You can have the greatest product or service in the world, something that everyone would love to have or do or have done, but if nobody knows about it, you might as well have nothing.
That’s what’s happening now.
Our gallery is scheduled for the Art Walk, which is where local artists sell MOST of their year’s work.
Problem is, the paperwork is still undone, long after the FINAL DUE DATE, because no one has taken JUST A LITTLE responsibility for putting that paperwork through, and repairing mistakes later.
Nobody did it.
Oh, sure, they send e-mails, text messages, insta-grams saying they just can’t handle it, and everyone reads them, but nobody takes action, because nobody wants to risk failure, thus guaranteeing failure.
So we’re currently MAYBE in the Art Walk. They’re holding the papers for us until we can get our shit together enough to tell them what we sell and who we are.
Christ, it never had to get this far, but it needs fixing — and fast — within 24 hours of now. Frankly, it should have been handled within hours of first receiving the application, where you track down every fact you need, right then and there, no delay, no prevarication, no dangling it out for someone else to resolve, because they’ll just pass it on like you did.
Abdicating Responsibility is not a good way to do business, nor is it a good way to behave in general. Nobody takes responsibility, nobody takes action, and nobody notifies anyone that there will be serious and costly consequences, and then shit-hits-fan and there’s shit all over the place.
It would be so easy to just take a guess at what we’ll be showing, and then fix it later if necessary, but that didn’t happen, and so we might miss the Art Walk and a potential income of tens of thousands of dollars.
We’ll NEVER get a leg up at this rate. We need an EXTRA $2,000 per month to pay for the gallery and advertising, so we can get some buyers in there looking for specific items that we have, but in order to get that extra money, we’ll need to score at least one BIG sale this coming month — just one good sale per month is all it takes.
Please note, I did NOT include the facts needed to complete that application for the Art Walk because, frankly, you ought to be able to figure it out yourself or assemble the data from guesswork and answers to specific questions.
Like I said, figure it out for yourself.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the Art Walk — one of the few reasons we are there in the gallery in the first place — failure is not an option. It needs to get handled on Tuesday, no matter what.
This is not the only case of abdicated responsibility and unncecessary suffering that has occurred here lately. Guilt, recrimination, blame, all totally needless, had the form been simply filled out, even with guesswork, which didn’t have to be too far afield, we all know that we sell paintings, sculpture, jewelry, coins, beads and books, at the very least.
I wish this were an isolated incident, but it isn’t.
For the past five months, actually since the last week in November, I have suggested, mildly at first and then more stridently as wasted time went on by, that people investigate the FREE outlets for announcements, public service notices and more.
Classes, especially FREE classes, qualify as worthy of public notice and can in some conditions be free or very cheap to place in very high levels of public exposure, such as our local newspaper’s Sunday supplement, “The Prospector”, which everyone new in town reads.
$25 a week buys us some space in the Prospector’s “Announcements” section.
If we want more than just a local event announcement, it’ll cost more — about a thousand a month with a 12-month contract, for a quarter-page display ad, which is much more likely to bring in customers than a yellow pages ad, which costs much more and doesn’t do as well.
I’ve been down this road a million times, and you HAVE to start somewhere — taking responsibility for bringing customers through the door is one way to begin.
In a way, you have a job which you don’t have to take, which is to hand out flyers and leaflets and business cards and sometimes even to bring the customer right through the door and into the shop.
The shop can include the school, if you see what I mean.
New customers that YOU brought into the shop will give you an opportunity to accumulate Merit, plus try out your People Skills when communicating Work Ideas to a newbie — generally a scared newbie.
Newbies aren’t actually new to The Work — they’re victims of Between-Lives Blackout, and need reminding, which can lead to the recovery of thousands of lifetimes of skills and understandings.
If you were an Enlightened Being once, but you’re caved in now, there’s no reason why you can’t simply re-achieve that Enlightenment you once had, except your Protestant Work Ethic or whatever similar blockage you have in place is in the way of realization.
Radio interviews? Don’t put me through them — I’ve paid my dues and had my fifteen minutes, and now it’s time for YOU to take up the baton and run the extra mile.
How many newspapers are there in this area?
I’ll bet that, in the past five months that we’ve had the gallery, you haven’t even taken the five minutes to check which ones they are and how many people they reach, and what kind of people they are — meaning what kind of newspaper or tabloid market you’d be reaching, which is your target audience.
What kind of person do you want to attract to your gallery?
Actually, what you really want to attract is the high-end buyer — the low end buyers are already satisfied with what they can get in the Art Department at K-Mart.
Linda learned the art business over a period of 22 years, but she started with some familiarity with the artists who were famous in their day and to the present day, which is only a handful.
Art prints vary in price based on dozens of factors, and you can’t pick up that whole body of knowledge all at once, nor can you find it online or on a database — you learn it over time.
Most of the prints I carry require some knowledge and finesse. I don’t expect anyone to have those skills right off the bat, but I DO expect folks to learn the skills, and that leads to making a ton of money, which is more or less the feedback that tells you that you’re learning your lessons.
You really ought to know the difference between a litho and an etching, but if you can’t make yourself be interested, you’ll never be a part of that knowledge.
Do you know what to look for in a Dali signature? How much margin there ought to be on a Rembrandt or Van Ostade? Do you know how to find out about a print that you don’t already know?
If you had the answers to those questions and could whip out a ready answer to just about any question about modern or contemporary art, including “what is the difference between modern and contemporary art?”, you could generate thousands and maybe even tens of thousands of dollars per month for the community through the gallery, but you probably won’t, and do you know WHY you won’t?
The answer is very simple, very obvious and very plain. Because you don’t. The Body of Habits rules here, unless you take it over and change it, which takes plenty of sweat-work.
Are you dedicated enough to make the effort? It’s about as challenging as pressing the “Like” button on a facebook page.
You could learn all you need to know about the print business in about four months, if you worked at it every day.
You’d need to generate a lot of sales just to get the experience, then change gears up to the more expensive prints, which run more risk and take more skill to sell.
One good sale. That’s all it takes.
All you need, as I said, is one good sale per month, or twelve good sales per year, with some months “dry” and some “wet”, meaning slow months and active months.
July, August and September are generally not so good for the art market unless you happen to be in a tourist spot, which we are.
We could bring hundreds of tourists into the gallery if we were able to show the Donner Party Collection — there’s tons of interest in local history, and the Donner Party has no other local showing or exhibits, so we’d be IT, and we have a lot more historical pieces to show if it takes off bigtime, but again, if nobody knows about it, we might as well do an exhibit of Pez Dispensers, which actually did quite well over Christmas.
It would take roughly $2,000 to put the Donner Party Exhibition together, but could bring in tens of thousands, if customers start streaming through there.
We have tons of offerings, from art and jewelry and antiques and vintage clothing and games and toys and puzzles and art supplies and rare antiquarian books and stamps and coins and — gosh, I could go on for hours, listing all the stuff we can bring into that gallery, but if nobody knows about it, we have zero.
That’s the singular most important fact you’ll ever learn about The Work.
It’s not enough to master it yourself. You’re not really a Master until you’ve both USED the Work Method and PASSED IT ON.
If you can’t personally pass on the Work Method, no problem — just get yourself placed in the chain that leads to The Work, which means “like”, “share”, “comment” and all the other things you can do to share ideas in the stream of social media.
I intentionally and quite deliberately do NOT take part in social media, with the exception of this blog, the daily broadcast, and of course the occasional eBay listing, all of which USE social media but do not actually use it in the popular fashion, which is, apparently, the infamous “Missionary Position”.
Never thought I’d use THAT phrase — “Missionary Position” — in a sentence.
Okay, so what can you do with no money, no time, no interest and no commitment?
You’re quite right — nothing.
It takes money to make money. It takes money to tell people you have something to sell. We have literally MILLIONS in art products from our 55 artists — which includes you, whether you know it or not.
You don’t have to participate willingly. You can wait until you’re carried off kicking and screaming to actually DO something to change what’s happening to you.
All the high muckamuck spiritual mumbo jumbo you can muster up will not help you here — you need to take responsibility for your own life, your own spiritual development and your part that you will play in the Great Work.
Part of that effort is to bring people who NEED the Work into The Work, and that means doing things like checking to see if there’s more than one local newspaper — there is.
Things like calling the local radio station or dropping in to see if there’s any way to get a public service announcement out there, and how long before the event do you have to bring it into the station, things like that — the dismal detail work and follow-through that is needed to carry forward any serious project.
By “Serious Project” I mean anything that you do for a while, not something you pick up for a few minutes and drop again when you’re bored.
Boredom? Tedium? Effort?
You’ll have to put in a lot of effort to make a machine like a gallery go forward under its own power, and even more to make it pay the bills for ALL participants including the artists and the volunteer sales and cleanup labor.
There’s a LOT to do, and NOBODY, including me, has the time or energy to do it all, which is why we work as a team — no one person takes ALL the burden, all the weight, and nobody can, so get used to working as a team, or fall by the wayside as a Vulture Yummy.
If all the details were done right, the gallery would be humming, but they aren’t, and the gallery is slow, because folks are waiting for customers to just drift through the door all by themselves.
Hell, if you don’t play your cards right, they won’t even venture through the open door.
Flyers and leaflets and table tents are the answer. Put those table tents and flyers and leaflets in all the B&B — that’s “Bed & Breakfast” places, including yours if you operate one — and all the art and antiques related places you can find.
Put the table tent in any restaurants that will let you do it.
Hand out leaflets and put them anywhere except under windshield wipers — nobody appreciates that, and it’s just too openly aggressive to do any good, but putting them on community billboards will work, unless they get covered up, which they inevitably do, after three days of visibility, so you have to re-visit those billboards and re-post your flyer or leaflet.
What’s the difference between a flyer and a leaflet?
If you’re asking that question, you clearly didn’t understand me when I said that I’m not going to spoon-feed you, it’s up to you to find this shit out and it’s up to you to find the energy and willingness and courage to go ahead and DO something about it, get into action.
But you’re so helpless, so broke and so miserable and run-down that you just can’t seem to do anything.
So you just sit there and try to think about something else, but nothing else comes to mind. This is the chief complaint of most folks today — everybody talks about the weather, but nobody DOES anything about it.
Now, I’m planning to take some cheap — $3.99 — meteorites out on the street and into the malls tomorrow, to see if I can sell them as a street vendor. If so, I’ll let you know, but I always wonder, why the hell didn’t YOU do that, months ago when I came up with the product?
But then again, I also wonder the same thing about the greeting cards, the postcards and a number of other items that would do very well in street sales, but I already know the answer:
You don’t have time.
That’s an easy way of avoiding the real issue — you’re not interested in that. You’re here strictly for the spiritual shit. Who wants to be a street vendor?
How about if you were selling incense, candles and aromatic oils? Would that seem any more spiritual than, say, selling a doggie-doo keychain?
I have thousands of doggie-doo keychains, but they’re not for sale, nor can you buy my full-color Heliograph 1926 calendar. If the year “1926” ever comes around again, I’ll be a millionaire.
There are some people out there who would love to buy an ancient-stone or ancient-glass bead necklace, earrings, ring — all with materials that are 2,000 years old or more. All you have to do is REACH them somehow and convince them that the stuff you have is real.
That’s a big challenge, but the biggest challenge is to reach them at all.
Once you can reach them, you can work out the details, try to get a message across, see if you have anything of interest to them.
Until they ACTUALLY SEE YOUR AD or COME INTO YOUR GALLERY SPACE, they won’t have any way of knowing that you have those things for sale.
People respond to very specific things. Yuba Blue attracts customers who have been there before. New customers come in because old customers told them about the place, not because they stumble on it as foot traffic — there isn’t any foot traffic in Grass Valley, not any, not ever, since 9-11, and most small towns report the same phenomenon.
No foot traffic means no malls, no shopping, no browsing, no strolling on the streets, which is more or less guaranteed now that vehicles have been weaponized against unarmed shoppers and vacationing tourists.
Terrorism depends on terror. You can fight terrorism simply by refusing to be terrified, which means not caring what happens to you, which is, in the Age of Trump, not a bad idea — always keep in mind that at any moment, catastrophe is possible.
Fear is the new reality. I’ll explain:
Donald J. Trump is afraid. He’s REALLY afraid, paranoid, freaked out fearful about dying alone, as if dying with company is any better.
He really thrives on fear, anger, upset, conflict and confusion, which brings everyone involved down to his level, which he finds soothing.
You’re a kind, friendly and forgiving person, so you don’t mind bending a little to accommodate Trump’s little weakness, but at some point the bending over leads to kissing your own ass “goodbye”, and that might rankle you to the point of taking a stand against.
Well, that’s the situation in a nutshell, millions of people wondering what Trump is going to do next, what outrage he’s going to put on us this time just to get his ugly face into the news, and that leads to desperation, panic and eventually, overwhelm.
If you’re already at the point of giving up and caving in, you’re right where Trump and his evil friends want you.
I say “evil friends” because, if you know how to look, you can easily penetrate the thin disguises worn by — no, I won’t name them, I’ll let YOU see for yourself.
It’s easy to penetrate HypnoVeils.If you blink your eyes to make them water just a bit, you’ll easily see that “Mnuchin” is “Beelzebub”, “Conway” is actually “Lady Astoreth” and so on down the line.
Government does indeed have a Dark Side, a Shadow Government — the demons that possess the highest levels of government do it openly and shamelessly, because nobody believes what they’re seeing, anyway.
“I Love My Country, But I Fear My Government” is a tee-shirt that has already had its day, back in the sixties, but maybe it’s time to reinvent it, along with the motto on the New Hampshire quarter, “Live Free Or Die”.
Dammit, if you still think you have the leisure to be chasing after every little turn-on, you’re not only wrong, you’ll be dead wrong.
Now is the time to take some action, that that starts with the gallery, which is a group exercise that YOU can take part in, a year-long workshop that pays off bigtime, if you’ll only take it seriously and DO something with it, and it’s not enough to just help with the rent and send a few artworks.
There’s a world of social media out there, and it’s set up — rigged, if you will — so that only a dedicated group can work the controls, with everyone doing their part to run the ship.
The engineer can’t be off on some personal errand, when the engines need care. The ship’s doctor can’t be fooling around with a new experimental remedy when there’s triage do be done. The Yeoman can’t land on a nearby planet and survive.
So if you have no time, no money and no interest, what can you possibly do?
First of all, you can MAKE time. If you can’t make time, you’re not much in the way of a Being.
Secondly, you can CREATE MONEY. Again, if you can’ do that, you’re not much of a gamer.
Thirdly, you can change your fucking attitude, and BE interested. Once again, if you can’t make yourself be interested in something that isn’t naturally and automatically of interest, you’re not much of a Being.
That Weak Essential Self is going to get you into trouble, if it hasn’t already done so.
You’re the only one who can change the situation. All the controls are in your hands, and no one else’s.
How do you take control?
You need to take action. The very first action you can take without too much effort is to agree to the idea that you need to take action, then ask for help — in the Ashram or during a broadcast, in the chat is okay — on the next step.
If your job is to get the publicity going, make sure you do it. Don’t pass it on and expect someone else to do it — they may not, and you’re still the responsible party.
Fix anything that needs fixing, and do it right away — don’t depend on memory to serve you. Do it now.
I’m too old to go to the gallery every day dependably — some days and some hours are better than others, and it’s impossible to predict now which day will be “on” and which day will be “off”, so I’m very appreciative of the folks who take that pressure off me by working in the gallery one or two days a week.
My hope is that we’ll make enough in sales to cover their expenses and maybe even more, but that’s just my personal hope, not a plan and not a guarantee.
I manage the gallery and am on-call at any time when customers come in and ask about something that folks don’t know about, but it’s not “MY” gallery, it’s YOURS, and that’s where the buck really stops, at YOU.
When the gallery was in full-swing back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we did a LOT of art sales, jewelry sales and antiques sales, and we can do it again, but YOU need to help us achieve that.
If we’re making enough from the gallery, it means that YOU don’t have to keep digging in your pocket to support the community, and that’s all to the good. I don’t want to see the community get locked into the “New Blood, New Money” Syndrome, where you recruit just to raise money to maintain the community.
It’s much more elegant to raise the money without recruiting and proselytising, making converts and collecting True Believers. Not a good plan, makes a big mess in the end, requires a “Crystal Palace” style of worship, and creates a tax break for the local industrials.
That’s a terrible place to be, so don’t do it. Support yourself, don’t be supported.
I’ve done my part in terms of FINDING OUT THAT THE GALLERY WAS AVAILABLE, making sure we acquired the gallery — which happened in November, but we’re just now getting the space properly functional — and filling the space with saleable items that have good markups and high customer appeal, but as I said at the top of this article, if you have the best stuff in the world, but nobody knows about it, you have nothing.
So DO something to change your life for the better, and do it now! Get in touch, and ask how YOU can help!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby