Joseph Jaffe

As a work­ing clay artist for 15 years one of the most frus­trat­ing and chal­leng­ing aspects of being a work­ing artist was the ran­dom nature of the pub­lic buy­ing cycle, the huge lack of under­stand­ing of the buy­ing pub­lic about the value of art, and the rel­a­tive lack of tools avail­able to effect my des­tiny, and hence my abil­ity to con­tinue mak­ing my art. All of this cou­pled with the unpre­dictable and rather arbi­trary nature of jury­ing into a show had the mak­ings of seri­ous feel­ings of not know­ing how to take some level of control.

Dur­ing those days artists had lit­tle in the way of avenues or chan­nels to con­nect to their buy­ers and for their buy­ers to con­nect to them. What engage­ment there was basi­cally con­sisted of money chang­ing hands rein­forc­ing the com­modi­ti­za­tion of art. Sales for the most part were the result of ran­dom con­sumer behav­ior inten­si­fied by the fail­ure of tra­di­tional mar­ket research tools avail­able to retail out­lets that could use them to iden­tify and mar­ket to a par­tic­u­lar niche of buyers.

The poten­tial of the inter­net as we know it now was not yet yet avail­able. Instead it was seen as lit­tle more than an elec­tronic ver­sion of tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing. E-mail as a communication/stay– in-touch tool was yet to be real­ized. To fur­ther com­pli­cate mat­ters the nomadic nature of work­ing artists fol­low­ing the art fair cir­cuit had few tools to iden­tify and reli­ably stay in touch with their tribe of fol­low­ers wher­ever they went.