Even more so in his point 6. He writes “What you see in the biographies of great artists, great writers, great anything is that they are good at figuring out where the vectors align.” Which is just plainly and absolutely not true. There were plenty of people who we now recognise as “great artist” who absolutely could not figure out where the “incentive vectors align”. Thus they lived in abject poverty, or needed to support themselves from something other than their art. But if your definition of “great art” is that it is commercially succesfull then of course what you will find that the “great artist” are all like good businesman. But that doesn’t tell you about what it take to be an artist, just only what you value.
Albert-László Barabás, a physicist, created a network map that can predict an artist's future success based on their early network connections. His work outlines two key "laws of success":
- Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success. This highlights the importance of networks when objective measures of quality are difficult to establish.
- Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded. This indicates that small differences in quality can lead to large disparities in success due to the amplifying power of social networks
Barabási's model can predict an artist's career success with surprising accuracy based on the venues of their first five exhibitions. This model underscores the importance of early connections and the venues where an artist exhibits their work, which can significantly influence their long-term success4.
The first five venues where an artist exhibits isn't wholly based on their social networks, but also tells you how excited the art world is about their work. Since attitudes about the work or the artist are key factors in establishing what their early network is, I don't see how you can conclude that the work and the artist are irrelevant, but the network is relevant.
I.e. some portion of “network success strategy” is actually downstream of talent success.
When you say it can "predict an artist's career success", to a 1st approximation, that means it can predict which artists' work will sell for over 10x its current price in a dozen years.
Is it really that easy to make money in the art market?
While the author doesn't explicitly define what is "great", I 100% believed that what it is defined as. That "great" is being commercially successful.
The article is premised around running a non-profit art gallery in a struggling municipality. That he did a good job by "helping grow the revenues"[0]. He needed money for his new baby and couldn't afford to lose a job[1]
It is a modern day art gallery. These things are businesses first - to support their own operations and then to help artist support themselves and their work.
So yes, "great" art IS art that sells.
Now, what sells is highly highly subjective, and a very large part of that sales process is making the customer _feel good_ about their purchase. And I think this is where you disagree - that there is a higher, objective reality around good vs great art. And for so much art, there really isn't.
[0] "I started was the inflection point when the revenue, which had been shrinking or muddling for 5 years, began growing again"
[1] "since I knew I couldn’t afford to quit anytime soon with the baby and all"
I understand that is his definition, but then talk about that. Instead of saying that the exhibition ended up "mediocre" say that "ticket sales were lower than expected" or "sold less paintings than we hoped for", or "didn't bring in anybody".
Because as is he just writes "after weeks of this you end up with something mediocre" and "predict which exhibitions would end up great". That is very vibes based. Did he just not enjoy those exhibitions? Or is it tied to something objective outside of his head? (such as revenue, or crowd size, or critical acclaim) The first is not interesting, the second is.
> That he did a good job by "helping grow the revenues"[0].
Or did not do a good job. Base on the very sentence you quote which starts "It helped that the year I started ...". Doesn't give me the impression that even the author believes it is all their doing. Very easily someone could write the same story from a differed perspective "we hired a guy to run the café, but he was way too distracted to keep consistently at it. First he ruffled some feathers with the board then he mellowed out so we kept him around. He pooh-poohed artist who was not as responsive in electronic communication as he would have liked, but we told him softly that is not his decision and to shut it. At the end he was only showing up sporadically and then left to write or something." We only have his world on it and even based on that his track record is less than stelar.
Was Van Gogh a great artist because at some point in the future his works are among the most expensive ones ever sold sold? Or was he a bad artist, that turned great after his death when the market favored him more?
If it is the former, every artist could potentially sell well in the remaining time of human civilization — how far in the future do you draw the line?
If it is the latter then we get the paradoxical situation, that the same work can be both great and bad depending on the observers time reference. So the same painting is bad, until someone "discovers" it and manages ro produce economic hype around it.
As someone with a MA of art who has probably seen more exhibitions than most people on this site (including the last 5 Biennales and the last 3 Documentas) my guess is: great art is great even before it is commercially successful.
Whether it then turns out to be economically successful as well (and when) hinges on many different factors, like the Zeitgeist, pure chance, where it was exhibited or next to what it was exhibited, how the galerist treats the work, how much the artist puts on the market, how the market feels at the time when it is shown etc.
The "greatness" of the work is only a very small factor in the economic success it has, some would even argue it doesn't matter as much as one would think.
But all of that matters on how we define "great". If you are a rich collector that sees art as an investment it is just about the numbers, then great art is only art that you have and that sells for more than you bought it. You'd define it differently depending on who you are: artist, art historian, galerist, lay person, crafts person, journalist, copyright lawyer, restaurator, ..
That's quite a niche view.
In fact art is an overlap of many different kinds of markets selling to many different kinds of customers - from people buying phone wallpapers online, to tourists buying souvenirs on holiday, to oligarchs laundering money through prestige purchases.
And many others.
A community gallery is going to intersect with a couple of those, but not all of them. Sustainable funding is a goal, but maximising income isn't.
Financial success doesn't sane wash narcissistic entitlement, of which there is plenty outside of the arts.
There's one guy where I live, whom I tried to help out several times. I would invest lots of effort handling the practical stuff: flyers, text, web site, etc. Little thanks, because it was his due. Then he would have a new idea, change direction, and it was all for nothing.
Part of Gage Art Academy's mission is to create working artists. Students learn about (and struggle with) how to get paid. Stuff like how to price their works, balancing one's own artistic expression with making stuff that sells, how to pull off an exhibit, etc.
I strongly assumed that bit was about him predicting whether each exhibition would be "great" from the gallery's perspective - in terms of attendance or revenue or whatever metrics they used. It's not spelled out, but since the whole piece is about him focusing on the business and ops side of things, that bit probably was as well.
I don't think this is particularly true anymore. Most of the canonical artists of the past century were successful during their lifetimes. The ones who weren't either died tragically young (e.g. Basquiat), or didn't care for exposure much at all (e.g. Hilma af Kint).
1. It's became harder to distinguish quality. Artist training has been streamlined, so technical excellence (which is easier to evaluate) isn't novel anymore. So that means determining quality of art now depends on more difficult to evaluate criteria.
2. Art moves faster now, so it's harder to have an influence on the art world (one of the ways an artist becomes famous) posthumously, because by then the art world has probably moved on from the state where the art would have impact.
3. We're just better at discovering artists. E.g., low-barrier to entry for digital distribution means it's easier for artists to find an audience.
Any thoughts?
I take it the author means "great" as in "successful".
It’s defined implicitly in this blog as commercially successful within the timeframe I had to sell their art. Which is a perfectly defensible definition, but should be explicit so people know what argument they’re hearing.
A prerequisite to be considered a great artist is that the artist master a "craft" to perfection be it painting, drawing, sculpting, or something complete different like Burial who created one of the most important electronic album using the basic audio-editing software Sound Forge.
There's certainly an element of it but it's gotten very meta and abstract these days.
What is the craft in a dirty bath tub or a robot endlessly sweeping liquid?
Better yet what's the craft in a white canvas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invisible_artworks
I'm actually not denying there's art here, sometimes I "get it" but the art of today has gotten very conceptual and meta.
I see similar issues with music - where the need to be accessible vs original are pit against each other. Da Vinci, Monet, Turner, Picasso - the art is fairly accessible. Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Holst ditto.
But who will be remembered as being accessible and "serious" from our generation in music? Probably John Williams - a film composer primarily. I'm not dissing composers, one of my favourites of all time is Nobuo Uematsu but I am not sure what is art anymore. I wonder if art can only emerge with hindsight. What did it feel like to be in the present when people like Chopin and Liszt were in their heyday while Delacroix and Moreau were painting. Or when Ravel and Debussy were writing impressionistic music alongside Monet and Manet painting
On the other hand maybe this is some art thing I’m too far away from to understand? Maybe really good artists to work with never need more than twenty minutes of deep focus at a time for anything?
On the other hand, without warning going dark for 4 work day hours a few days before exhibition would look terrible if any serious question came up.
So I don't think it's literally responding within the hour, but it comes pretty dang close. You have to keep in mind that being an artist creating art and being an artist setting up an exhibition are basically two different jobs and if you end up doing them in parallel at the same time, that's your problem right there.
And what kind of question needs to be answered that fast, but wasn't important enough to be asked several days earlier? My feeling is that there should be very few such questions, few enough that each artist can safely take half a day if they get one.
What is the difference if you answer in 10 minutes, 6 hours or 24 hours? Are you competing on time of response so if you're fast you're getting the deal?
If you read and digest the article, the point is not to create a litmus test based on time-to-response, it's to recognize there are a lot of people to talk a big game but are unserious about achieving shared goals.
If an artist is not responsive because they are so serious about their creative process that they don't have time to respond to a gallery doing an exhibition than maybe that's the right thing for what they are serious about, but it does jack shit for the gallery staffer who is serious about creating an exhibition.
They work for a a year, or maybe several, then there are sales to be had over the corse of a month or so. The work they are selling is finished.
Would you work on something for years, and then when the time comes to maybe sell it — not answer the phone?
but, i took it a little more broadly than it was actually specified: people who are not great about communicating or make it hard for you to work with them at the outset will probably continue to be like that throughout the entirety of your working relationship.
i watch some videos on the Tested youtube channel, where the host is Adam Savage, who was one of the hosts/creators of the MythBusters tv show, and he often talks about this point, and how he learned it working with Jamie Hyneman early on in his career where they would take clients, and Jamie explained this principal.
In the real world I just prefer to interact with people who prioritise me over other things and most people are the same.
IE, focus more on qualities like: Asking to move a wall at the last minute, needing a life counselor...
Once you understand people are very different, the whole story turns into setting teams up such that the right people are in the right role. Ofcourse this is hard to pull off, so there is always drama in any group.
In other words it’s easy to make a difference as a high performer in a low performance organization.
Again not detracting from this persons achievements, I just don’t think these most of these observations apply in high performIng organizations
At least if you're okay with being the only person with any ambition. Personally I have to flee from those environments.
If you don't have access to high performing institutions for whatever reason, this is how you can leverage a position in a low performing institution to achieve a lot of success.
And yet, the big takeaway for me is that to be a high performer it isn’t enough to A) know what needs to be done, or B) be able to do it well. The key is C) figuring out the incentive landscape.
His story of carving out his own job only to find he had no support from the board is what I’ve tried before. In my low performing organization, I thought I could be a high performer by knowing what needed to be done and doing it well. Everybody I directly worked with loved me and thought I was highly effective, but I never made any lasting change like this author. I didn’t understand the need to skip way up the levels until I was already burnt out.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20240816150009/https://www.henri...
These authors have this habit of reflecting on their live experiences and trying to make some sense out of them (a time honed and worthy pursuit!), but then moving into thought leader / self help / linkedin territory by making every other sentence an imperative in second person person singular.
A sentence like —
The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.
Could be
The context is smarter than me. It holds more nuance and information than I can fit in my head. I keep telling myself to collaborate with it.
And it wouldn’t annoy me half as much. It would feel as if a peer wants to share experiences with me, whereas now I feel like I’m being shouted at by a middle manager.
If you love his content please consider chipping in to his substack to help keep these great pieces coming out instead of linking the archive. It’s why he was working at the gallery in the first place instead of writing full time.
1) Use scientific terms (e.g. vector fields, waves resonance) 2) Cite tech influencers (e.g. Sholto Douglas, Tyler Cowen) 3) Make the subject an abstract novel field that most developers or tech folk don't really pay attention and use #1 and #2 to make it relevant
I guess this approach worked, since it allowed the author to go on writing full time in Denmark (HCoL), which is an achievement these days.
This seems a very narrow if not conformist view of art.
Artists doing graffiti, participating in hobby groups, state funded projects, discovered by later generations, etc - they don’t care about making viewers feel good about funding; and yet their art can very much make the world a better place.
You mention state funded projects, but the funding has to come from somewhere else. What the author is saying is this: it takes money to run a gallery (or a museum, for that matter), therefore even if it is not the primary objective, we should strive to keep the money flowing so that we can make have better galleries/museums.
Galleries are necessarily behind the curve because they're businesses and have to stay afloat. You typically don't go to a gallery to see something new, but to see the works of an already established artist.
Meanwhile interesting, innovative art happens outside of galleries, but you have to look for it, as there's an oversupply of aspiring artists.
Bottom line is you can't base the whole art scene on the opinions of art galleries, as they play it safe and art is strictly about the opposite.
The “keep the money flowing” approach distracts from making art and leads to making art that sells well. Do we really want that to dominate galleries/museums?
[1]: “American taxpayers concur, with 55% supporting increasing federal investment in the arts, 57% supporting state government funding for the arts and 58% supporting local government funding for the arts” https://www.delawareartsalliance.org/government-funding-arts...
That said, the most interesting lessons are in the first and sixth (the 2nd 6th, the actual 6th) item: How to do a better/more widely scoped job than what you got hired for (by understanding how interests, incentives and responsibilities align in an org) and the fact that in most places, most people are not serious (meaning they tend to not go deeper, look at the big picture, etc.).
This reminded me of the part in Good to Great where one company's success was attributed to setting up a steel factory in a agriculture-heavy area, where the residents were farmers who were already predisposed to working hard.
I'm curious if, on the flip side, anyone has any strategies for "convincing someone to measure up" as the author puts it.
As with all things, it depends, but it seems to me that in such places you can find some of the most authentic and driven people out there. And it's probably quite fun to work with them.
Also like engineers, the best make far better decisions, or are far better craftsmen, or both.
I have found the most authentic folks are the low-key ones that have a booth at an arts festival or some other show.
I've been to galleries, and thought the vibe was really un-authentic. maybe I've been to the dysfunctional ones. Maybe that it is that galleries are more about something else than the art, more meta. (and they sold art not like this community gallery)
Don't know the reality of museums.
Are you saying that galleries usually don't last very long and tend to be commercial failures?
*where i am, any engineer (of any type) that can't speak English, is classed as an idiot (and probably benefitted from nepotistic [mal-] practices).
Maybe these artists were put out by the odd relationship of corresponding with the guy who runs the coffee stand for their show? He strikes me as the kind of person who needs to be involved in everything, but doesn't really care about anything. Huge ego and constantly judging everyone around him. He would make an excellent manager in corporate america.
I especially enjoy the little math&physics section, where he introduces few metaphors that are never explained or used.
I really hope that this a parody. It's kinda too sad if it's not.
My wife reorganized the after-school program for our elementary school, got it on an upward trajectory, got grants and some money in the bank to pay for exceptional bills. And left, without choosing a successor.
Of course, the staff blew through the savings instantly, because they didn't know the budget or the purpose of having some margin for safety. Had to raise rates and reduce hours and all the bad things, just to keep going. All the time thinking it wasn't their fault, just the bad old world that didn't want to give them money for free to blow on their whims.
I suspect Henrik missed the more important part of that lesson: Sometimes you have no choice but to work with someone who's difficult.
Why? To be quite frank, finding someone to work with is difficult, too. As Henrik states:
> I was the only person who applied for the job at the gallery
I suspect that, if the gallery chose to fire the artists that Henrik didn't like working with, there would be no art to show; and thus no gallery.
The way to solve that would be for Henrik to be more involved in choosing the artists; and for the gallery to cast a wider net when searching for artists. That implies a sense of exclusivity that may or may not be part of the gallery's core mission.
That's not to say that all amateur artists are self-centered; I met plenty of up and coming artists that felt like wizened "old souls" without ego, and playful at heart. I think they were just great artists in the making!
Even though it wasn't the most high paying job, it was really fun being part of the visual art heartbeat in a city.
In essence the task-oriented leading was switched to area-of-responsibility leading. That is, instead of giving a list of tasks to complete by the author, an AoR was given, and all tasks initially verified, then allowed to move forward as the author saw it fit. It is task-oriented vs. AoR-Oriented leadership.
Basically, in large part this worked because of the job context and the leadership of the boss.
Galleries bet on a few Artists among many just like YCombinator bets on a few startups every years hoping for the best.
Art as a Business: Selling art is predominantly a business, and, frankly, quality often doesn't play the leading role. Market dynamics, branding, and influence have a much stronger impact on an artist’s commercial success. Many buyers lack a refined taste for art but are guided by curators, galleries, or social trends to invest in one artist over another. This is particularly true outside the realm of blue-chip artists like Picasso, van Gogh, or Bacon, where established market signals guide decisions.
Theory and Practice: while I love the theoretical discussions around art (e.g. Walter Benjamin) I find these ideas largely irrelevant to the business side of the art market. Theory has its place in academia and criticism, but it often feels disconnected from the pragmatic realities of selling and promoting art.
If you're interested in understanding how the art world operates, I highly recommend visiting Art Basel or similar art fairs. These events showcase the intersection of commerce, curation, and culture, providing a fascinating snapshot of the art market's priorities and trends. I personally did my own art intervention with technology and received known artists who wanted to participated in the experiment and beyond the project originality it would not work in other contexts without some validation (being in a space in Wynwood [1]).
On dealing with people (in his case, artists): "if...someone isn't measuring up, I have no idea how to convince them to do so. So I look for people [who do]." I.e., don't waste your time on people who are "demanding or confused or slow at answering their email".
Lots of other interesting points!
Before Covid, everyone on LinkedIn was bombarded with job offers as and soon as they created an account and put anything IT related on it.
I was a php dev. Sort of the Wild West over here
So he persuaded unpaid volunteers to do the work he was being paid to do?
Nobody has a problem with this?
Almost.
This is something a lot of people don't appreciate about a modern constitutional monarchy with a functioning democracy: The modern role of royalty.
In the US, (I'm American,) we don't have events like this. Why? Elected officials (the President, a governor, mayor, ect,) has to perform these roles. They can't do these as often because they (elected officials) are busy running the country / state / city, trying to get reelected, or helping someone else get reelected.
When these events happen in the US, they are always inherently political. You always have an opinion of the leader. Even when event isn't supposed to be political, there's always a remark or an attempt to schmooze to get you to vote some way.
In this case, my understanding is that the King's primary role is an apolitical (because he's not elected) representation of the government and culture. We (in the US) simply don't have this. We get movie stars and Donald Trump.
I'm not trying to say that one form of government is better than the other: There are always people who are power hungry seeking power, and there are always people who are wealth hungry trying to manipulate the system. What I'm trying to do is point out that Henrik's system (constitutional monarchy) has its own advantages.
getting through that first section makes me want to take nothing this guy says seriously. the insanity of it...
