...R&D, Startup Thinking & more

SEASON 1 EP 05

Mentioned in this episode:

Creative Bridge

• Creative Bridge brought to you by Code Base is a course for creatives who want to learn about startup thinking, innovation and digital product development. Learn More

GUTS Gallery

• Guts flips the traditional power dynamics between gallerist and artist, creating safe spaces, accessibility, constructive dialogue and collective shouldering. In an art world scared to speak out about inequality for fear of jeopardising their positions, Guts Gallery refuses to be silenced.Learn More

Episode Transcript:

Hi, it's me Isotta. Welcome to Episode 5 of Art Is.... a seven-part podcast for artists. Last episode, we explored storytelling and how embracing the, ‘how I built this model’ on our own terms can empower meaningful connections and communities of emerging artists. Enabling us to better value our own professional experiences as learning tools for our peers, students, and communities. 

Over the past few episodes, we've been leaning into the uncomfortable division between art and business. First, by looking at art based knowledge tools, then at emerging technologies like NFTs and Clubhouse, and last week we circled back to themes from Episode 1 and interrogated how sharing stories of professional success and setbacks can transform creative communities.

Now, after some inward reflection, it's time, once again, to step out of our comfort zones, go beyond the studio, and look at how we can learn from other industries, and begin using a more interdisciplinary approach to thinking about our professional development and the future of the art world. 

This is Art Is... a podcast where we visualize the future of the art world. Often, I feel that the art world and its many players exist in its own universe away from other industries and business norms. Between the elitism and the power dynamics of these traditional art institutions, it's hard to find a place in that hierarchical framework where you and your work fit in. 

It can feel impenetrable. People, projects, institutions all exist in a bubble that's built off a longstanding tradition of exclusivity, class, wealth, and status. Now, of course, with the pandemic things have broken down. The industry was frozen for a few months. Many lost their jobs. Artists missed out on exhibitions and emerging creatives lost many opportunities to break into the arena. 

However, as restrictions ease and the art world opens up, I find that this is a perfect moment for reflection and exploration. So that instead of returning to how things were pre COVID, we establish a new set of best practices for our creative careers, and move away from the backward nature of so many professional art environments. 

My perspective on starting a career as an artist has really shifted in the past year. One of the things that have become really clear after leaving university is that I hadn't really defined what being successful looked like. I don't think I ever put pen to paper and thought to myself, what would being successful as an artist mean? 

One of the ways of approaching that problem is by drafting up what I see as a personal mission statement, identifying principles and values that I'd like to uphold. And to be honest, I don't really know how to do this. It's very much a work in progress. 

Drafting mission statements aren't too common a practice in the art world, but I'd like to bring your attention to what Guts Gallery is doing. They've identified an incredibly clear mission statement about supporting underrepresented artists and championing a new generation of collectors. And creatives and they've also drafted a really interesting code of conduct, which they published online, where they discuss their adaptive business practices, both internally and externally. 

How they seek to create safe spaces and chart paths that no other galleries have done before.  Where they put artists at the center of the art world rather than gallerists. 

I'll link their website in the episode description so you can read their mission and learn more about the awesome artists that they champion. Guts Gallery is really emerging as a leader in this space, and I'm excited to learn and connect with other parallel initiatives happening around the world. 

Interestingly, these practices around mission statements are quite common in the business world, especially in the startup space. And I think that there are some insightful and effective practices around mission statements and accountability that we, as artists, could adopt and learn from. While leaning into what makes us artists and ensuring that the knowledge practices and innate curiosity that we have are a starting point for our missions. 

We are passionate, multifaceted, and interdisciplinary, but the art industry is not. So instead of looking to what has come before us and model our behaviour from what has been done, we can look outward for innovation and forward for inspiration. And start adopting good principles and behaviours from other industries along the way. I see this kind of like an R & D initiative. And by treating it as research and development, we can learn from that industry while also be experimental and observational in our own ways. By outlining these values, we can articulate the kind of professional trajectory we want to build for ourselves and our art practices, which I think is really critical to bridging this art business divide. 

A while back, I met an incredibly insightful entrepreneur working in fashion. Her name is Narie Foster and she co-founded the fashion brand MM L’Fleur. She explained to me how at her company, they have three core values. The idea that everyone has a superpower. Some people are specialists, excellent at executing key tasks. Others are more generalists and can do a range of things well. Maybe you're great at problem-solving or big picture brainstorming, but whatever it is, she said you need to identify it so that you can also learn your weaknesses and develop a keen sense of self-awareness.

The second value she upholds is, “Nothing above you and nothing below you.” This rings true to me because it's really about not having entitlement in the work you do and always staying humble so that at the end of the day if there's a job to be done, you can do it just as good as anybody else. I recently heard Lindsay Peoples, Editor in Chief of The Cut, say something very similar about her own work ethic and humility. 

The third value that was introduced to me is the idea of intersecting kindness and directness.  The art world isn't known for its great compassion or communication skills. Being transparent and honest and speaking our minds and sharing what we're afraid to say is critical in this mission of visualizing the future art world. Especially since we have obstacles to overcome that are generation-sized.

Returning to the idea of defining success. I find that currently, we early-career artists tend to imitate the professional trajectories of other artists instead of seeking out personalized visions of what our individual artistic success could look like. Of course, that's easy to say and much harder to do in practice. And because we don't have a culture in this industry of sharing stories of professional success and setbacks, it's exceptionally hard to identify what success should mean.  

Let's assume you have a broad goal, like financial stability. Or more freedom to set up your own schedule and work full-time on your practice. Or perhaps it's creating a complete body of work that you can then showcase or sell. 

These are big goals. And I find that it's very hard to deconstruct them into individual tasks to work on every day. Like, one of my goals is to start making a living wage from my art practice. That's a pretty big long-term goal, but how can I ensure that the work I'm doing now is in line with that goal? One of the ways to go about starting this is setting achievable, but ambitious targets in the short term that can measure the impact of our actions and reflect these larger goals. Because setting goals and targets is great, but those mean nothing if there isn't a system in place to track and assess the work we do. I believe artists actually do this all the time in their own creative practices, it's just the iteration and critique model a little bit more structured, but unfortunately, we don't tend to extend this practice into the professional development side of our careers. 

A perfect example is something we could all understand and relate to–applying for exhibitions, grants, and residencies. How many times have you spent days on a single application drafting, writing, putting together a portfolio and then only to be rejected and move on to the next thing immediately?

Now, this is important. We have to keep putting ourselves out there. But speaking from personal experience many times, while I was doing these applications, I knew I wasn't really the right candidate or that the application seemed strange to me that the opportunity wasn't right.  But I ended up doing the application anyway. 

And lost a lot of time and confidence in the process. 

I bet that you can relate to this behaviour. And in fact, there's a concept in the startup space developed by Eric Ries called, “Build, Measure, Learn.” He wrote a book called the Lean Startup and the premise is pretty straightforward. Start creating a feedback loop that helps you realize when you've got things wrong before it's too late to turn initial failure into eventual success. 

This “Build, Measure, Learn” loop is used to test business ideas and build products that customers actually want. However, as emerging artists looking to define success and start setting strong goals and actionable targets, perhaps we can use this kind of feedback loop as a means of tracking experiments, progress, success, and setbacks. 

Let's break this down by taking an art-related problem that many are facing–the need for studio space. This is an issue that can be resolved with many solutions, but how can we start discerning what is right and how to ensure that the problem gets solved in the end? Maybe we should apply for a grant to fund that studio space. Or apply for a residency where studio space is provided. If we start using these “build, measure, learn” feedback loops. Each time we pursue something, we can start constructing frameworks that inform our decision-making based on past experience. 

I believe that by doing this, we could then accelerate our own professional development through rapid learning every day. The point here is that you start using the “build, measure, learn” loop to decrease the risk around your ideas, and then you start learning quickly. 

In the startup space, this is known as the “fail fast attitude.” If you fail slowly, you learn slowly.  But if you fail fast, you learn fast as well. In the studio, we fail fast all the time. We test ideas and materials and measure the results physically, visually on the go. But in our career planning, we aren't experimental enough and we don't really measure the impact of our results. Now, I believe, once again, this relates to an unfortunate undervaluing of our own skills and experiences. But as we visualize the future art world and realize that there are practices to be learned and adopted from other industries, I think it's really important that we start building our own feedback loops on our own terms integrated into the value systems that we create to ensure that we have accountability and authenticity in all of these processes.  

One of the goals of Art Is... is to explore alternative business models that could be adapted by artists in the future. 

In Episode 3, we looked at emerging technologies. Last episode, we delved into the scarcity mentality and the secrecy, or “don't reveal your secret sauce,” mindset. To visualize the future of the art world, we need to imagine where this world exists and what purpose it serves. 

I think that the traditional art world, in one way or another, will always exist. It's been around for centuries with little innovation because its value system is based on isolating itself and creating exclusionary and elitist practices. But what if instead of fixating on changing that system, we build a new category altogether, like what's happening in the tech industry, and start defining it on our own terms? And part of this is transparency. Building everything in public. What we do in a studio cred. When you share your raw unfinished work process and all to your peers for critique and feedback. 

When you see your art and space like that and people discuss and give comments, it's intense. But personally, those moments have yielded some great revelations that if I hadn't been vulnerable, I would have missed out on. If we build in public and designed this new category of early career and emerging artists as thought leaders, we should be starting with the end in mind. Identifying our pain points and problems in order to build from the ground up, lean into our knowledge practices, and create an order of operations to maximize our investment in innovation and create long-term value. 

Whether it's the startup space, or the world of R&D, or tech, there are innovative strategies and approaches that we can seek out in any industry. And the learning opportunities here are endless. In Season 2 of Art Is…, I'll be bringing on guests that can speak to these in much greater depth. 

But in the meantime, I'd like to leave you with an idea that I learned from Sahil Levenia, founder of Gumroad, an online platform that facilitates the sale of products by creators directly to consumers. He explained that every business starts with who you want to help, and that community leads to a problem that leads to a product that leads to a business, and that it takes the community to build a business. What we're doing is bigger than one problem, product, or business. But the lesson here is that there are answers in our communities. And as we continue to grow and develop and explore values, mission statements, feedback loops R&D tech startup thinking, the most important thing is to keep fostering deep community connections and transparency. 

And that's really what I'm trying to do here on this art podcast–keep an open mind, create new opportunities for connection, and get artists to start visualizing an artist-led future. I would love to hear from you. Thoughts, comments, questions, anything at all. So please reach out on Instagram or Twitter (@artispodcast), or send an email to listen@artispodcast.com. 

Thank you for listening to Episode 5 of Art Is… This week, I'd like to thank Codebase Edinburgh and the Creative Bridge Program, which I participated in over the summer of 2020. Yasmin Sulaiman and Oli Phantly, who led the program, helped me realize how startup thinking could inform my professional and creative development and gave me the confidence to start this podcast for artists. You can learn more about their work@thisiscodebased.com and I'll add the link in the episode description. 

Please check out the Art Is… Bookshop, created through bookshop.org. You can find links for both the US and UK bookshops in the episode description and on the Art Is… Instagram and Twitter. Thanks and see you soon!