What is the 'vicious cycle' of the art world and how does it hurt my business?

The vicious cycle works like this: You create a series of work, but because you never market it consistently, you never get it in front of enough eyeballs to actually know whether it would sell or not. Then time passes, you get bored and move on to a new direction, and that old body of work gets mothballed. Because you don’t like it anymore and aren’t excited about it, you give it no energy or promotion. When people ask what you’re working on, you only talk about the new stuff. This cycle repeats endlessly. The problem is you’re like a chef who cooked a potentially great dish, served it only to your spouse once, then moved on before anyone else could try it. You never gave that work a real chance. Many artists have old work created years or even decades ago that has never been actively marketed to their current, larger audience. That work might sell very well today, but it’s buried in the back of your website where no one knows it exists.

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Asked by an artist who constantly creates new work and abandons old series · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2023-09-29