I feel there is a misunderstanding in the art world, that may or may not be a reality for you, depending on where you are and how strong your local art market is. But in Slovenia and many other countries, it is very much an enormous issue.

A lot of the artists I know do not get the real function of a gallery or agent. Their beliefs are that such people are financial vultures; praying on the poor unsuspecting artists who are trying to produce great work and butchering their creative passion with turning something sacred into a commodity item on sale.

The number of people producing art has never been higher and with everybody including your aunt trying to sell their work and get exhibited, only the best actually manage to do so in the end.

But the issue with art is that beauty is incredibly subjective and there are more concepts and ideas than there are beliefs in the world, so defining the best people in the art business is incomparably harder to do than finding the winners of any sports competition.

If in 2007 blogs were all the rage and almost anybody that was somebody online had one, today it’s podcasts. And with platforms like Anchor.fm offering free hosting and distribution, there really are no more excuses from getting on the bandwagon yourself!

Today, everybody has a webpage; from the free options at Wordpress, Wix or other web providers to the more sophisticated self-hosted options that I would encourage anyone with a free account to have a look into.

But it’s not having a website that is important, because it’s like having a nice new set of expensive brushes and colours; owning them doesn’t make you produce a painting and showing them to your friends wont get you far either. 

You have to use them, and the same goes for your webpage.

Even though mailing lists seem like a thing of the past, they are still an irreplaceable building block of any creative business. Regardless of whether you’re writing daily blogs like me, or if you use your mailing list to sell or notify people about your work and exhibitions — if you’re a creative, you should start building your list.

Posting a lot on your media platform of choice and doing so on a regular basis is a must if you wish to propagate your message and your art into the world and don’t have cash to burn for Facebook or Instagram ads, but it takes a lot of time and becomes incredibly tedious to do after a while!

After spending months or days (or minutes — for all of you speed painters out there), it’s finally time to decide how to present your work! And the big question is: Should you invest in buying a nice frame to put around your work and make it “more presentable” or should you just leave it as it is?

Regardless if you paint, sculpt, make experimental video installations or are a political performance artist, the main goal for all of us is to express ourselves. 

But while we may be really good at making art, presenting it is an entirely different skill to have and in today’s video I want to talk about how to spread your creative message to your followers and fans!

*Original video 

They say you have to love what you do, because you will be doing it for the rest of your life, but my question really is, if this is a sustainable way of looking at creation and life in general, or just a generalisation that might work for many, but fail to help the rest?

Yesterday evening I attended an exhibition opening titled “Happiness for you and your family”. It was a show about the problems of immigration and deportation and tried to showcase the issues of inequality among people in our region.

While the cause is surely a valiant one, the whole execution of the message was far from it and the issue lays not with the message, but the context in which it was presented — the gallery.