Five Tips For Artists Online
I had the pleasure of appearing this week on artist Devon Walz’s podcast, Art + Magic, and one of the main topics we discussed was how I approach social media. Acknowledging the inherent toxicity of the internet and the importance of establishing boundaries, the reality is that most artists must have a social media presence and content strategy in order to sell their work online.
As artists we devote so much of our time and energy into actually creating the work that just the idea of having to package it neatly into a social media format is exhausting. I get that, and I have to work hard to not let social media dread bleed into my practice. But at least for me, I know that a healthy balance can be struck where social media is a tool to amplify your work without muddying up your practice.
Here are five tips for artists sharing their work online:
1. Stay in touch with what you love
It’s not always easy to prioritize what you love with what you think will perform well on social media. Staying in tune with what I’m curious about in my work has always steered me in the right direction over creating art that is tailored to succeed in the algorithm format.
An example for me is my mall series. These paintings of haunting capitalist ruins have never been my best selling work or the top social posts, but they helped me establish a clearer narrative around the hollowness of consumer culture and the rise of economic instability. The themes of these paintings, and the bright colors of the interior scenery, are exciting and inspirational to me even if this work isn’t my most successful body. I’m glad I explored this series because it led me to concepts like my glitter and gilded series and it continues to push forward my ideas of capitalism’s legacy.
2. Figure out what you want to say and what you don’t mind spending your days doing
The core of art is communication. It’s not just about making pretty paintings, it’s about telling a story. That story can be as simple as, this is me showing up and making a painting every single day. Or your story can be significantly deeper, about a lived experience, societal issues, identity, and so on and so on. The point is that you cannot find your audience until you figure out what you want to say. And for that message to resonate with an audience in the long term, you have to channel that message into work that you are comfortable exploring regularly.
3. Create context for your art
The old cliche goes, “dress for the job you want.” Setting aside the potentially problematic rhetoric therein, I think the heart of the message is relevant for artists. If you want to be taken seriously, take yourself seriously as an artist.
You start doing that by showing up consistently to your practice, sharing your work with confidence, and ensuring you don’t apologize for the work when it is inevitably challenged online. My glitter series has steadily met resistance online for its supposed tackiness and frivolity, but I have worked hard to back up my use of glitter by highlighting the classist and misogynist impulses that cause many to feel repulsed by glitter out of hand. Creating this context around my decision has helped my confidence with the series and allowed me to start a conversation about glitter’s reputation.
4. The most liberating art marketing strategy is… make connections
Long before I knew anything about, or had ever used, a marketing funnel or paid advertisement (really just any traditional marketing strategy), my go-to marketing strategy was born of instinct. That is, nurture your relationships.
I always think of my comments, DMs and emails like a garden. The sun and water that a garden needs in this metaphor is my timely responses and shared passion with my audience. In my experience, sharing in the excitement that a person feels over your art is crucial for them to want your art in their home.
Just like different plants need different amounts of those elements, fans and customers are unique in what they are looking for and how they view the artist-art collector relationship. Your art speaking for, and selling, itself is rare, as much as we would like that to be the case. In my career I’ve had collectors who buy my work despite never having interacted with me online, but the vast majority of my original sales go to people who I’ve conversed with regularly and who are familiar with my process. This is an incredibly valuable component of my business that I’ve invested years of work into.
5. Dance with the one who brung ya
Creating content for the internet can be really scary. That’s especially true with newer algorithms that will seemingly cast one of your videos into the wasteland of low engagement at random. Making all of your content in an attempt to hit on virality is not only exhausting, but it’s also intimidating because there can be serious downsides to going viral that are unintended. If the core of art is communication, the potential for your message to be misconstrued due to it reaching outside your audience is high even if going viral is alluring.
One thing that’s helped me avoid this treacherous cycle is to make work and content for my established audience. Even when I was starting out and had very few followers, I always tried to make content that I knew would resonate with the people who enjoyed specific traits of my work. For example, I really enjoy creating voice-over videos where I combine aspects of storytelling and technique while a clip of a piece being created plays.
These videos allow me to have an open-ended conversation with my core audience where themes that I’ve been exploring for a long time, like my childhood, femininity and growing wealth disparity, are addressed and contextualized relative to past work. This content isn’t likely to go viral, but the steady development of a conversation started years ago with my audience is more important to me long term because it leads to people gaining a deeper understanding of my work and feeling a stronger connection to it.
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Each of these points could warrant their own dedicated blog, but I wanted to write a piece that established the most complete view of my approach to social media in 2022. Knowing that platforms are constantly changing how they ask creators to create, specific methods for how I post are bound to change year-to-year. But the core of my approach is this, and I think it is a method that transcends algorithms and trends.