Here are the concluding four tips on how to prove the exception. Enjoy!
7. Become really available
You could act as if relating in the marketplace is a tremendously burdensome thing and make yourself only grudgingly available—for meetings, for interviews, for audience contact, and so on—or you could invite such interactions, make dates for coffee, accept any and all invitations to speak or be interviewed, and otherwise become really and readily available. Become a recluse after you are famous, not before. Yes, you need studio time; yes, you need time for all of the rest of your life, including time for your day job and your loved ones; and yet you must still find the time and the wherewithal to make yourself really available. Much of your competition will, primarily out of anxiety, stubbornly refuse to do this—you are free to make yourself more available than them and in that way prove the exception.
8. Create events and the occasional stunt
Create events like shows you curate. Create stunts, too. Occasional stunts may be necessary. A stunt is a splashy event created to produce publicity. It might be you shredding your unwanted paintings in a public place with the press alerted, it might be you attending your opening nude rather than dressed, it might be you marrying and divorcing another artist in a ceremony the two of you design to advertise your “marriage doesn’t work” suite of paintings. Most artists hate stunts. It is nevertheless worth your while to calmly think through your relationship to stunts. Who knows, you may actually have a stunt or two right up your sleeve that you would enjoy dropping on an unsuspecting public!
9. Angle for bigger outcomes
Keep your eyes peeled for bigger rather than smaller outcomes from the marketing and promoting work that you do. Convince a friendly gallery owner not to hang one or two of your paintings but to give you a whole show. Use your rhetorical skills and powers of persuasion to angle for that bigger outcome. Ask a friendly collector not only to take a look at your new body of work but also to throw an event in support of it. Use your charm and smarts to angle for this bigger outcome. Each time you think about attempting something, ask yourself, “What bigger outcome could I angle for with exactly the same amount of effort?”
10. Think globally
It is wonderful to be represented by the gallery down the street but it is unlikely, verging on impossible, that you can prove the exception if your field of vision is limited to your immediate neighborhood. What if the galleries most likely to be interested in you are scattered all over the world? Then you must search them out and reach out to them. It is excellent to fashion and maintain local relationships but to prove the exception you will need to make the world your oyster. Because of our contemporary technology this has never been easier; and while everyone is using that technology as a matter of course, you can prove the exception by taking that technological capability and harnessing it to build your reputation and your best life in the arts.