Use the label below your art to share something unique and interesting. The inside story of the inspiration or the creation of your art is what is interesting not the dimensions and the choice of medium. Take advantage of that moment of attention to connect with the viewer.
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Video Transcript:
John Paul: Hi. I’m John Paul Fischbach, the Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator.
Craig: Hi and I’m Craig, the Chief Tech Guru here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator.
John Paul: We’re sharing this Hot Tip Tuesday because it’s a pet peeve of both us that we work with lots of visual artists to help you with. It’s a bit of pet peeve but it’s also a golden opportunity. It’s about those didactic panels, those labels that go next to a work of art. Usually they say something really important and really interesting.
Craig: So interesting “acrylic on canvas”. That’s so interesting and important to me the art consumer. I’m not an artist. I really don’t care what the medium is or what kind of paint it is or the thing that it’s put on. What I care about is “Oh, I like that” or “I don’t like that”. The reason that I might like it is I’ve got some insight into what the artist was thinking. That’s what that little panel is for if you ask me, the art consumer.
John Paul: Where we started working on this idea is that you have a golden opportunity when the piece of art is on display to tell a story; to tell a story about that artwork or to tell a story about yourself or the process of creating that artwork. Any of those things would be really valuable and would bring that fan to be a potential customer.
The important thing and where we started working together is we said all right, how do you take some of that information, put it on one of those didactic panels or those caption labels? And Craig said why don’t you use a QR Code? Brilliant for a couple of reasons. A QR Code is a genius piece of pull marketing. Help them if they don’t understand what a QR Code.
Craig: A QR Code is one of those sort of black and white squares that has three black squares and then lots of little black squares in between and you can use a Smartphone camera to take a photo essentially of this smart code and converts it or un-encodes it into what it actually is which can be your website, so a URL.
John Paul: It can take you a particular place on your website.
Craig: That’s right. Not just the homepage of your website. It can take you to that page that’s dedicated to that page of work to give you an insight into it or a video that you’ve done about what you were thinking and feeling at that time or you could actually make a video of you completing the work or packaging it or anything talking about the work.
This is the pull marketing: that customer then is going to be feeling much closer to you as the artist and feeling much more like supporting you as the artist by purchasing your work. That is your aim in putting that work in that exhibition in the first place.
John Paul: We did a little bit of brainstorming. I’d like you to think about these different bullet points as possibilities of things you could do either absolutely on that didactic panel just as information or paragraphs or using a QR Code and link them to these. Think about some of these. What does the piece mean to you? Why did you choose this object or this subject? Where and when did this piece of art start to become real? What did you learn? What did you realize as you created it? How long did it take to create this piece? Were there any artistic challenges in realizing this artwork?
If you expand on any of those ideas, your fan is going to become connected to you. Do you know what? People give to people. People want relationships with people. They might want your artwork because it’s speccy but really if you want that customer for life it’s about forming that relationship so don’t waste that didactic label with saying ‘98 cm x 100 cm acrylic on canvas’ please. Please don’t do that anymore.
If this was a helpful tip for you and something that you’d like to embrace please like this video. If you have other artist friends whom you know you could start a little bit of a movement if artists claimed their relationship to their artwork and to their customers please share this video with someone else. If you want to make any comments, have any questions please feel free to make a comment, ask a question, Craig can help you.
QR Codes are pretty straightforward. You just go get them. It’s really not that hard. It’s called a QR Code Generator.
Craig: That’s right. Just Google QR Code Generator. We want you to more than survive we want you to thrive. In order to thrive you need to subscribe.
John Paul: We’ll see you for another hot tip.
Let the term, artist open calls, awaken your inner entrepreneur.
How often have you seen these opportunities — call to artist, artist open calls, calls to artists, international call for artists, call for artists submissions, open calls artists? These are good opportunities to gain exposure but chasing them can be exhausting and sometimes depressing. As artists we are often “opportunity heat seeking missiles” We are very good at popping our head up and identifying an opportunity. What you might be failing to recognize is this is how they grow their business. So the next time you see artist open calls take this as a call to develop and grow your own arts business.
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This is so innovative! To put a qr code alongside the art description actually gives the viewer a choice to know more about the process or back story of the piece if art or to ignore it and simply make what they want of it (as many people do).
I have now downloaded a qr generator and separate reader for free.
I sent a scan to my high tech son and got the reply “what’s this?” Which surprised me.
Thanks for this tip.
Love that tip I think I will share it with the Director of the local Gallery. Its there Rules we follow… Thanks… Nanette