building a culture of the arts.

The past few days I've had conversations with friends centered on an interesting subject. One conversation was with an artist who asked about the difficulties of selling our work. The other was with one of my oldest and dearest friends who had in my early years as a craftsman, kept me busy making display cabinets for his shop and furniture for his home. He noted that through the years, he had shown my work to many friends and bragged about its features, thinking that they too, would want to buy my work. He asked if I had any thoughts about why they did not.

I can tell you who buys hand crafted work (generally) and why they do. In my own case, most of my work has been sold to other artists, people who know what it takes to make work, and know the reasons for it. As we became a nation where the makers are an exception, and not prevalent in our communities, the value of the hand-crafted, artist designed product is only rarely known  deeply enough to guide behavior. Potential customers can appreciate the values in the work when those features are pointed out to them, but its's so much easier for them to buy manufactured stuff  than to invest art, which in most cases they do not fully understand.

We have a problem. We have neglected the building of a base of art buyers by failing to offer art making as a primary goal in education. By failing to engage students in the making of beautiful and useful things, we've failed to impart the character required to build communities in which artists are nourished and encouraged in further growth.

We can change that, but it will take time. We start by becoming makers, and then use whatever tools we have  at our disposal to encourage others to make.

Make, fix, grow and create.