Business Cards for Artists

On the "Advice for Artists Seeking Gallery Representation" thread a reader asked:

Hi Edward, Thank you for the "Advice for Artists Seeking Gallery Representation" resource. What do you think of artists using business cards with images like those at Moo.com I don't mean the mini cards just regular sized cards with the usual information on one side and a quality image of your work on the other side. I see how these could be seen as unprofessional in other careers. But what about visual artists? Thanks for your thoughts.

OK, so something about this question made me wonder whether it was written by someone affiliated with the company (might just be pre-caffeinated paranoia), but there's plenty to bat about within the general topic so I'll thank the reader either way.

A lawyer/collector friend of mine once told me that having a good business card was one of the most effective means by which you can convince people you have just met that they should take you seriously. That seemed a bit overstated to me at the time, but I've since started using a more substantial card stock and design for our gallery cards and noticed that, if nothing else, handing these to people is less likely to lead me to feel like making excuses for their quality. Back in the day when we were just getting started, we used a less expensive card, and who knows what that momentary hesitation/self-doubt ("Is this person making judgments based on the flimsiness of my card?") cost me in terms of making a good impression when meeting people.

Now there's a part of me that wants to say "It's just a card, for Pete's sake...the important thing is that it conveys my personal contact information." But I know myself that after an art fair or reception, when I later empty my pockets of all the collected business cards, I do make subtle judgments about people based on their quality. Having invested in themselves (as a good card suggests they have), I'm more willing to take them seriously in the abstracted context of remembering our conversation or why I took their card in the first place.

OK, so that's about cards for business people, but what about business cards for artists? And more to the point of the question, what about images on an artist business card? For me it entirely depends on how well designed the card is over all as to whether I find using an image cheesy or classy (with classy being my strong recommendation, but perhaps cheesy being more appropriate for your own purposes).

The central assumption here, of course, is that you'd use an image of your own artwork, and so, again, for me it depends on how well that works design-wise. If, for example, you have to shrink an image of your work down to the point that it's barely readable, why bother? If you crop a detail of a larger piece and use that, it could work, but it I've seen that look cheesy more often than not. Then there's those artists who change the image on the card frequently ("Shouldn't my card reflect my most recent series, if not my most recent work?" goes the defense of this strategy). My sense of that is that if you're at the stage of your art career that anyone in the world short of your spouse would know the difference, you probably don't need a business card. Actually, my stronger sense is that if you're doing this, you have way too much time on your hands and that rather than changing the image on your business card every two months or so, you should simply spend more time in the studio making work.

Then there are the "concept" business cards...clever incorporations of scale or shape or materials to reflect something about the artist's work. My first thought at seeing a card like this isn't that the artist doesn't take their business card seriously (such cards are often much more expensive to produce), but that they don't take their art that seriously...having willingly reduced it to a logo or branding giveaway.

For me, the best artist business card is the one that does what a business card should do: convey the artist's contact information in a clear type treatment, as well as convey something about the artist's professionalism (whether that is accomplished via an appropriate image of one's work or not will most likely depend on the work). A business card need not convey anything about the artist's actual work, in my opinion, though. For the vast majority of artists, postcards are infinitely better at conveying that.

My point here (and I think I have one) is that a business card is a professional tool used to convey contact information and make a statement about one's professionalism or lack thereof (either may be appropriate for one's ultimate purposes). It's usually not, to my mind, the best way to represent one's work, though. Don't make it do double duty unless your work is extremely well represented in that smaller format.

As with all such threads, these are my personal opinions and may not reflect those of other dealers, so don't throw out any cards you currently have if they're working well for you.