What I produce is virtual art — housed within the context of a 3-D environment. While it is arguably digital, that’s not how it will become known in the future, and virtual art IS the wave of the future, particularly that art aimed specifically at the cellphone user.
Yes, your 22nd century art collection will be housed within your cellphone or on the cloud, and collectors will go to great lengths to achieve uniqueness.
I have a very sophisticated ten-key padded lockable flash drive, into which I intend to place my UNIQUE Virtual Fine Art, to insure its scarcity.
I’ll remind you again that there are only three things that drive ANY market, to wit:
- SCARCITY — The scarcer the better, but you must be able to prove it.
- DESIRABILITY — This includes any provenance you may have regarding the work.
- CONDITION — Actually, they say “Condition is Everything” and I have to agree.
This dress was DESIGNED in virtual, but you can buy a wearable version of this very dress from me for a mere $200 including contact-free shipping.
So forget about the actual goods, let’s ship software — so, what kind of virtual art market can you expect to enjoy?
Who said “enjoy” was part of this deal?
Fine Art is tough enough to sell in the flesh, but when you’re selling non-tangible totally CONCEPTUAL ART, which is how Virtual Art will be conceived in the near and far-flung future, you have to go several steps further.
“Further than what?” you may well ask, and I have a ready answer: “Further than you’d ordinarily have to go.” The less tangible, the harder the sale.
What I mean is, you’ll have to develop the virtual art market yourself, because it doesn’t yet exist.
Not yet it doesn’t, but the isolation, lockdown and self-quarantine are just beginning — you can’t yet imagine the world of the next decade, but it’s a world in which it’s almost impossible to make a living from anything, let alone art, which is considered an “extra”.
Art is the first thing to go when the school budget gets cut. Science is second, followed by liberal arts, down to the level of industrial trade school, when things get really dicey, and they surely will.
Ah, well, where are your virtual art customers? Why would they put something on the wall, unless it’s a family photo of someone they miss having around? Framed photos, sure, but framed paintings?
Why would they buy something they can’t show off? No visitors means the paintings go unseen.
Isolation is a powerful enemy, yet it’s the most powerful tool of meditation, if it also summons Inclusion.
You expand outward at the same time you collapse inward, see? It’s a skill to be mastered.
Maybe we’ll save that for another dissertation. Meanwhile, I have some fabulous and exciting things for you to do, things that will take hours and hours, and will absorb you and give you tons of really productive enjoyment.
You can design an art object in Second Life and sell it on the marketplace, with over 1 million potential Second Life customers.
There’s no better way to Take Up The Awful Slack.
I’m not saying you can earn a living doing that, but you can spend many pleasant creative hours making items that give you the basis, the foundational material you’ll need to become a MAVEN or a FASHIONISTA or any of the many classes and categories of “experts” of all kinds, mostly self-described, who deal in vital art, craft and do-it-yourself skills and secrets, on youtube, facebook, instagram and other communications outlets.
If you can show someone how to occupy themselves for many hours and have FUN doing whatever it is, while bingeing their favorite music or podcast, and on top of that, to actually make MONEY at it, you’ve really got something.
Virtual Art is going to become a vital part of the investment community, in the same way that any gradable item can become a collectible, and you can not only get in on the ground floor today, you can learn to stay there.
Well, what I mean is, on the creative edge, where certainty is a state of mind, never a guarantee.
You can’t care how much or how many, when you enter the battlefield of fine art, but you CAN learn the rules, and master some of the fancier moves.
On thing for certain, you can only sell so many pieces of art per year, and that’ll be your limitation, your boundary for success.
So if the NUMBER of sales won’t ever go up, what will?
Why, MONEY, of course. Let’s take the example of Andy Warhol, who demonstrated that art doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be PRICED good.
I’ll give you an example. Here’s an item I’m willing to sell for $2500:
Yep, it’s a hand-painted coronamask. If you think a handpainted fabric facemask priced at $2500.00 is totally out of line, you haven’t been shopping at name-brand fashion houses recently.
Actually, $2500.00 is cheap.
Suppose it were hand-painted by Dali, and you could prove it with full provenance including the original bill of sale, photos of you with the artist in studio, etc.– how much do you think you could get for it?
I can tell you how much, based on the prices of signed original Picasso ceramics, which were $25 apiece when my Mom bought them from him on a trip to Spain in 1953 — they sell today for tens of thousands of dollars, IF you can find a legitimate one anywhere.
I have a huge collection of original Picasso linoleum cuts, mostly bullfighting and portraits of his wife. The entire collection is only $15,000.00 but it includes methods of marketing these items in today’s art collecting environment.
You’d have a tough time finding someone able and willing to buy ANYTHING these days, let alone fine art, and that goes double for virtual fine art, so what’s the deal?
How can we get anything going in any art market right now?
Well, the first step toward solving a problem — and having no income definitely counts as a problem — is to define it.
Defining the problem brings it into focus.
When you can do this operation with one thing, you can do it with anything, so it will come in handy as a tool for you in other areas as well.
What operation? Why, selling intangible art to folks who have no job, no home, no food, no medicine, no car, no hope, that’s all.
An easy task it is, too — there was never a better marketing atmosphere and positive customer outlook as we enjoyed during the Black Plague.
Of course, we were selling miracle cures for the Plague at the time. Would have worked out great, but we quickly ran out of customers.
That’s what’s happening to Trump. He’s killing off his biggest fans. Don’t go like that, when you’re selling virtual fine art.
Your customer is that kind of person who has a cellphone that’s seen the best time of its life over a decade ago.
That’s right — the stone-age geek is your primary client, and the more atavistic, the better.
You can’t get a more interested customer than someone who is unaware of the state of the Union, but you mustn’t take advantage of someone’s ignorance.
If they are as yet unaware of the Covid 19 situation, it’s really your obligation to mention that they might not be able to have friends over to view the art, so they’d be better off pushing it out there on facebook and instagram, which is exactly my point.
That’s where people will be living life, at least while the internet lasts.
Oh, did I not mention the collapse of the internet? It’s in all my 37th century Earth History books.
Not that we have books back in the 37th century like what kind of books you have today — first of all, until I arrived in the 20th century, I’d never actually SEEN paper before, nor had I ever seen a tree.
We don’t have trees, but if we did, they’d die of lack of water. The oceans vanished decades ago, nobody knows exactly when.
We keep time the old-fashioned way, by the year of the reign of our leader, the Great Mother Slime Mold — but you already knew that, if you’re a fellow-traveler from Outside the SIM.
Yes, SIM. What did you think you were in?
As far as price is concerned, you can approach it best in the Warhol tradition — whatever you can get for it is the price, and you DON’T bargain or lower your price, if you’re going to market the Warhol Way.
$2.4 MILLION DOLLARS is what I have in mind for my virtual supersculpture, which includes an entire town square surrounding your gigantic, enormous, colossal fine art sculptural statue in the square.
For an extra hundred bucks, I’ll throw in a fountain and a mailbox.
You think you can’t get that? Yes, you can. All you need is a celebrity to either pitch the product, or own it and then sell it with you as the broker, see?
The whole thing depends totally on YOU and the CUSTOMER, not on the work of art. It’s never the thing itself — it’s always about the market, which is about expectation and reward.
If you guess rightly, you can expect a reward.
Guess wrong, and you’ll have a garage-full of virtual art that you have to move, or else, and with this stuff, marking things down for sale is a BAD idea.
That’s not how you sell fine art. Don’t ever mark it down or discount it. If they quibble over price, they can’t afford it, and have no business buying it.
That’s like gambling with house money. Never do that.
Only gamble with money you can afford to lose. Now, do you know ANYBODY who can afford to lose money these days?
If so, you’re well on your way to success in the art market, but the chances are, you don’t. Everyone you know is either jobless, broke, or both.
So where’s your customer?
Clearly, not in your backyard, nor over the fence. You’ll find ALL your customers online. That’s where everyone went.
Some folks haven’t figured that out, yet. Don’t let yourself be one of them.
6:30 Pacific Time is when the July 4th “Click-Bait” workshop begins!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby