How To Become A Successful Artist - Artnome

Lately I have seen a slew of ads for expensive classes promising to “help you become a successful artist.” These are marketing classes, not classes in art instruction. Preying on financially strapped artists during a pandemic seemed like a new low, but clearly there must be a demand for this type of advice. So I decided to boil everything I have learned as an artist, curator, researcher, and marketer about obtaining success in the art world down into a single piece of free advice. If you want to succeed as an artist, make as much work as possible. That is the secret sauce. Regardless of whether you are after commercial success or simply want to improve in your craft, the answer is the same, make more work. If you want to know why I believe making more work improves your chances of success, read the rest of this post.

There are few sins in my book worse than encouraging artists to produce less work. It’s like telling a fish not to swim or a bird not to fly. Yet this advice is often given by dealers and gallerists with good intentions who are trying to help artists “manage” their career and avoid “flooding their own market.” We’ll never know the amount of art that was not produced as a result of this bad advice. What a crime to rob humanity of more art simply to try and artificially inflate the market value of an artist’s work. In this post, I will argue there is no evidence that producing a high volume of work in any way damages an artists’ market. If anything, producing more work likely improves their chances at success.

To study the effect of producing “too much work” on an artist’s market, we first need to establish “how much is too much?” The truth is that nobody knows the answer to this question. Five years ago, I went in search of a single database listing the total number of works created by our best-known artists. I reached out to a handful of Ivy league libraries as well as the Smithsonian, the Getty Institute, and other respected institutions asking for this database. They all came back to me with the same reply: “sadly no such resource exists.” So this leaves us all wondering, ‘How many artworks do successful artists create in a lifetime? A few dozen artworks? A few hundred artworks? A few thousand artworks? Low tens of thousands of artworks?’ The truth is, nobody knows because the resource to gauge this has never existed.

So I decided to start the Artnome database and get my own numbers by scanning through printed catalogues raisonne (books containing the official count of works for each individual artist). The chart below shows the total number of works created by 32 well-known artists to give us a general idea of what a normal amount of work is for an artist to produce in their lifetime.