to have a career but you know they're covering other kinds of things and that's when people start realizing they need somebody like me um i'm not i don't know how much debt our schools i mean what my experience with an awful lot of art school students is that they're paying their own way and they're working and they're going to school at night um and they're maintaining that and keeping their debt down um i don't think i have a good answer for you i think i think it's it's a problem and it's challenging i don't think anybody gets thrown in jail for not paying off their loans yet um but they they accrue interest and its problem um you know i think that trying to be too commercial with your art too soon can totally ruin you know your whole body of work and where you're going i think i don't know i got to think about it more and i don't have already a good ready answer i just think it's something that's facing people i can understand that yeah yes sir so since you deal with people that are probably a little further down the road in some sense is there a particular kind of like i guess i have a blended career and i'm just wondering if a lot of the artists contact you have that sort of mixed income base and sort of you know division of labor during the course of the day that's an interesting question the question is about multiple sources of income some of which are art related and some are not and i have a couple thoughts you know when the swedes the vikings would sail to foreign lands to conduct battle and they'd land on foreign soil they'd burn their ships there was no going back you succeeded or you died and as an artist i think if those are your two choices success is pretty likely and i've never been in that position where i've had to you know burn or not burn my ships so i share the parable but i don't know that i endorse it i also don't know i think it's different for different folks um whether having a not related art job and i'm not art you know what i mean where you have a job that's not art related got it um is that better than having i mean like um or is it better to be an art professor and then try and get studio time in you know when you're not when you're not professing when you're not teaching um and i've seen both scenarios succeed and i've seen both scenarios fail my concern is that if you are i mean i think you've got to be spending at least 20 hours a week making art to you know to have a chance at an art career you know i think you could get it down less sometimes but it should be closer to 20 more often and that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for going out and going to openings growing your community you know talking to an art gal walking into an art gallery and going nice show thanks you know the objective with trying to find a gallery is to get the dealer to ask you questions and to grow a relationship before you say here my image is do me you know you want you want to grow that relationship and i don't know that if you're spending half of your time with a straight job so to speak that you have enough time to do these other kinds of things okay now so it depends you know and maybe it works you know for some people the autonomy of having a straight job that pays them enough money to make the kind of art they want to make where they don't have to sell it but they can do what feels good for them is perfect you know but for some people who want to make art that makes money that takes care of them having this other career gets in the way so i i could see it going you know either kind of direction now one of the things that i've learned that i thought you might be asking is i've always for years maintained that it's important to create a singular body of work and to work in paragraphs and chapters and to have sequential bodies of work and i was doing a webinar a few months ago with jason middlebrook and jason said no paul that's old school and he said it's much more important to be an interesting artist and i changed my mind so i think that to be an interesting artist interesting no but i mean a lot of people want to be able to make you know photographs and paintings or different kinds of directions or abstract images and something that's kind of narrative and um i would have argued that that wasn't so wise and at this point i would say you know as long as you are interesting and you can you know promote and focus on who you are put yourself out there it's okay to go either more than one direction simultaneously yeah what do you what is your opinion on the future of teaching art and what do you think about current graduate students who are pursuing a different career in teaching i get in trouble for this answer i'm going to try and say it well i use i mean here i am teaching in this course and i used to long ago be a teacher and i feel like if you want to teach gangbusters do it and do it well if you were teaching out of necessity don't do it the necessity being this is the only thing i can make money at you know i mean if necessity is i love teaching i want to do it it's necessary for me to do that that's great but i don't think people should teach if they don't want to teach i think they should be making art and focusing on that i think it's frequently difficult to teach and deal with all those aesthetics and conveying information let's have a general knowledge and then go back into the studio and focus singularly on your own particular vision i think that's challenging okay about the future of teaching art you know i don't know i find it so many art schools are business factories and they are just as much a business as ibm and they pontificate about philosophy that i frequently find irrelevant and that doesn't deal with students coming from themselves and knowing who they are i feel like offering a doctorate in studio art is absurd and there are schools in the world that are doing that i find that just a way to make money to keep students around longer and i don't believe that it makes them a better artist you know the question you're not asking i think is should i go to graduate school arts graduate school and my sense is it's a if you can afford it it's a great place and time to focus on your own art without worrying too much about the debt that you're going to incur and you know being able to just dive into yourself and your art and grow your community that's really important but if you're not doing those two things the art graduate you know a master's degree in art isn't very valuable and um i don't find it particularly necessary i don't think unless you're going to be teaching many people of all the art dealers that i've spoken to and myself included that i didn't care and they don't care if their artists do or don't have a master's degree you know under 10 care no i gotta pick somebody else back there similar sort of question i've seen a lot of mfa's produce stuff that i think is frankly direct and i've seen other people without the formal education produce very fine arts sometimes after years of studying painting thinking and visiting galleries etc how important do you think an actual formal art education is not i think it depends on the person i just finished reading this fabulous article in wired magazine about a college maybe even high school dropout who's just design invented designed and sailed the world's fastest sailboat he got the thing up to in like a 30 minute hour breeze the sailboat went 75 miles an hour you know and nobody previously had ever gone over 50 knots and you know it just came from tinkering in the backyard for his whole life you know and being on the beach and playing with water and stuff like i mean you know so much of what makes an artist significant is their life experiences more so than their formal education and to an extent i think i fear a formal education reduces life experiences i'm going to go back to frida kahlo what would have happened to her art career if she'd never been in a trolley bus accident that drove the railing through her pelvis and you know prevented her from ever having children and having to be you know have so many surgeries how different would her life have been if she had just grown up a happy little mexican kid you know it's impossible to know but a lot of it comes from those powerful life experiences yeah i used to really enjoy coming to your gallery thank you and um why did you continue and the second half of my question is what do you think the future of galleries is for artists to a large extent i i think i outgrew my audience i got really interested in art that plugged in and new media and computers and video art and things like that and so like in 2002 i started showing a fair amount of that stuff and there was way too many people that came in the gallery and said paul great show where's the art and you know and it was really hard to sell you know like dvds and at that time and you'd have to sell a whole projection system or this flat screen etc sell things to museums they go what if dvds aren't going to be around we'd rather have this on a hard drive you know so you'd make that but there was an awful lot of there's too much educating going on and you know the people's art i could sell i didn't love as much as the people's heart i couldn't sell so it became a problem for me and i've been doing it long enough i don't know what the future of galleries is i think it's getting more polarized i think more and more artists many artists don't need galleries you know because of the internet they can communicate and have correspondence and grow their own audience you know but if an artist wants to get pretty far in their career i think they do need a gallery you know you probably want an art gallery that shows an art fair so that because at art fairs there's more curators are going to see your work than you know in 10 years of having the art just in your studio if curators are going to see it you're going to have more opportunity for museum exposure you know which is i think what a lot of artists are really after and they feel like that you know is a stamp of approval on their career and stands to augment that so i think at the higher end you're definitely going to have galleries i think the way galleries work on the lower end of the middle end and representing artists is probably going to change you're going to have you know more relationships for lack of a better term of expediency where i'll do this show i'll work with the art for six months after that our relationship is over but we can renew it if we want to i mean i think a lot of this is attributable to the influence of the internet anybody else well cool i've enjoyed talking to you i appreciate your questions thank you all very much

Channel: Klein Artist Works

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Keywords: Paul Klein, Successful Artist, Art Coach, Make Money on my Art, $ Art

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Length: 39min 13sec (2353 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2013