Marketing Mondays: A Week's Worth of Useful Reading

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Surfing my favorites blogs and websites, I've come across a number of interesting sites that offer some of the same territory as Marketing Mondays. I thought I'd share them with you. Then, reading them over, I decided to add a few related websites and books. This was going to be just a short item, but now it's gone and turned itself into a Marketing Mondays post. Click on titles to access the links.

Artists and Dealers Writing About Art Marketing

Joyce Owens: Artist on Art

This is the blog that inspired the post, so it gets top spot. It's subtitled A Black Woman Artist Speaks. Will You Speak Back? Hell, yeah, Joyce! I just comment on your current post. Owens has an intermittent series going called 21st Century: New Rules for Artists. Check it out. Amid the many cogent ideas is this short one: No Artists = No Galleries. So simple, so true. Spend some time scrolling, as the series is seeded among other interesting posts. Owens is based in Chicago, so she may be introducing you to a whole new territory, too. She gets pride of place in the visuals, above. That's her snapping a self portrait. I pulled it from her website

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Morena Media

Subtitled The Artist's Business Digest, it serves as both a digest of business articles useful to artists (disclaimer: Marketing Mondays has been mentioned), and articles by the editor, Karen Miranda Augustine. She won't coddle you. "These are the facts: we live in the 21st century. If you're not on-line, you don't exist," she says in a recent post, Off-Line and Left Behind. And check out her blogroll for art business and marketing sites. Augustine is based in Toronto, which explains the funny spelling of words like favourite and colour.

Edward Winkleman Blog
Subtitled, art/politics/gossip/tough love--and covering every one of those topics--the blog also reaches out to the artists in his readership. Yes, I've mentioned this blog before, but good information bears repeating. Winkleman's informative series, Advice for Artists Seeking Gallery Representation, was culled from his many posts as a stand-alone section. His book, How to Start and Run a Commercial Gallery is also very helpful to artists who wish to know how to connect with the folks who are starting and running those galleries. I wrote about it here.

Non Profits

New York Foundation for the Arts

NYFA, for short, is a non-profit that helps artists in all kinds of ways. Related to this post are its Business of Art articles. Click here for the live-linked list.

I'm sure there are others in this category. Fill me in.

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Business

Art Market Monitor

As its title says it's about the art business, which is different from artists dealing with business issues. Still, it's full of news that artists will find useful: who's stopping where on the curator go round (if you want to get your work before curators, you'd better know who and where they are); market sales, auction news, the diamond market, art theft. It's not what you would call fun reading, but if you're going to put your art out there, you might as well know what there is. It's edited by Marion Maneker.

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The Art Newspaper

The hardcopy newspaper has a digital edition, which you can access online. You can even subscribe for free. Its content is at the nexus of art business, artists, and art, so it's easier reading that the strictly business sites. It even has five years of Art Basel Miami Beach special issues in downloadable PDF format.

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Lindsay Pollock Art Market Views

More on the art market. One sidebar gives you a link to Pollock's own stories. Another gives you the headlines of stories Pollock has culled from the news. Did you know, for instance, that the Velvet Painting Museum has closed?

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Books

I've written about these volumes in previous posts. But since we're talking Marketing, and it's a new year, I'm mentioning them again.
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The Artist's Guide: How To Make A Living Doing What You Love by Jackie Battenfield. This is a great book with eminently useful info for building and sustaining a career in art. Battenfield talked to art pros from all over the country (disclaimer: including me), and what she couldn't fit into the book, she put into her website, published as Reality Check Interviews. I interviewed Battenfield here and wrote about the book here. If you can afford just one book in this category, this is the one. But since books are a deductible business expense, I say spring for these others, too:

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Art/Work: Everything You Need to Know (and Do) As You Pursue Your Art Career by Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber, published in 2009. Bhandari runs the gallery at Mixed Greens in Chelsea. Melber is a lawyer who runs the Art Law Blog. Both are deeply supportive of artists. The layout features the authors' text bookended by related and supporting quotes from artists, dealers, curators. It covers all the current issues, from Art Fairs to Courtesy Discounts to the nuts and bolts of preparing, pricing and promoting yourself and your work..
Note: Bhandari and Winkleman will participate in Blog It!, a panel discussion in Manhattan this Friday, January 15. Seating is free but you must RSVP to attend.

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I'd Rather be in the Studio: The Artist's No-Excuse Guide to Self-Promotion by Alyson B. Stanfield, published in 2007, offers solid, well-organized advice from a Midwest-based professional who has been a museum curator and is now a business coach. The focus here is squarely on promoting your career, not on the larger topic of the career itself. You might also check out Stanfield's s ArtBizBlog, subtitle: For the business of being an artist.

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Do you know of other useful publications? Post the info in the Comments section.