Brian Walker Interview, Part III

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." ~Pablo Picasso

Last week I had a good dialogue with Brian Walker, co-founder of DiscoveredArtists.com, that seemed worthy of a wider hearing. We had been talking about the impact the Internet has made on the art scene and a little about the challenges for emerging artists in finding an audience for the work or connecting with buyers. This is the final section of that discussion.

PART III

E: When I was in college, I was going through the arts program preparing to be an art major and I remember reading an article about Mark Tobey, how he was discovered at like 45. It was inspiring and gave me hope. I just wrote about this on my blog a few weeks ago, this book of interviews with Duchamp, and Hans Hoffman, Edward Hopper, Mark Tobey, and in the book you read that the guy had gone to Europe, he was with Gertrude Stein, he'd been in New York so when he was discovered at 45, he had already been part of the art scene for 20 years. He wasn't just discovered. He'd been doing things.

BW: It finally paid off.

E: Yeah.

BW: So I think what part of my frustration is for artists, is that I think some of this whole starving artists thing is self created. I think that any product, and I'm not trying to productize art, don't get me wrong, I don't want to make it a commodity because it's not, but there are basic steps that every artist should be taking to get themselves out there. You know, artists on our site for the most part, new guys now under the new way that we market, they're being seen. Their work can be seen by 4000 people in 2 or 3 months, and while sales aren't great right now which is partly the economy, partly because the Internet's not fully realized yet and partly because it takes a while, art's not necessarily an impulsive buy, especially when it's a readily available all over the place. But it takes time. I've always referred to this as a marathon not a sprint. You've got to be out there and that's the bottom line.

E: How big is the art market today? I have numbers for snowmobiles, how many snowmobiles are sold in a year, or what the sales are for amusement parks, diesel trucks, and sports betting. How much is being sold in the art scene if you extract Sotheby's million dollar auctions?

BW: I can't answer it. I'm a data guy. I'm actually working on a subproject right now that's part of what I did in my previous life, a lot of analytic works for large clients, and analyzing their data. A lot of this is not available. I've had a really hard time sort of compiling, how much art, not from the Sotheby's perspective, but how much art was sold last year?

E: Right.

BW: It's really really tough to get a figure.

E: I know, I was trying to find that myself.

BW: I can tell you this, that in the research that I did, on what I considered to be at the time 5 of the top online art market places --these included Boundless Gallery which has now since closed, they were up for 7 years, they closed 2 months ago just about, which is unfortunate, because they had, anyway, that's another story -- but there were 5 of these... and I can't remember if EBSQ was included, but I was able to kind of get a sense... (I joined many of them because I did paint for a while, as more of a hobby; I'm not a good painter although everybody loves my abstracts that are hanging on my walls, but that's beside the point. I'm a marketer, not an artist but I did try that out and partly just for research and I as able to extract data and understand who was selling. I know that Boundless did an announcement while I was part of them, that they had just reached a million and a half dollars in sales in the first 8 months.) ... I think that the total combined for just 5 sites was somewhere in the neighborhood and I'm kind of reaching back but it was around 10 million dollars, and these are smaller kinds of sites. So maybe that's a little bit of a ballpark, and obviously I don't have all the data. Etsy sells, if you want to call it art, they've got a lot of crafts and things, but they're certainly moving a lot of inventory. The price points are lower, but they still move a lot. I had heard, I think this is right, 25 million? Something like that.

E: That's pretty good volume.

BW: Well they have tons of visitors, too. And then eBay did come out with a report, and again I have all this stuff stored away, I haven't referred to it for a while but eBay had come out with a report on art sales on their site, and it was in the multi million dollar range, but with price points under a hundred dollars.

E: I saw that, and if you're doing giclee prints and it costs you x number of dollars and they sell it for less than what it costs to print it, you're not really in a very good business.

BW: You're not in business.

E: Thanks, Brian, for your time and insights... We'll see where it goes.

My own small corner of DiscoveredArtists.com can be found at
http://www.discoveredartists.com/gallery/ennyman3

Brian Walker Talks About DiscoveredArtists.com

Being an artist has many challenges. The first set has to do with the whole process of creation. The why, the how, and the often challenging, "At what point has this piece I have been obsessing over, at what point do I call it finished?" And so a new work has been conceived and birthed. Now what?

DiscoveredArtists.com, the brain-child of co-founder Chicago's Brian Walker, is one answer to this question. DiscoveredArtists.com is an exclusively online art gallery. I recently contacted Mr. Walker and asked for his time in order to share his vision with readers here at Ennyman's Territory. What follows is the first portion of our exchange Tuesday evening.

Ennyman: Discoveredartists.com is a business that aims to bring artists and collectors together. How did that project come about, and when?

BW: Well, this thing has evolved quite a bit. We launched DiscoveredArtists in July of 2008, so we're a little less than 2 years old. But I spent 6 months before that researching pretty much the entire art market online. I almost bought a brick and mortar gallery here in Chicago, and I'm happy that I didn't, and decided to go virtual. I figured we'd have greater reach and there was maybe a need, I don't know that that need has been there the last 18 months -- it’s been kind of a tough market -- but I'm certainly happy I didn't buy the brick and mortar.

E: Yeah, there's a lot involved with that I'm sure.

BW: It would have been double trouble, but you know, I was actually in Italy when I sat down with my business partner and we decided to conceive this. It was about 6 months before we launched and we went to Rome and then we went to Florence, and went to a huge art show. There were about 800 international artists at this enormous show and (we) met a lot of them, and that was kind of what confirmed for me that I wanted to get into this. Initially it was this concept that we'd bring artists and art buyers and interior designers together, which was a great concept but it’s evolved from there… As we establish our brand people begin to trust us, people begin to be trusted. The art that we're showing is high caliber, and it’s really evolved into where I want to become more curated, more about providing just the highest quality art and artists that I can find. And then provide promotional services to artists. Marketing, promoting, that’s my background.

E: What was your background, or I guess I'll let you finish this part and then I'll ask you that.

BW: No, well that’s kind of it. We started off allowing just about anybody to come into the gallery and that was a huge mistake. We're kind of backtracking now and trying to undo some of those mistakes… not to offend artists or hurt artists feelings, but there's just no way to compete out there because artists are so critical of themselves. And art buyers, the ones who really matter, are going to be very critical. So we've got to keep the quality up, and that’s something that the past 5 months I've been addressing. It's still a work in progress.

E: I got attracted to what you were doing because of high caliber of the art there.

BW: That’s really critical. I don't want to get insane about it, but frankly whoever you and I might decide are the best artists on the planet right now, they likely have such an arrogance about them that they'd never fathom the idea or even think about being a part of what we're doing. I want to change that. That’s what leads into the marketing part of this. I think that what's most critical, and it's really where our skill set lies, we've created a gallery and we've created an ecommerce site where people can come and buy, and we're always going to market. But artists, for the most part, are not very good marketers.

E: I agree.

BW: So what I've really found, for 99 bucks a year, I'm going to go out and some of it is self serving, because you know, you're always going to get more promotion than your 99 dollars, and that's the self serving part, because we want to go out and continually push you, push your art because it makes the gallery look good and it makes everybody else look good. So it's really about honing in on this marketing and trying to attract people into the gallery, let them know that Discoveredartists.com is the place online, because there's a lot of stuff out there, but really if you want to come and find what we consider to be some of the best artists... Some of our guys are starting and untrained but they're excellent, and compiling the best artists that we can find, and making their work available to designers and collectors and so on (is what we are doing.)

E: Regarding your background, you started to say you had a marketing background, or were you in art first and then marketing? Because you're not a kid…

BW: I've been around. I'm in my 40's, 42 now, 43 very soon. When I started out, as a kid, my stepfather was in the rock and roll business, had a record label. As a kid I went to every rock concert there ever was, all the great ones. In the 70's I saw all the greatest artists, and I hung around them. I mean, I was a part of that life, and really enjoyed that, but my career took me different directions. My two primary jobs that have been my biggest jobs, because I've done a lot of things throughout my life, included trying to start other companies. But I worked for 2 PBS stations, public television stations, first in LA for about 4 years, and then I moved back to Chicago and took a job at the PBS station here called WTCW, and worked for them for seven years. I became their director of marketing and basically handled all their fundraising and direct marketing efforts. I had a pretty big staff and customer service, so that was part one of my real career. Part 2, I ended up going to work for the Chicago Tribune.

E: How has the internet changed the art world. It seems to change everything it touches, and in the art world in particular, what have you seen? I mean there's an incredible amount of stuff being sold on Ebay even.

BW: I have to answer this question from my perspective only. This may not be a fair assessment, so I guess I'll caveat my response. I don't think that the Internet has yet to realize its complete potential in terms of art. I think there is still a lot of skepticism. Here is what I think, I think there are too many art websites. I'm one of them, I think there are way too many of them, most of them are crap, most of them are full of just… because every artist tries something now so they're bouncing all over the place. In my dream, there would be 5 big ones and that'd be it. Because it’s diluting--

E: --the quality?

BW: It dilutes quality and also confidence.

TO BE CONTINUED

Disclaimer: Some of my work is currently being represented by DiscoveredArtists.com.