BUILDING AN ART CAREER ONLINE PART I

In this two-part series, James Gurney presents options for artists who want to improve their internet business strategies

No matter how traditional we want our art to be, we have to come to terms with using computers and the internet to get our work seen and sold.

What's the best way to allocate our time and resources? How can we be as effective as possible at promoting our work and building a following? And how do we make a living at it? I'll be delving into some of these questions below, as well as providing a short painting demonstration that illustrates the type of material I create for my own online content.

An artist friend in Greenport, Long Island, stops by to see how I'm coming on the sketch of the van. As the drizzle turns into a light rain, my diffuser (just above my hat) serves as an umbrella over my easel.

SHIFTING GOALPOSTS

Let's start by looking at the state of social media. The last two decades have witnessed the invention and evolution of social media. They have received a lot of criticism, but they are still the most popular way to spend time online. Over the years, the goalposts have changed. The original idea was to share your life and thoughts with a finite network of known friends and family. Nowadays it's much more about building follower counts by creating more entertaining content.

SHORT FORM OR LONG FORM?

Along with that change of network orientation has been an evolution in content. Today there's less emphasis on words and pictures alone, and more focus on short-form video. These changes were already happening at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X before Tik Tok came along, but the dramatic success of Tik Tok led all the others to emphasize attention-getting video content. YouTube created Shorts, and they've been successful with it.

But it's not just a story of attention spans getting shorter. Long-form podcasts and real-time videos get a lot of views, too, especially in the art field. So you can do well going short or long.

FEEDING THE ALGORITHM