How aware should an artist be of their own market?

In the chapter of my book that I assume most people skip over fairly quickly, especially those not planning to actually open a gallery, like, say, artists looking for insights into how best to navigate the gallery system, I make a big point about thoroughly understanding both your market and who your competitors are. That chapter, on "Writing a Business Plan," details a document so daunting to create that I am willing to bet more than 70% of galleries under 3 years old in New York have never written one.

I know we opened Plus Ultra back in the day without one, and that it wasn't until I approached a bank for capital to move into Chelsea that I ever considered taking the time to do so. Beyond potential investors, though, the most important reader of your business plan is you. This should be a document you refer to like you would a road map, to guide you on what your focus should be as the ride gets bumpy or more complicated.

The part of writing a Business Plan that isn't about your own vision for the business and thus is the one that takes the most time (or did for me) is the subsection generally called "Description of the Industry," in which you not only familiarize your reader (a potential investor or perhaps a new employee in your gallery) with how the industry you're going to be working in operates, but more importantly you demonstrate to them that you're a safe investment (or how you wish them to think as your employee) because you actually know that industry well. As I note in my book, you do this:

[B]y offering your readers a detailed description of the art gallery business, including how it operates, how well it is doing at the moment, and how well it is likely to be doing in the foreseeable future. It is important that you cite reliable sources for your conclusions here and not simply offer your own opinions or conjecture.

Another part of your Description of the Industry in your plan should be a description of your specific niche in The Market. Here again, it's important to convince your readers that you understand this well enough that they can trust their money in your hands or know how best to work with you to help you meet your goals:

In The Market section you should describe the specifics of how you’re positioning yourself within the overall market you’ll be competing in. As is true throughout your business plan, your goal in this section remains to provide yourself a roadmap, as well as to convince your readers you have a firm grasp of this topic. To do this, describe the following: who your customers will be, what their needs are, and how you plan to meet those needs; go into detail about the size of the market and how recent market trends will impact that size; provide a matter-of-fact evaluation of your competition, including a list of who they are and what their strengths and weakness are; describe how you plan to position yourself within the market; discuss how your pricing strategy will work to help you meet your goals; and describe how you arrived at your sales estimates based on these combined factors.

Of course whether or not a dealer will engage in the painstaking research and reflection required to do all this probably depends on how competitive they wish to be in the market. Believe me, your competitors are doing all this and more. We've all heard the stories of the lengths powerful dealers have gone to to be competitive (one reportedly memorized all the contemporary auction results from the time he was a child, another visits collectors in their home and then, when the collector leaves a room, snaps photos of all the art they have on the walls for future reference), and indeed there's every reason to believe the most competitive forces in the business are gearing up in earnest for a battle for global domination like none ever quite seen before. To fight on this scale, though, you need real power and in the art market, like most other markets, information is power (hence the seemingly mindless memorization and secretive categorization efforts).

Yes, yes, yes, you're probably saying by now...that's interesting and all, Ed, but what's that got to do with artists? Your post has "artist" in the title. Art isn't about knowing your competition inside out, art is about something higher.

I'd agree that Art is about something higher, but an art career is exactly about knowing your market and knowing your competition. Just look at many of the giants of the last century. These included artists who wrote manifestos, most of which usually began with a devastating take down of their competition (including their predecessors, probably each artist's fiercest competition). These manifestos were not easy to write. They required a great deal of research and reflection. They required truly understanding what the competition was doing and what their strengths or weaknesses were. (Sound familiar yet?)

Today few artists are invested or even interested in the polemics of the manifesto career model, but the most financially successful among today's contemporary artists (like Hirst, or Koons, or Murakami) are certainly intimately aware of the market and what their competitors are doing.

OK, so several of the artists I know reading this are probably ready to head back and take another shower by now. Let me switch this around to make it a bit less about money and (hopefully) demonstrate why what I'm saying is important even if you're queasy about "the market." Let's change the question in the title to "How aware should an artist be of their competition?" Assuming that you're not only competing as an artist for collectors' money but also for critics, curators, and historians' attention, do you need to know what other artists are doing or can you simply burrow away in your studio and focus on your own work?

That probably depends mostly on what your own work is, but even more on what your career goals are. But stick with me here a moment. Let's take the high ground...let's say the career you're most interested in is one outside the gallery system...one in dialog with serious curators and other connoisseurs you personally invite to your studio.

Few things are more frustrating for an artist during a studio visit, I'm sure, than to have their work compared to that of so-and-so (especially compared as lacking in some way), but how can you possibly respond to such comparisons, pointing out the important differences, if you're unfamiliar with so-and-so's work? By not being able to respond, your work is perhaps left looking derivative to that curator. Of course, if the curator takes the time and is observant enough, they will eventually see the differences for themselves, but many of them are extremely busy, it took you months to get them over to your studio, and you can see them already checking their watch while you struggle to respond to the comparison. To me, this is a clear cut case in which being well aware of your competition is important.

Mind you, I fully understand that you can't know every artist out there, and that curators will compare work with some obscure artist they did a studio visit with while traveling through Central Asia or wherever, but should they compare your work with someone who's had a recent museum exhibition or highly acclaimed gallery show, you're left looking "out of the loop" if you can't at least comment on that other artist's work. Which is only to say that if you're a painter focused on geometric abstractions, you might want to spend some time familiarizing yourself with other well-received artists focused on geometric abstractions, and not to say you need to be an expert on the latest thinking in political performance-based work or whatever.

But that's another way of saying, know your niche. Or, know your market. There's a market for buying art, and another market for simply discussing and exhibiting art, but whichever is important to you, you'll do much better reaching your goals the more you understand that market.