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Authentically Human

By Bill 2 Comments
Small Businesses 2

Image by Angela Rad­ulescu via Flickr

What is authen­tic­ity? Is it being hon­est? is it really being per­son­able? Is it defined by inter­ac­tion or presence?

Artists I would argue are con­sid­ered authen­tic because of their pres­ence, because the nature of their work is hon­est and because they are human. But they can’t sur­vive by just show­ing up…they have to engage also. And therein lies the crux of the answer. Star­bucks or GM can have signs all over their stores adver­tis­ing how much they care about me and my deci­sions. But it means noth­ing if the GM sales per­son spends more time try­ing to upsell me than find­ing out what I truly want, or the barista doesn’t bother to know that I reg­u­larly show up and more impor­tantly what I buy.

This is why small busi­nesses, par­tic­u­larly  one to two per­son busi­nesses will be the lead­ers of the com­ing shifts and again why artists can be in that group lead­ing the way. We have all the pre­req­ui­sites, all we have to do is rec­og­nize and use them. Because of our face-to-face inter­ac­tions with our buy­ers we have a chance to model authen­tic­ity, to set the stan­dards and show how suc­cess­ful being authen­ti­cally human can make us.

And…because of our rather nomadic man­ner of con­duct­ing busi­ness we also can show that using today’s tools can only enhance authen­tic­ity. If we can show that we can develop and main­tain authen­tic rela­tion­ships with our fol­low­ers despite geo­graphic bar­ri­ers we will have knocked down the bar­ri­ers that so many have used to jus­tify their reluc­tance to engage. So remem­ber it is your human­ness that draws buy­ers to your booth or gallery and makes them will­ing to buy with­out sell­ing. Also remem­ber that your human­ness is the sum total of who you are and authen­ti­cally let­ting that out is the best way to stand out in the crowd. If your work doesn’t express who you are, your gallery doesn’t show your pas­sion or you leave the real you at home,  poten­tial buy­ers will see stear clear of you and most impor­tantly your buy­ers will turn into non-buyers.

 
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Comments

  1. TomasNo Gravatar says:
    January 27, 2009 at 4:33 pm

    Good post.
    Unfor­tu­nately, the pos­si­bil­ity of buy­ing with­out sell­ing looks like a dream to me.… Good Dream. It helps to endure all hard­ships and not to loose the human­ness — to locate one­self by the time­less val­ues in the mess of cur­rent mar­ket.
    I arranged a lot of exhi­bi­tions already and still receive warm feed­backs, but have no sale and thus am impo­tent to buy the oblig­a­tory art mate­ri­als at a moment.…
    The buy­ing with­out sell­ing looks fine but that belongs to the area of the des­tiny, I think. The artist can do a lit­tle hear — we either are blessed to meat our sup­port­ers or go through the test of the faith­ful­ness — as a say­ing goes, Time will show who was who

    Tomas´s last blog post..word­less reproach of a stump from underfoot

    Reply
  2. BillNo Gravatar says:
    January 27, 2009 at 5:00 pm

    Thanks for the com­ment Tomas I visit your blog reg­u­larly and love your work. When I talk about not sell­ing I am refer­ring to a dif­fer­ent approach than the tra­di­tional ones of that used to be so preva­lent and against which artists rebelled by stat­ing that their work “would sell itself”. Nei­ther of those approaches work any­more because peo­ple are long­ing for per­sonal con­nec­tions with those they pur­chase from.

    Hence, the need to net­work and build a fol­low­ing of not only buy­ers but also evan­ge­lists. Peo­ple do want art they just don’t know how to buy it and in many cases they need to be shown how it can fit into their lives. Few peo­ple can visu­al­ize how a paint­ing or other work will fit into their lives…that is where con­nec­tion comes in. The end result is less reliance on ran­dom sales and more on tar­geted, e.g. when you cre­ate buzz prior to a show you have that brings in ready buy­ers. They are ready because they know you, they have already estab­lished their rela­tion­ship with you and your work so the only deci­sion point is if you have what it is they may or may not be look­ing for.

    Your work reflects the deep metaphors of jour­ney and trans­for­ma­tion some­thing a lot of peo­ple are feel­ing today…you might want to start empha­siz­ing the trans­for­ma­tive nature of your work as well as the tran­quil­ity of the jour­ney inward that your work offers.

    Hang in there if I can help in any­way just drop me a note.

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