If you’re reading this, there’s still a chance to jump on board. I’m planning a full-frontal economic surge this spring, just to illustrate how it can be done with no money and just a little of your time. My goal is to raise an unspecified amount of funds — which means I haven’t got a specific target or a specific amount as a money-goal. The money is irrelevant. I’m just doing this to prove it can be done and, if you took the time and spent the energy, YOU could be doing it just as easily as I.
First off, I’ve already told you in the previous blog how easy it would be to start a small business with a shed as the main tool. Don’t even dream a customer is going to walk in the door — that probably isn’t in your future. But you can use the shop to organize your offerings and make them accessible and easy to find and ship when their time comes and they have to leave the nest.
My intention is to build a shed for each online business, and keep everything under control by isolation and relentless order. Everything has a place, and everything is IN its place, where you expect to find it when you need it.
Nothing can be more frustrating or fearful than not being able to find a one-of-a-kind item that MUST be shipped, by eBay rules, within 72 hours of closing, if you’ve selected the “ship within 3 days” option, and you’d be a fool to choose otherwise.
If you can keep a perfect shipping record and a good list of satisfied customers, you have a chance to win the honor of being a “Fast Shipper” and this will increase your sales by about 7% per year, and I have the records to prove it.
It’s bone-chillingly easy to make $1,000,000.00 on eBay if you follow my simple rules, and don’t forget, I wrote the first official eBay Seller’s Guidebook the first year it started, and the rules haven’t changed, although the playing field is now quite clogged with phony listings and extravagant and clearly fraudulent claims.
It isn’t that those guys are getting away with murder. They are, and the poor bastards that get taken deserve every bit of it, because one single minute of research will reveal that those listings are a pure scam. There’s a sucker born every minute, and you can’t smarten up a chump. Chumps will be chumps.
The problem with the fake and phony million-dollar listings placed in the Pro Dealer’s Section by a wanna-be Picasso or Jackson Pollock, with an inflated sense of self-worth and an ability to slide by the eBay rules is that with all the crap in the high end place, you can’t put a legit piece, because it’s dominated by literally thousands of million-dollar listings that are clearly crap, clearly a rip, clearly someone’s idea of the perfect scam.
In a word, there’s no room for genuine appraise-worthy high-end fine art on eBay, and I hope that my half-million readers will get the point. Find another venue for your high-end art, because eBay won’t ever fix it. In fact, they LIKE the way it is.
The high-end auctions these days are handled in LIVE auctions, run by Sotheby’s and Christie’s on eBay channels, plus their own feeds. This does us no good whatever, and still leaves the Wall Street Bankers in charge of our money.
I have dozens of high-end art pieces, many of them in the million-dollar range, but can’t present them anywhere. If I had a sense of desperation, I might be persuaded to put them up on eBay, but I know they’d get lost in the jungle of junk, and they could sit there for years without a serious buyer anywhere in sight, because serious buyers know better than to shop for serious fine art on eBay.
Repair of the damage done to professional art dealers on eBay could be easily handled — just make the art dealers identify themselves as members of art dealers association or some other indication of pro status.
Artists have a special spot to list their own art, and that is not being respected by the con men who claim to be Picasso and Pollock, but what can you expect — honor from thieves?
It’s ironic that eBay will not allow me to list more than a few thousand dollars worth at a time — these are new limits imposed obviously by Homeland Security or economic pressure. The people at eBay customer service don’t have to be pleasant, and most of them aren’t.
In spite of this, I’ve learned that everyone gets the same crap treatment, a profound limit on the number of items you can list, and the amount of total cash you’re allowed to list for, which you can beg them to raise every 30 days, and clearly the multimillion dollar listings are grandfathered or they managed to raise their limit to several hundreds of millions of dollars, or they somehow cheated or hacked their way into multimillion dollar listings.
Okay, here are the basic rules for survival as a high-end art dealer on eBay:
- If you DO list high-end art on eBay, always use “Listed Artist” or “Listed American Artist” to identify the artist as professional with a legitimate secondary market.
- Never lie — don’t even stretch the truth. Be real, be honest, and you will never be sorry. If there’s a problem with the piece, mention it clearly.
- No Persuasion — If the customer needs to be convinced to buy the piece, it will come back in your face someday, if not as a return, as “no further sales”. Repeat customers are the bread-and-butter of any art dealer’s business plan.
- KISS it — “Keep it Simple, Stupid” is the perfect rule for any art gallery or dealership.
- Don’t Frame It — Show your artwork out of frame and offer to frame it any way they like. When you frame a piece, you are exercising your personal taste upon the piece and, don’t forget, a frame is furniture, and NOBODY except a decorator or a client should choose the frame.
- Certificates Are Vital — If you have provenance or written records, keep them. I have a painting that Jackson Pollock painted and threw down at my feet, cursing at a man who had just offered him $300 in cash for it when Leo Castelli was getting $100,000 for the same thing. Because I have no RECEIPT for it, even though I showed and painted with Jackson and Lee, IFAR will not accept it as genuine — that’s okay with me, because I never intend to sell it. It was a GIFT, even though he gave it with a guttural curse in his throat.
- Never Underprice — Setting cheaper prices will not sell the item. It’s YOU that people are reacting to, to YOUR VITAL ENERGY, reacting to YOUR VIBES. In short, customers can FEEL your presence or absence, and they buy or don’t buy according to the vibrations that you put into your listings — another example of a “Schmuck Detector”, like the kind that the Genie Schmuck-Slayer would have loved to have on hand, or maybe you haven’t read “DarkSide Dreamwalker” yet???
- Make sure of your market, and check to see listings in your target category. Get a sense of the surrounding listings. Adjust your prices to get away from the phonies. If their listings are mostly at $100,000.00, price your works under or over that amount.
- FIND ANOTHER MARKETPLACE besides eBay. Use eBay only at first, then when you gain some momentum, depend less and less upon eBay to deliver the customers.
- Have Local Auctions — Find a nonprofit charitable organization that would love to use our art to fundraise for larger more expensive projects, such as a new church building, or a dojo or a campground. We have sold Masters, Moderns and Contemporaries and through the sales of their original works, we have raised over $100,000.00 at a single fundraiser auction, when the participating organization provided the customers.
That’s all she wrote for the moment. I have a new shed out back, and we have a photo session scheduled momentarily and yes, I know it’s still dark outside, but I have plans … watch for a new effect in an hour or two … I call it “The Sun”. If you like it, I’ll leave it in.
If you lived in India or Pakistan, you could easily find Mughal miniatures to put up, and they’d be a hit. If you live in Spain, you can easily obtain Goya Etching Re-Strikes for about $50 U.S. and resell them for about $350 with no trouble whatever, or I’ll buy them and do it to show you how easy it is.
Anyone living in Japan will have a ready market for Henry Miller lithographs, and if you live in Norway, Odd Nerdrum is your first choice — he’s connected to the gallery in which my work is shown in Oslo, so it’s easy to get in touch with him.
Should you have the misfortune to live in San Francisco (I’ll get some letters on that one, and that’s why I put that jab in there) you can get in touch with Grace Slick for some White Rabbit prints or original acrylics. If you do that, say hello for me and tell her that I found the photos from the White Rabbit RCA session, if she still wants them.
I don’t use email, don’t have it on my system, nor any other form of inter-human communication other than my videogames, Diablo II and TF2, that’s it. I’m hard to reach by internet, harder to reach by phone and increasingly unwilling to spend time in futile pursuits such as prodding folks to get up off their arses and get to work.
Those who have taken on a chunk of work could do well to tell the others that nothing horrible happens when you do that.
My intention over the next few weeks relative to eBay is to develop and sell some of my Art Installation Fully Decorated and Furnished Micro, Mini and Tiny Homes in the range of $110,000-$450,000 including the wall-art, sculptures and mobiles.
If I were allowed to list in the millions, I would list some at my favorite lucky number from when I raised money for film-makers — $2.4 million. I managed to find 14 banker boxes full of replies from people willing to risk that to make a Sammy Davis or Chris Lawford film.
Big Money is out there in full force, and they’re bored, bored, bored. I plan to make a Beverly Hills Backyard Shack that sells for $2.4 million, but damn it, I can’t list it on eBay. Any ideas?
Another plan is for a $2.4 million Florida or California Beach Garden Shack, with mural art and dark walls, a two-story Frank Lloyd Wright straight lines & curves against angles that would fit right in with the Palm Beach, Santa Barbara or Laguna Beach crowd.
How about a $2.4 million Backyard Shack for the person who has everything? One thing money can’t buy, they tell me, is poverty. I can prove that untrue with this Poverty Shack Getaway stuffed with two and a half million bucks worth of fine art by any artist you’d care to name. I will bet this gag would get into the news on a slow news day.
URGENT NOTE: I need some volunteer help this coming weekend to move hundreds of banker boxes full of heavy stuff.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby