Getting accepted into a prestigious gallery, art fair, or exhibition feels like a massive win—but it is not the finish line for your creative business.
If you think landing one big show guarantees smooth sailing for the rest of your career, it’s time for a reality check.
In this episode of Art Crush, professional artists Paula Telizyn and Fi Marks dismantle the myth of the big break. Too many artists put the entire responsibility of their success into the hands of a curator or event organizer, only to be let down when the sales don’t automatically roll in.
Paula and Fi discuss the massive mistake artists make on social media when promoting an upcoming show: spending all their energy hyping up the venue while completely forgetting to market their own artwork.
Galleries and event organizers are focused on promoting their spaces. It is your job to promote the transformational value of your original art.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why relying on a gallery or curator to build your career is a trap.
- The common social media mistake artists make when accepted into a show.
- How to stop just having “nice chats” at your booth and start selling your art.
- Shifting your marketing focus from the event to the client experience.
- Taking full responsibility for your creative success and art sales.
Listen now to take control of your next exhibition!
00:00:00 Speaker 2: Welcome to Art crush with artist Fi Marks, and Paula Telizyn where we talk about running an art business in twenty twenty six. Being an artist, a professional artist, being a woman artist, and more.
00:00:24 Speaker 2: Hello Fi
00:00:26 Speaker 3: Hi, Paula.
00:00:27 Speaker 2: So today we’re going to talk about shows, galleries, art fairs, events, but not in the way that people might think, because I think those are talked about to death on every other podcast or whatever in articles and stuff. What we’re going to talk about instead is the artist’s role and responsibility when it comes to those events. So I’ve said in the past, I’ve interacted with a lot of artists who have told me, like, if I get into this one gallery, my career is made. If I get into this one show, everything will be smooth sailing ever after. I just need to be in that event, that space, that show with that curator, whatever, one time, and that’s it for the next three decades, my career is absolutely made. And then they do that one event, that one show or whatever, if they’re lucky. and nothing happens, nothing has changed and they’re immediately let down. This happens to a lot of people. and if they even get into that space, they put all the expectation and responsibility of their success onto somebody else’s hands, even if they’re paying that somebody else for the wall space, the booth space, the event space, whatever. If they’re, they, they’re paying for it. So you were saying something really interesting before we hit record. So I’m going to hand this over to you,
00:01:46 Speaker 3: what I was saying to Paula before we started recording is when Paula mentors a artist, she will often say, you have an event, go make a big thing of it, show your Excitement. It’s the best thing ever. Which totally agree with. But what I was saying was I have seen a lot of social media posts from artists who tend it because it’s easier to to big up somebody else. So they will tend to go on and say, I’m so privileged, I’m so lucky to be part of this event. Um, it’s so well organised. The setting is amazing, come along and see for yourselves. Within that, there is no mention of their art or what they are selling. Well, there’s that dirty word again. and why they’re there. And more than important, as we keep, keep going on about is what the clients, the people who attend the event will get from the artist and the art that you are showing that tends to not even be mentioned. It becomes all consuming about the event. And it’s the same with galleries. Often people will be like, I am so lucky I am in such and such a gallery. they are amazing. look at this. This is my art in the window. And it’s all about the gallery, not about their work. And we have sort of been led to believe that the other side of the coin, if you are a gallery owner or a gallery worker, or you run an arts event, that they are on the side of the artists, this isn’t necessarily the case. They will be talking about the event as well because it’s their event. That’s what they’re being. They’re doing what they should be doing. That’s fine, but it would be nice if, oh, we’ve got this artist and they’re doing this, that and the other, I mean I have seen some that say, oh, alphabetically will show you each artist and say what they do, but they’re not really bigging it up. They’re just using the artist statements and showing a piece of artwork. And so it really is down to us as artists to talk about what the people will get coming to the event that they won’t get from just visiting your website. You are persuading people to come and see your original art in the flesh, so to speak, and buy it. That’s what you want. It’s not just about having nice chats. Thanks to everybody who came and we had a nice chat. That’s another one that I often see. And it’s like, yeah, okay, well, you can have a chat with somebody over Zoom or on the phone or whatever. That’s not why you are at this event. You’re at this event to sell your artwork. And Yes, you will be talking and engaging, but all along it’s persuading and marketing, persuading and marketing. And, again, it’s like that subtle difference. So people think, oh, tick. Yes, I’ve done my social media, I’ve bigged up the event. Um, so now I should just do really, really well. And I have actually also had people saying when I’ve said, yes, I’ll be sharing the event on my social media. I’ve got so many followers and I have heard galleries and event organisers say, oh, that’s great, because that means I don’t have to. And, you know, thereby it is not your responsibility to big up the event. Your responsibility is to big up your art and what people will get when they come and see it. What why they must. Because it will change their lives.
00:05:44 Speaker 2: Yeah. Or improve their lives in some way. one of the things I think we need to say in terms of, uh, the idea around these events, these galleries, these art fairs and whatever is that if you are paying money to show your art there, even if it’s juried, so you’re paying whatever fifteen hundred pounds for a booth at the fair or whatever you are their customer. When you’ve exchanged the money to show your work, they have done their job. Yes, they need to promote the event to a degree, but they don’t really have to because you’ve paid them for the service of showing your work in their space, in whatever form that takes. So bear that in mind. This is why a lot of the pay to play galleries, why I despise them as a whole, without exception, despise pay to play galleries because the artist is the customer. They don’t need to sell your art to make money. They’ve made their money. Even if they say they’ll charge, you know, twenty percent on top or whatever. They’ve made their money on you. They don’t need to put the effort in. So that’s number one. Number two, when you big up your art at an event or in a space, because that shows the layperson. So these are people who are unfamiliar with art as a professional, but they like art. it shows a layperson that you’ve had validation by a professional. So a juried art fair has chosen your art. Therefore your art now is more important in your potential customers eyes or clients eyes or collectors eyes. and so when you big up the event and your work at the event, you are increasing the amount of validation that your art gets. Oh, actually, you know, I thought Fi Marks was just a woman who painted in her kitchen and sold some art, but actually, this art fair thinks she’s great. I’m going to take a second look. Or she showed up in this magazine. Now she must actually be somebody I should take a second look at. Right. You’re giving them those tools. Because again, we’ve said in a previous episode, people are not creative. They are just taking stuff in. We’ve we have a society now that no longer gets bored because there’s always something to consume apps or movies or whatever, they don’t get bored. They don’t have creativity. It’s not taught in schools. It’s not exercised as adults. so we need to give people context and, show our validation. So if you are at a gallery and you think that’s all you have to do, the gallery is going to promote, you no, you are responsible for making people get excited for helping them understand why they need to go there and see your work specifically. And it’s not just come out and say hi, which I admit I’ve been guilty of when I was doing my shows and events way, way back, there’s been, oh my God, more than ten years ago, I would say, come out and say hi because I didn’t want to be like, come out and buy my work and be just be upfront, right? It feels a little bit friendlier, but it doesn’t actually give us person a reason to come out and see you. So you’re responsible for, for bigging up the event, bigging up that you are in this event, and why people, as Fi said earlier, why they need to come out and see and experience your art in person. This is really important. Spell it out and market a lot. So even if you’re at a place, let’s say you’re at a tea house or coffee shop and it’s your first solo show, but it’s just your art along the wall in a, in a coffee shop. and I’ve seen this with other artists, you can either be like, yeah, when you go get a coffee, just look to the left and check it out. Or you can actually arrange with the coffee shop to do an opening event and let people come in, have an artist talk and everything else. You can actually create the fuss and the fervor around your event. You can contact the press and get PR, you can hand out flyers in the neighborhood as well, or go door to door and put them in mailboxes or whatever. But as artists, we need to do that. And you don’t just say, come see a show at X, Y, Z coffee shop or gallery or whatever you say. Come see the latest Fi Marks original or whatever your name is. Um, at this exclusive two day only event, this is your chance to meet the artist both days from seven to nine p m, where she’ll be available to answer questions and really get you excited about whatever, right. You are responsible for doing that. And so many artists do not understand their role. But as Fi so rightly said, you need to put your art in context. It’s not just thank you to XYZ Coffee Shop for having me. No, it’s my work is here. XYZ coffee shop is amazing. Come and see my art and then experience their coffee or then experience rest of the event. Put yourself front and center. You’re a business. You’re trying to get people excited. You need to be bold and explicit in your marketing and take responsibility for that.
00:10:30 Speaker 3: Yeah. What just came into my head, Paula, was that often this can be awkward when An event like an art fair or an art trail is organised, it goes through a middle person. So there is somebody organising the event. they are the person that you tend to liaise with and you’re not liaising with the person whose premises you are going to be exhibiting in. So you haven’t got that clarity. And that, again, needs to be I mean, that’s this is just what I’ve thought. Now you need to be able to go to where you are exhibiting and say, this is what I want. I’m more than happy to promote the coffee shop. house, whatever garden. But can you do the same? I will market for you as well if you market for me. If you’re not going to do that, then that’s fine. I’ll just talk about the artwork because that’s again, people are almost like embarrassed. It’s that awkwardness because they’ve been allocated this space. They haven’t got that relationship with the person whose space it is. Often the person whose space it is might be doing it for a whole load of reasons. and they might not think that they have a role in that apart from putting your art on the walls. So they’re showing your artwork. That’s it. That’s their job done. They didn’t sign up for anything else. They didn’t sign up to support your work to market who the artists are in their space, anything like that. They just agreed to have the art on the walls. because you’re having that third person and we’ve talked about, hiring out your own space and being really clear. And the more that us as artists take control of the space where we’re showing our artwork, the easier that will become because we won’t have that awkwardness, that relationship will have already been developed.
00:12:38 Speaker 2: I think, in a lot of cases, the artists are so grateful to be picked that they forget that they are actually the ones making money for everybody, right? So there’s this, sense of, oh, thank God. Um, Bob Gallery chose my art. I must be special. So I should be grateful. So they’ll ask me to come back again and they forget that this is a business agreement. You are offering a benefit to the gallery the same way that they’re offering the benefit to you. They give you space and an event in exchange for you making salable art and bringing people in with your name and quality of your work and whatever. so I think a lot of times because I was thinking this as you were talking, a lot of times artists are reluctant to be like putting their art front and center because they’re so busy being grateful to be chosen.
00:13:26 Speaker 3: Exactly, exactly. And that’s become the norm. It’s like, oh, well done. You got into such and such a show. Well done. You’ve got an exhibition. Well done. You know, it’s like, hang on a minute, hang on a minute. This is just the showcase. That’s not the end product, me being here. The end product is me selling my work. This is why I’ve turned up. And it shouldn’t be haphazard that. Oh yeah. You know. Oh it happened or it doesn’t happen. I mean I’d say I will put hand on heart and go. In the past I haven’t had that clarity. And I’ve been like, oh, well, you know, it’s just getting out there. You’re promoting yourself, you’re talking to people. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t sell. and I wouldn’t say beat yourself up if you don’t sell, but When we go back to that self reflection, when you reflect, was there anything else you could have done to get your ideal client avatar in?
00:14:25 Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. it’s the data and owning the responsibility of what you actually have done. because I’ve been in the coaching space for a long time, I see a lot of people in these, groups. So I’ve paid to be in a few groups and things where they say like, oh, I can’t get clients, I’m doing everything I can. And then the person leading the group will be like, what have you actually done? And so they’ve done busy work. I’ve rearranged my files on my computer. I’ve, put something new on my website. I put a post out last week on social media and that’s all they’ve done, but they’ve felt like they’ve done a lot more because they’ve done the busy work. It’s like when you spend all the time designing your logo, but never actually launching your business as though the logo matters that much, which it doesn’t. It doesn’t to the degree people think it does. and so people feel like they’ve done enough and they haven’t done enough, but I’ve taught.
00:15:19 Speaker 3: I was just going to say it’s doing the right stuff, you know, doing the stuff that is going to, move your business on. Not just any stuff, any stuff counts.
00:15:30 Speaker 2: Yeah, it does have to be the right stuff. So when I say to clients like, what have you done to move yourself forward professionally, and what have you done to move yourself forward personally to actually pull that data out and say, okay, actually, professionally, I haven’t moved myself forward the way I thought I did. I’ve just when I went to post on social media, I end up scrolling and it felt like I was doing something right. it’s also that same thing where people get caught in the research. I’m going to research twenty galleries and see which one is right for me. And then they spend a week doing all the research, doing the reviews, never once actually checking to see if the gallery is taking unsolicited submissions. You know, it’s.
00:16:06 Speaker 4: Well.
00:16:07 Speaker 3: It’s still open.
00:16:08 Speaker 2: Exactly, exactly what the reputation is. They’re just doing what it amounts to being busy work. When I’ve taught, the segment on collaborations in my courses, right? That tends to be an eye opener because when you collaborate with a gallery or a show or another business, it’s approaching on an equal footing that makes a difference. When I was doing my first art career, I don’t know what to call it first art career, but certainly at the beginning of my, major art career, way back, I actually approached another organization that could use my work and we hammered out an agreement where they would promote me to their tens of thousands of followers. I would promote them and they would use my work, give me a charitable write off. in some of their fundraising ended up being a very, very smart decision. I didn’t come to them and give them all the cards being like, oh, thank God you picked me. I came to them as a business saying, I have something that can help your business move forward. You have an audience that would be receptive to my work. How do we work together in a way that benefits us both? And it’s the same thing when you go to a gallery, you don’t go, oh, thank God they picked me. You go, I have something that can improve your position in the art world. You have space I need. How do we promote each other and changing that narrative now? Galleries will push back and be like, well, we can exchange you. Artists are a dime a dozen, whatever. I would definitely flip them the bird at that point. Even mentally. so some galleries and spaces and shows won’t like that because artists are so busy being grateful for the scraps they’re thrown. They don’t realize that they are actually the one who should be holding the entire meal and not asking for scraps. And so, so that mental position, I think is really, really important. So as you big up your shows to the best of your ability, sometimes you just can’t because sometimes the, the event or show or space is shit. But to the best of your ability, you change the narrative around how you feel about yourself and your art and how other people see you. And this is not arrogance. This is showing up knowing you are a skilled professional with something of value. So we’re not saying you’re the best artist in the world because that’s all relative and subjective. And whatever. We are saying that you need to see yourself as a skilled professional with art that is valuable, that can move other venues forward. If you collaborate on an equal footing, you’re providing your skilled work and highly valuable and desirable work and marketing. They are providing a venue and their audience, and that’s how you approach things. When you are doing shows as much as you can. like I said, sometimes it just doesn’t work. Sometimes you do the best of your ability. But I have seen artists run with that and turn shows that could have been mediocre into something really great, because they took the responsibility for bringing people through the door, and that is important to do.
00:19:19 Speaker 3: I think the shift is in the word collaboration rather than, um, having the opportunity and the things that often have been said. Everything, every show you ever do is a collaboration. So if you go into it with that mindset, that should feed into how your marketing, that show.
00:19:43 Speaker 2: And the mindset that now you need to think of yourself if you don’t already do so as a skilled professional, because everywhere we turn, we have people putting down the arts. Oh, it’s nice to to play with crayons all day. Must be nice to to just get your hands dirty. Must be nice to whatever. Your work isn’t valuable though. Go get a real job, right? We have that at every turn. That art is not a value, but it absolutely is.
00:20:10 Speaker 3: And so many artists get told, well, you’re just going to have to go and get a job. They don’t, you know, it’s almost like your job as an artist doesn’t exist. The job of an artist is a non-entity. If you’re not selling your art, you’re going to have to go and get a job. They don’t even put the word real in it. They’re just saying, go get a job.
00:20:32 Speaker 2: This idea of the starving artist drives me freaking nuts. And artists themselves joke about it, but the words we use, even if we say we’re joking, actually impact how we see ourselves, So if we take courses saying things like, don’t be a starving artist, here’s a course. Or we we joke and say, oh, money’s a bit tight this month. I’m a starving artist. We actually reinforce the idea that artists as a business should be starving. That’s normal. Why try so hard? So, Reframing how we see ourselves, calling our events and shows and all of that with galleries and whatever as collaborations approaching our collaborations as equal partners, instead of being so grateful to be chosen and then marketing ourselves as people who create beautiful works that improve the lives of our clients and customers and collectors will change how you speak about yourself. And you’ll never call yourself a starving artist or an aspiring artist ever again. You’re a skilled professional doing important work, and this will affect how you big up your events, your shows, and everything around what you do so that you feel more comfortable getting the PR, doing the marketing and expecting to get that marketing in return from the collaborations that you are doing. So I think that pretty much wraps up this episode because otherwise we’ll be going in circles covering the same sort of topics. Is there anything else that you wanted to add? Fee?
00:22:14 Speaker 3: Nope, don’t think so.
00:22:16 Speaker 2: Awesome. Okay, so we’d be interested in hearing from other artists. What have your experiences been? Have you had similar experiences, different experiences? Have we changed your mind about how you approach your art business? Have we maybe improved how you feel about yourself in a world that doesn’t appear to value art in a world run, unfortunately, by tech bros who, thank goodness, are all getting old, so hopefully they’ll be gone. Uh, let us know what you think in the comments below and don’t forget to like, subscribe, follow and share. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, audible, uh, Amazon Music, iHeart podcasts, and more. Wherever your favorite podcast episodes are found, we should be there too, and we will see you in the next episode. Episodes come out every Saturday. We’ll see you in the next one.
