Marketing Mondays: How Do You Define Success?

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It's been over a year since Marketing Mondays started. I wasn't sure I could sustain 52 weeks' worth of ideas, but here we are seven MM posts into the new year and there are plenty more topics to consider and some to revisit.

Artist Karen Schifano suggested I revisit the topic of success. I first posted on the topic in June last year, but now that readership is way up (1600+ of you every Monday!) this seemed like a worthy topic to revisit.

Cartoon by Eric Gelber

The paradigm for success looks something like this:
Get a BFA.
Get an MFA.
Set up a studio in a large city, preferably New York.
Tap that font of inspiration to make art every day.

Sweat, agonize and work your little fingers to the bone to create a substantial and worthy body of work.

Do the obligatory Open Studio or two.
Exhibit in group shows.
Get a solo in a non-profit or small commercial gallery.
Receive some blogger attention.
Apply for and receive a Pollock-Krasner grant or other award that marks you as an up-and-comer.

Invite dealers and curators visit your studio--and have them actually come.
Move from being an assistant to having an intern.

Get invited to join a good gallery in which you've previously been included in group shows.
Have a solo show there.
Sell out the show.
Receive a great review in one of the print publications we all read.
Be the subject of a raging debate on one of the art blogs.

Be invited to a Whitney Biennial.

Find yourself hated or lionized (envied either way); pick one.

Have kids that your wife/partner/nanny takes care of.
Have your dealer take your work to the art fairs, where big-name collectors wrangle for the opportunity to acquire it.
Hire assistants (no more pesky interns).

Jump to a bigger, higher-profile gallery.
See your big-ass dealer sell your work for a six figures (maybe more).

Find there's a waiting list for your work.
Move to a larger studio. Make that a much larger studio.
If you're teaching, get tenure.
Apply for and receive a Guggenheim (because you really need the money).
Make the cover of Art in America.
Better still, hit the trifecta, AiA, Art Forum and Modern Painters.

See your work curated regularly into ever higher-profile museum shows with ever more lavish catalogs.
Soar into another level with a MoMA retrospective.
Receive a MacArthur "genius" grant.
Renovate your loft after you buy the building it's in.
Get a second studio in another place--Greece, St. Maarten, Berlin, Rio--your choice.
Have your assistants do the work.
See your work be the subject of multiple monographs by high-profile art historians or critics.
See your work included in the art history books.
Watch your work go for seven figures and your bank account bulge.
Die happy and rich.
(Did I miss anything?)

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The reality for most artists is anything but:
Working two part-time jobs with no benefits.
Working a full-time job with benefits but not enough time to make art.
Making art but getting little attention.
Getting some attention but making no sales.
Making sales but never getting into the good collections or seeing your career advance critically.
Sleeping on a futon when you're 35 and all your non-artist friends are buying homes.

Living and working in New York; spending all your time in the studio or working to support the studio.
Not living and working in New York; it's an easier life, but it's not New York.

Not living and working in New York and it's still not easy.
Not having a tenure-track teaching job, but struggling to patch together some adjunct teaching.

Seeing your students get the galleries and the attention.
Not getting the adjunct teaching jobs.

Having kids and regretting it.

Not having kids and regretting it.
Not getting the Pollock Krasner, Guggenheim or MacArthur.
Not getting on the cover of Art in America.
Not getting reviewed in Art in America.

Not getting a retrospective even at your regional art center.
Not getting retirement benefits because you never put in enough hours at any one job to be vested.

Not having a 401(k).

Moving your studio for the fifth time in 20 years because your rent has gone up higher than you can afford--and losing four months with each move to the pack, move and setup. (And, yes, you're doing it yourself with a rent-a-van.)

Battling with sexism or racism for decades only to find another ism biting at your angles: ageism.

Enjoying the privilege of whiteness and maleness for decades only to find your bald or gray-haired self in the same boat as your non-male, non-white colleagues whom you've secretly thought of as complainers.

Losing your gallery, if you ever had one, because it's closing, or because your work isn't selling, or because you're past middle age and the dealer won't admit that's why they're dropping you from the roster.

Losing your studio when you're 75 because the building is going co-op and you don't qualify for credit--plus you couldn't come up with the down payment.
Dying with a studio full of art that gets thrown out when the landlord comes to clean out the space.

OK, somewhere between those two extremes is the career that most of us have, neither big-ass blue-chip nor its black-and-blue opposite.

And that's the topic of today's Marketing Mondays: How do you define success for you?

. Is it based on the art world paradigm?
. Or is it something else--integrating art and life in a bucolic setting? Teaching, raising a family and showing every couple of years in a regional co-op gallery? Finding a way to combine your art and your politics? Working nine-to-five so that you can be free to outside of the gallery-go-round?
. Whatever it is, how close have you come to that ideal?
. Has your ideal of success changed during the course of your career? .