Open Studios Declared Success, Again

The Mis­sion Arts Foun­da­tion did a great job of get­ting the word out, but a lousy job of pick­ing a week­end. Mis­sion Open Stu­dios this year com­pet­ed with KFOG Kaboom on Sat­ur­day and Moth­er’s Day on Sun­day. After a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly busy start Fri­day, there was very low traf­fic on Sat­ur­day. That’s what hap­pens when you try to com­pete with a free con­cert and fire­works. Thank­ful­ly, Sun­day picked up the pace.

I did very well sales-wise, but it’s telling that the major­i­ty of my sales this time around were to oth­er artists tak­ing part in Open Stu­dios. There was a lot of barter going on, and I’m sure that’s the result of the low traf­fic Sat­ur­day. Not only do we start to won­der how we’re going to unload the work we’ve brought to sell, we have more time on our hands to look at the oth­er artists’ work when foot traf­fic is slow.

It’s not all about the sales. You could bring all the artists togeth­er for one day and close the stu­dios to the pub­lic and it would be a won­der­ful event. From time to time I get the chance to talk about my work with oth­er artists, exchange ideas and resources, and gen­er­al­ly build com­mu­ni­ty ties, but with every­one there all at once it’s a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty. Busi­ness­peo­ple call it net­work­ing, but that label seems super­fi­cial and inad­e­quate for what goes on between the artists at one of these events. It’s not sim­ply that I can use oth­er artists as con­nec­tions or get ideas from them; it’s that we get to look at each oth­ers work and talk to one anoth­er and get down to our process­es. We ask each oth­er ques­tions that inspire us to explore avenues we had­n’t thought of.

Per­haps «networking» seems inad­e­quate because it’s not as much a ques­tion of fur­ther­ing a career but of increas­ing our val­ue. I’ve advised younger col­leagues to strength­en their social base to build strate­gic allies and find hid­den oppor­tu­ni­ties, but I don’t think I’ve ever sug­gest­ed to any­one in the pro­fes­sion­al sec­tor that she or he should glad­hand col­leagues in order to actu­al­ly become bet­ter at what they do. It’s an intrigu­ing idea, and I don’t pre­tend it’s unique to artists.

I find myself remind­ed of Cov­ey’s ideas in Sev­en Habits. Come from authen­tic­i­ty and integri­ty, inter­act deeply and empa­thet­i­cal­ly with oth­ers, and con­stant­ly strive to main­tain and improve one’s own capa­bil­i­ty; that’s the thrust of it, and Cov­ey aims that direct­ly at busi­ness­peo­ple. Per­haps then, the dif­fer­ence is not that the art world is any dif­fer­ent from the e‑commerce world, but that my involve­ment in the e‑commerce world does not come from authen­tic­i­ty and integri­ty and there­fore the rest can­not fol­low. Per­haps this is an exam­ple of see­ing an exter­nal dif­fer­ence where there’s real­ly a change in per­spec­tive. Per­haps pro­gram­mers and sales­peo­ple have these sorts of expe­ri­ence all the time, but I’ve shut myself off from that pos­si­bil­i­ty by pre­sent­ing myself inau­then­ti­cal­ly. I don’t know if it’s true, but it seems like a good idea to try out.