One of my Facebook friends recently asked me how important it is for an artist to market their work.

I believe it is as important to have somebody who loves your work and talks about it, as it is for you to make it.  Otherwise, it’s a song in the forest that’s never heard.

The debate is:  How much time does an artist spend fawning over potential buyers, explaining what they’re doing and all the other bullshit that goes along with the sale of art...

I believe that sort of thing is best left to people other than the artist.  But the artist very often has to be there, playing the role of what I call “the pet horse,” prancing around, talking to people and posing during the shows...

But if you do that all the time, then where’s the time for making art?  Artists are the people who put in the hours painting the canvas, taking the photograph, designing the buildings, or whatever.

What if the great inventors of the world—the Edisons, the Salks, the Fords—went around dreaming all the time, telling everybody how great they were, instead of putting in the long and tedious hours of thought and experimentation?  We’d have plenty of bullshit in the world, but we wouldn’t have a lot of progress.

There is a fine line that artists have to walk when they determine how much time they spend making their art and how much time they spend dancing with a gallery owner and a collector.  We are all different.  That line cannot be discerned by anybody else but the artist.

A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, but drinking a barrel of it will probably kill you.

Matt