Artistic Skill, A Blessing or a Curse?

 I got this Robert Genn Newsletter. Read it, then read my response. which I didn't send to him. He doesn't encourage comments and this is such a great topic.

Not your father's Oldsmobile
 May 22, 2012
 Dear Linda,
 Remember those sad children's faces with big, misty eyes? If you don't, you weren't around in the late fifties when they were hung on a lot of livingroom walls. Nowadays, this sort of painting has been sent to the rumpus room or the dustbin. Remember those juicy, over-the-mantle Parisian street scenes? What about those black velvets? Debuted in high-end galleries in the early sixties, black velvets made their exit marked down to $29.95 in humiliating supermarket parking lots.
 Fashions come and fashions go. One generation doesn't always want what the former generation coveted. It's an action-reaction syndrome and, considering human nature, it's inevitable.
 Music is an example. Statistics show that kids tend to go for any music that's different than what their folks like. My son Dave is a rocker. One day I asked him what he thought was the essential quality of Teen Rock. "Anything that parents can hate," said Dave, only he used more colourful terms.
 The situation is compounded by each generation's renewed need to appear smart and not to be like the fogey-generation behind. Dad may drive a dinosaur gas-guzzler, but junior needs to look good in a light-footprint sipper. Who knows, the next generation might feel smart in bulletproof pickups. Some already do.
 The "Not your father's Oldsmobile" campaign failed because it was still an Oldsmobile.
 The secondary art market is loaded with, "What goes around comes around." The "What's next?" crowd tries to figure out what might be a smart investment. Woodblock prints, for example, can suddenly come out of the fifty dollar range into the fifty thousand dollar range.
The transformation often takes two generations. Recently, at an auctioneer's viewing day, I saw a couple of sad, misty-eyed kids staring out at me. The next day at the auction some discriminating connoisseur was the highest bidder.
 For those whose main sensitivity is money, name blinds judgment.
With the advent of the Internet, even regional and peripheral names can gain mystique. This may be the main megatrend happening in art right now. But art-market well-being is also governed by the liquidity-availability equation. Right now there's lots of availability and limited liquidity. Without reasonable money floating around, artists, too, can get sad and misty-eyed.
 Best regards,
 Robert

A painting I bought from an art gallery in Rome in 1969 while
on an art buying trip for our company.

The artist's name on the big teary eyed children’s paintings is  Margaret Keane, an American artist and an amazing business woman. We sold  a lot of her highly stylized paintings  in addition to European and Asian “oils”  (nothing on velvet)  in the sixties through the mid eighties. All the artists we carried painted to earn a living. They were production artists.

The best of production art came from Europe, Italy in particular.  And most of the artists that painted those oil paintings did so using a pseudonym.  They saved their birth names for their fine art that was marketed in  respectable European galleries. They made a living from their production painting while honing their skills in fine art. There was nothing shameful about producing  a lot of  similar landscapes or flowers or portraits. It put bread on the table and oils on the palette.

 But the fine art artists, on this side of the Atlantic,  were outraged. They cried  the public was being duped when no duping was done, only business.

Decorative art had been produced  for centuries. To this day, nobody knows which part of a Reuben was painted by Reuben or by one of the many artists who worked for him. Wall art was a product for sale and production within a reasonable time period was desirable. To speed things up,  artists formed workshops and hired on other artists. American artists, me included, stuck our nose up at artists who would sink so low to produce in bulk. Art was lofty didn't anybody know?  It wasn't a commodity. 

The Asian art market overtook the European market somewhere in the seventies. The Asian representatives would sell their artists'paintings for a lot less than the Eutropeans; so, the Asian market  became the new center for export. They didn’t paint English gardens or Paris street scenes  for over the mantle as well as the Europeans, but they did a pretty darn good job, good enough to fill the public's demand.  The “average Joe” liked having real oil  paintings in phenomenal wood frames, (Mexico was the best country for that at that time),  for a reasonable price hanging on their castle walls. He thought an authentic oil  was  much better than  a mass produced print, like a   poster. 

From what I have seen, production  paintings are still being sold in galleries. The artists producing these works have amazing skills and are prolific producers. Their dealers/agents are aggressive. I don't know whether the artists separate their production work  from their fine art work via changing their signature, but given the snobbishness of gallery owners and the American public, I would guess yes.

Volume sales is the way to make money in art like in everything else. That’s why many of us go into prints. The glicee print, from what I read in Wikipedia,  is  the best reproduction around; all of the prints come out identical.  A digital reproduction of original art is done on high quality substrates, with superior ink-jet printers and color correction. Artists often oversee the production of the prints of their work and approve it before it's brought to market.  Editions consist of about 1000 pieces; that's quite a lot considering that prior to digital print reproduction, print editions were a hundred to two hundred.  I have no idea, but wonder, if these digital editions are limited.  With no plates to destroy after printing , as in the old days, how many times are artists reproducing the same original?  Are there any rules about this? I didn't see that information.

I find all of this information incredibly sad. The truth is as I've always known. I have a skill that will never support me or even cover my supplies.  My sales are erratic, consequently, I am not making money regularly from making art.  Could it be I'm not really an artist? Am I just a hobbiest? The IRS thinks so.

Margaret Keane was a damn good artist and one smart cookie in the fifties. Google her biography. Take a look at what she did with one slick idea. I think she's amazing. Reese Witherspoon is going to play her in an upcoming film, Big Eyes.

NOTE:

The painting you see here, to break up all this text, was done by an Italian artist who painted his way  up the ladder and into a gallery stable in Rome, where he is still represented.  We bought it on one of our buying trips to Italy in 1969.  I would have bought two of his pieces, but he was getting ready for a one man show and didn't want to part with another.  I just liked this lady sitting up in her bed observing the world go round  and him for being so candid in our discussion of art, artists and making a living with this skill that is as much a curse as it is a blessing. On one hand, we are gifted with an appreciable talent, On the other hand, that talent is useless...unless wake up and smell the coffee.  Art is a business and it always has been.

I would recommend Genn's newsletter. It makes you think.