So, I usually pass these things by. You know how it goes, The ad sounds wonderful but then you listen to 30 minutes of sales pitch with possibly 3% actual information. Or else you get your email spammed forever, 15 times a day. It basically steals 10 minutes of your time every day deleting stuff… You unsubscribe and curse the greedy b@$+@rd$. We’ve all been there right?
But in a weak moment I clicked on an ad for a free webinar about the art world by Brainard Carey. It said free, so why not?
I was SO pleasantly surprised! I am telling you this as a real person – I don’t know this guy from Adam. I am not getting a kick-back or anything.
Firstly, at the webinar time, I was sound asleep on my sofa. I had been up since 3AM working on releasing 2 new fabric designs and making some new album covers for my FB and Pinterest, so 1PM started to feel like 5PM and I crashed hard. I woke up at around 4, totally forgetting I signed up for the dang thing.
I rolled over to the computer to get back to work and saw the reminder in my email…Damn! I missed it! Oh well. But there, in the email, was a link to the whole webinar on YouTube! Awesome! I settled in to watch, fully expecting it to give little drips and drabs of actual information between some hard sell…it WASN’T. It was a full hour of really GOOD information with a sales pitch for his classes at the end. I don’t fault the guy for trying to sell something. We all need to make a living. He’s not Mother Theresa. But it was proportional. It was a reasonable amount, and the sales pitch was interspersed with a Q & A from the audience.
And yeah, he did that thing where they say it normally costs 20 million dollars, but for a limited time… I don’t fault him that either, I guess that’s some tried and true sales technique, even though I roll my eyes a little.
But the information was real and very good. It went into how to approach art galleries and I could immediately see why I have been failing. I am going to go out and try a new way tomorrow. It talked about the dreaded “Artist Statement” and I am rewriting mine tomorrow too.
He talked about museums and it all rang true, going by the experience I have been having with the folks at SAM. He talked about how to approach a museum and it was very much like how my exhibit idea went down with those SAM folks…To me it’s about building relationships.
So, basically, to all the struggling artists out there, I think it’s worth it to check this out, even If, like me, you can’t afford the classes at the end. It’s informative and painless.
Building Chinaberries 