Alumni and Outsiders: What to Do When Selling Art Sucks

Ben Wannamaker
6 days ago
3 min read

By Ben Wannamaker

I once met a Leslieville gallery owner who asked where I went to school, and when I said I didn't, they said, "Sometimes, that's better." Sometimes it is. Other times it's not. Where each emerging or established Toronto artist finds the shoulders of giants they will hope to stand on is as varied as the learning styles or artistic approaches of each emerging artist. The problem with people who think that school is the only route is that many were sold the old post-secondary success story and are overly enthusiastic about it. When it doesn't go according to plan, there is a fall and there is a disenchantment, and one must inevitably ask oneself, why?

On the other side of that question mark lies what determines a Toronto artist's trajectory and their ability to sell or even give away paintings, which can be a task in itself for both emerging and established artists alike. It's even harder to support yourself (or a family) entirely by selling paintings or sculptures in this city's economy, and if you ask the ones who do, you'll find they sometimes have to sacrifice certain parts of themselves and their work to do it. Even in the best of times, throughout the history of art patronage, artists have said goodbye to a piece of themselves when a piece of work leaves their space.

How this materializes is different for everyone, of course: some just hate to see the special works with what they see as honest, authentic, master-strokes, leave the studio and never come back. Paintings to their creator are often described as a friend or part of the family, imbued with life, and it’s simply hard to see them leave.

While with others, the rub lies within a sale or a steady art-based income, requiring that an artist must lean away from what the heart says its owner should be doing in the studio, and they obey that suggestion like a hunter using a scope instead of their naked eye. It’s just practical. Some sell visual accompaniments to extra-exclusionary art speak, or may play purely provocation politics. Instead of creating art based on acute observations, artists may instead resort to the lowest common denominator as a hook for the public's obliterated, near-phantom attention span (that will always evade anything that requires the substantive patience good art demands). “Democracy has bad taste,” says artist Grayson Perry. Yet we still yearn for the masses’ approval.

The artists saturated in academia arrive on the market, attempting to sell their wares with an ego swollen from the residual sting of tuition and student debt. Many new alumni are convinced that the financial and lifestyle sacrifices that they made have earned them a place in the zeitgeist, and so they try to elbow their way into shows, galleries, or sales with pure force.

Today's Toronto artists have to sell themselves while remaining humble and accepting rejection, or simply work for the pleasure and necessity of the metaphysical itch-scratching that making art provides. In our current climate of late-stage capitalism, this reality is both challenging and hard to swallow. Artists want to make money doing what they love. When they can’t, many just leave to find more hospitable places to support their art careers.

It's a big market, and no market is free or fair, so a young artist's cream may well curdle in their personal version of a Toronto art market meritocracy. Many capable young alums become disenchanted and quit when they fail to see the value in working a second job or working for the love of art-making itself. And after all of one's eggs don’t hatch like they’d like, the should-be-genius inevitably will stiffen and stop making art altogether, with time still flying and each subsequent sunset arriving faster than a timelapse.

Luckily for both academics and outsiders alike, an artist is an artist no matter where and what they studied, and an artist will always inevitably go back to the drawing board and try again.

Because the drawing board is what obsessed them in the first place. It's there that time slows, moments inflate, and honesty, passion, and clarity of execution become recognized. And perhaps impossibly, even rewarded by some series of chance, choice, action, patience, and universal occurrences combined.