Time + Money + Resources, Part IV

—The art world—

For several posts, I have been exploring this formula for artistic success: time plus money plus resources. Recently, I have found another twist to the concept. Some expenses are timed expenses. Every month I have to pay something toward the resources that run my studio: my phones, my insurance, my gas, my electricity, my alarm system, my Web hosting and domain registration, my rent, my water, my post-office box, and my internet connection. Whether I used these or not, I have to pay for them within a limited period of time and often at higher than residential rates. I have a limited amount of time to spend paying for them. I am not flush with time so it is costing me time as well as money.

This is a double whammy. In my formula of time plus money plus resources, I have a limited amount of time to pay these bills, and I cannot grow this time. As I am limited in one of the variables, my chances of growing things in my favor are severely disadvantaged. Meanwhile, if I can't pay on time, the cost relative to time increases as the bills pile up and fees and interest are added. The only way to view such a situation is to understand that it is rigged against me. It's costing me time twice.

With this knowledge I can make a decision that seems increasingly logical and necessary: I can eliminate as many cyclical expenses as possible, replacing them with expenses that recur only when I can afford them. For example, I can add minutes to my phone when I have money and if I don't, I don't. Another way to combat this situation is by collaborating with others and sharing resources so that we can double the time relative to money and resources used. In doing so, I buy myself time and money, with only a partial decrease in resources proving again that this formula tends to move in one of two directions: increasing or decreasing exponentially.

Time + Money + Resources, Part III

—The art world—

Sometime last year, I introduced the idea of an equation for success in an art career. I said that a successful art career is equal to time plus money plus resources. It's a simplistic formula, intended to illustrate the struggle we all engage in just to get to the point of a healthy art practice. It's basically an economics and ecology sort of equation, leaving out all the other elements of creativity.

But I pointed out that it's a recursive formula, feeding back into itself. When life is costing us time and money and resources, we spend each asset on the other, moving away from financial success. When we have an excess of any of them, it tends to enable us to increase all of them. We either spend time, money, and resources and lose, or we gain each of them.

Art is a luxury. Even for the artist. Art can only happen after the cost of living is paid. Below the bottom line, the equation moves backwards into negative numbers. Above the bottom line, the equation moves forward. It literally either starves or gets fat.

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and, in short, you are for ever floored."

Along the lines of this Dickens quote, and sticking with our analogy, if we indicate the bottom line by using a zero as a starting point, we can plug imaginary numbers into the time + money + resources equation. In order for a successful career in art to happen, more of the assets in my equation have to be a more positive number (i.e., in excess of merely living). If more of the assets are more negative (not getting by), then the art career doesn't happen and the equation moves backward, further away from a successful career.

Let's complicate things. Let's expand the equation and say that each asset is either gained from or spent on the other two. We now test the limits of analogy and get ridiculously specific, but it helps to illustrate my point.

Time as (moneyA + resourcesA)

plus

Money as (resourcesB + timeA)

plus

Resources as (timeB + moneyB)

Let's take the last of the parenthetical calculations, which states time + money equals resources. Remember, each of these assets can be gained or spent. If I gain positive 1 money but spent negative 1 time to get it, everything remains the same, the money is just enough for subsistence. I've no time or money left for developing my art practice. My resources do not grow. I'm tired and need time for rest. But if I get twice the money out of my time, I'll generate new resources that can buy me more time through efficiency and productivity, thus earning me additional dollars. I suppose it's basic economic theory, though I never learned it this way in college or high school.

But, we are still speaking abstractly. Coming back to the real world (with a little more insight), I've found that it helps me to place a monetary value on my time. I can value it, for example, at $25 an hour. It also helps to value my resources. How much time and money do I spend on them? How much do I use up?

For example, when I first started going to an artist meetup almost an hour away from my studio, I calculated the gasoline and wear and tear on my van at 55 cents mile, and I calculated the time I spent at $25 an hour. Then there's the money for tolls, coffee, and a bowl of soup if I was hungry. I learned that I was spending in excess of a hundred dollars hanging out and decided that, for a time, it was worth it. Nonetheless, I only lasted a few months before my van had to be junked. I know that it cost me some months of owning my van. I can evaluate that, and I do not feel upset about the van breaking down because I understood what the costs were.

I realize that I'm geeking out on this topic. But the reality is, I need to be clearer about the economics of art making so that I'm not always so confused and angry about how hard it is just to get to make art.

Time + Money + Resources, Part II

—The art world—

I have made it a goal to limit myself to showing in one competitive group show a year. Once I get in, I'm supposed to stop entering competitions until the next year. I haven't got very far with this goal because, at the moment, I can't afford to enter even one competition, let alone how many entries it will take to get into one show. But the goal gives me some guidance. It's a rule.

Most artists see competitive group exhibitions as opportunities for exposure, not sales. Or sometimes artists say they are showing for experience, which seems to mean another line on the show list. Hopefully, this equates to reputation. If you have a strong show record, then your work is more valuable in a gallery setting.

But how much do these credentials cost? Do you want to be in a half-dozen shows a year? Less? We know that an artist only gets accepted into a fraction of the shows he or she enters. This cost could be offset by sales at the exhibitions, but we know that an artist only sells work in a fraction of the shows he or she is accepted into.

So, let's consider some completely invented odds.

Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that I get into one out of every twenty shows I enter. How realistic this is depends on the kinds of shows I enter, how smart I am about evaluating the jurors, and how conventional and trendy my work is. So this figure is just for illustration. Entry fees seem to range from twenty to forty dollars, so let's just say it costs me thirty dollars to enter a show including postage. Let's also say that it costs me fifty dollars to ship my work to and from the show. And let's say that I sell one piece out of every twenty shows I get into.

Now, let's do the math.

Over the past four years, let's say I entered four hundred shows for a cost of $12,000 in entry fees.

I got into twenty shows

I spent $1000 in shipping.

I sold one piece for $2000.

Total profit or loss before any expenses other than shipping and entry fees:

-$11,000.

I lose over ten grand or $2500 a year to sell one painting in four years. On top of that, I spent 2400 hours entering the shows and mailing the work. I expect the same work will sell eventually through a gallery, so I won't factor in the cost of supplies and overhead.

We might say that it's worth the investment of over $200 a month to get me the exposure and reputation. Some would say it's worth it just to get to show the work.

If you have a good day job, you might justify it. $200 is not that much money for some people. But for some artists, that's the rent.

Is it excessive to put your work in five shows a year or is that a better goal than my one? It would take a considerable degree of discipline to enter a hundred shows a year—that's one entry every few days. Like blogging this blog, it quickly feels like stuffing notes in bottles and casting them into the sea. Many artists use the strategy of only entering regional shows where they can develop a local following and attend the receptions. Plus, they save on shipping (though not delivery). That's a good goal, but doesn't change the other expenses. Some artists get so well-established and their work is so good that they get into more shows than they are rejected from. That makes it far more worth it, but it still doesn't reduce the entry fees. Hopefully their sales increase as they get better at getting into shows, however. But that's not a given.

And, here's another illustration. If I were to sell a painting for around a thousand dollars every couple weeks, my friends would be amazed. Yet the gallery would take half the profits and that would literally leave me with $13,000 in gross sales before the overhead of art supplies and my studio.

I realize that, in our soundbite world, few would want to read a blog that looks so closely at numbers. That's a problem. We should have been required to do math like this in art school. In sociology and linguistics, they generate long equations that are supposed to tell them something and they don't get a degree until they learn to do it. But in art school, we get as far as scaling a canvas and not much further and we never talk money—ever. That parallels the art world rule of never talking money.

So, I'll continue to explore this topic in future posts, if only to work it out for myself.

Time + Money + Resources, Part I

—The art world—

I'm not a math person, but I've long considered art making to be the product of an equation. It takes time, money and resources to be able to make art.

Time + Money + Resources = Art Career

But the difficulty lies in the fact that it takes time to get the other two parts—money and resources. Likewise, time is money, and it takes money to buy time. In fact, you can take any of the three terms of this equation and see that one necessity is dependent upon having an excess of the other two necessities. If you've got the time and resources, you can make money. But it takes money to buy time and resources. This is why (unless you're a speculator rather than an artist—and some artists are both) people say it takes money to make money.

As an analogy, the equation, then, is what mathematicians and programmers call a recursive function. Each term in the equation adds up to another term. For the sake of mental health, let's call these terms assets.