Why do I become the bottleneck in my own art business?

Artists insert themselves as the bottleneck between the marketing and it going out to the world. They wait until everything is perfect, wait until the description is exactly right, wait until the title is sorted out, and in doing so, the marketing never actually gets done consistently. This perfectionism means the work never gets in front of eyeballs, the business doesn’t grow, and you wake up years later with no one having seen your work. The solution is to get out of your own way — ship the content even if it’s not perfect, because you need feedback from the market to know if you’re on the right track. You’ll never know if your subject matter or style resonates if nobody sees it.

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Asked by synthesized from teaching · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2025-05-23