We love to buy, but hate being sold to.

We want to buy, but somewhere in our hearts lives a suspicion that “they” are out to sell us a tonic of watered-down beetle juice.

The manipulative salesman or charlatan palm reader takes up a lot of space in our buy/sell story.

I get it.

I drank the Love Buy/Hate Sell Kool-aid many times.

So I don’t know why it should surprise me when…

First, there was the website hurdle. And now, even though I run into artists all the time who either don’t have a website, or have a single page they haven’t updated in a couple of years, everyone understands websites are the norm.

“Home” isn’t a metaphor anymore.

Then blogs hit the Internet pay dirt. And as with websites, blog chaos reigned for a while: what were you suppose to write? Who was your audience: other artists or your hoped-for collectors? Were blogs worth the time and effort? How could you monetize them? Should you monetize them?

Right on the blog heels…

I’m putting telesummit material together and want to be sure I hit the mark for you!

“If you could ask a major collector your top 3 questions, what would they be?”

You can place your questions in the comments section below here on the post.

Geoffrey Gorman's "Creatures of Curiosity"

I spent a grand spring day at SOFA NY (it poured!), hobnobbing around with Geoffrey Gorman, attending a lecture by Michael Petry, the director of MOCA London on his new book The Art of Not Making, and touring all the gorgeous artwork in the two dozen gallery booths. This was a high end New York show with a clientele to match.

But for the life of me, I couldn’t keep my coaching hat off (drives my family nuts too). It was the very first booth I stepped into–because there were these stunning glass sculptures of Martin Rosol’s that simply took my breath away; I loved the clean, geometric lines, just my cup of tea–and of course I wanted to…

I have a lot of material in my smARTist library, but until this  year, Art Fairs were not high on my list.

All that changed when I met Richard Rothbard – artist, gallery owner, and art fair producer – at a CODA conference in Savannah, GA, where I was speaking this last spring.

Besides hosting CODA Conference attendees at his Savannah Gallery, Richard treated me to a very non-Southern meal of fantastic sushi and brought me on board for his Contemporary Art Fair NYC, a sister show to his American Craft Fair NYC.

I was fascinated by Richard’s enthusiasm for bringing artists to NYC at a price they could afford – since most high-end venue Art Fairs are truly exorbitant. But more than that, it occurred to me that Richard was carrying around a wealth of information on Art Fairs.

I realized, in short order, that no one had thought to…

I’ve been talking to a lot of artists lately in a series of strategy sessions, and I’m watching a pattern replicate itself like an out-of-control virus.

I’ve come to call it the Business Bitters–that mouth puckering contrast to the sweet taste of creative flow.

The story is simple and timeless: artist paints or sculpts or weaves or throws or composes, experiencing a kind of…

Many artists I’ve worked with are often caught in a common trap, one that seems to plague artists at a particular point in their careers…

Once upon a time, an artist I was working with spent a long time priming and polishing her artist statement for a very serious studio exhibition she was planning in Boston.

She had been working for over a year on a series of oil paintings that had taken her in new directions, and she was attending to every detail of the exhibit with loving care.

Her large, abstract work was engaging on its own. But when you got a chance to read about her process and her thoughts as she painted, the work took on an even larger presence.

Part of my job was to coach her on how to present her artist statement so it reflected the same attention to detail that her art did.

But, as the saying goes…you can lead a horse to water…