We are told that live in an age of communication, and that we ought to embrace this. As I was running through my emails and facebook tonight, as I usually do, I began to wonder whether the amount of time and effort we invest in communication is always energy well-directed.
My mind has been mulling over this general problem over the past few days. I read a piece by another artist last week, in one of the art magazines, in which she said that her subscribing to Instagram was one of the best decisions she ever made in terms of distributing information about her art work. This is not the first occasion on which specific means of communication have been urged upon me as indispensable to the development of my work as an artist. Several years ago I had this experience with Linked In, which as far as I am able to tell has never yielded any detectable advantage to me. Other colleagues have urged me to participate in one of the several on-line galleries that are now available. My experience of on-line exhibition, however, has not been particularly encouraging.
The trouble is that there are several of these platforms available to us now, and there doesn’t appear to any way of evaluating their relative effectiveness. It would be possible to invest a huge proportion of one’s time in disseminating information through these channels, and still be none the wiser about their value. This is a practical issue of some relevance to me at the moment. Over the coming months I will be mounting three solo exhibitions of my work, and taking part (I hope) in one national event. Leaving aside the last of these, where I expect the organisers to do the work of publicity, I have to decide in the next month upon a strategy for informing the public about these events and my participation in them. If I were to accept all of the advice I have been given about the promotion of my work, I believe that I would end up by becoming a full-time communicator instead of an artist.