You don’t let a few setbacks sour you on the entire game. You don’t go out to the playing field assuming that your team will lose. Your Mindset is your Worst Competitionīusiness is a competition, just like sports. Remember, you will get out of your art business what you put into it.

Focus on exploring the intersection between your own artist identity and what your audience of collectors wants to buy. Solution: Seek to become a better business person all around by studying basic business practices and applying them to your desire to sell your art. The ones who treat it like a real business do far better. But it makes sense because the survey also revealed artists spend about an hour on the business aspects of the creative practice. Remember that the survey mentioned above? Creative Independent confirmed that most artists only make 10% of their money from their art practice.

You will also need to commit substantial time to market, promote and sell, just like any other business owner. Setting up a website does not transform you into an instant super salesperson. As you progress, you must come to understand your audience well enough to create art or other products that they want. You must understand your own artist identity well enough to figure out how to attract an audience of collectors. If you have difficulty selling your art in a regular brick-and-mortar shop, you will have the same obstacles selling your work online. Realizing that selling your art is a business is much more than accepting you will have to do some administrative tasks like creating a website and committing to accounting tasks. This type of thinking undermines your efforts. Many artists are resistant to thinking of their art practice as a bonafide business as if it somehow demeans the meaning of the art itself. The moment you decide to sell your artwork, you’ve decided to start an art business. Lets talk about each of these obstacles, and what to do about them so that you can protect your art business from failure: Not Treating it Like a Business It’s rarely one small thing, but a blend of these top reasons: So you might be wondering why do so many artists fail at the business of art?Īrtists usually fail at business due to a combination of factors. In a survey conducted by Creative Independent, nearly half of artists attribute less than 10 percent of their income to their art practice, as opposed to just 17 percent who make 75 to 100 percent of their money off their art. The statistics for artists are just as grim. (Source: US Small Business Administration) About half succumb to business failure within five years. In the United States, about twenty percent of business startups fail in the first year.

There is an elephant in the art business room.

How to survive and prosper as an artist