.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
Getting to your audience’s must have is important for your sales. Typically this means they must want it for personal expression on their walls (sometimes in a book for education etc). Their creativity being in the selection of your work. —
Getting to the Gallery’s must show is tied up in the owner believing that they can convince enough of their patron’s they must have.
The desire to decorate is endemic I believe – look at cave paintings, decorative markings on tools and pottery — sometimes wrapped up in religion – appealing the gods for a good harvest, comfortable life, health intervention, teaching the young or attracting a mate. All involve the arts.
Too much “art” in the 20th and 21st century has broken away from these precepts. It isn’t made for any of these fundamental or lower level Maslow type needs – and then the artist wonders why they don’t sell – only have a small audience, or even if they get “critical” acclaim of the “salon” they never really “catch on”.
I try very hard to make work that people will select for their walls – and also innovative and creative enough to appeal to the salon. I heard a reviewer a few years ago that art wasn’t about the beautiful or the decoration……..
oliver
Robert Genn Twice Weekly Letter wrote:
> Getting to ‘must’
>
> November 23, 2007
>
> Dear oliver,
>
> Psychologist Abraham Maslow has written, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write–if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.” The question for many would-be creators is simply how to get to “must.”
>
> Maslow spent a lifetime researching mental health and human potential. He emphasized the study of healthy minds and successful systems rather than the abnormal and the ill. He was particularly interested in the hierarchy of needs, meta-needs, self-actualizing persons, purposeful play, and peak experiences. Leader of the humanistic school of psychology, he referred to his ideas as a “third force”–beyond Freudian theory and behaviourism.
>
> Maslow saw human beings’ needs arranged like a ladder. The most basic needs, at the bottom, were physical–air, water, food, etc. Then came safety needs–security, stability, comfort. Then psychological or social needs–belonging, love, acceptance. At the top were the self-actualizing needs–the need to fulfill oneself, to become all that one is capable of becoming. Maslow felt that unfulfilled needs lower on the ladder inhibited a person from climbing to the next step. For example, someone dying of thirst is not likely to write or paint. People who managed the higher needs are what he called self-actualizing people. These folks, he found, are able to focus on problems outside themselves, have a clear sense of what is true and what is phony, and are spontaneous, creative, and not bound too strictly by social conventions.
>
> Here are a few of Maslow’s ideas for artists wishing to further evolve:
>
> Systematically study, understand and neutralize the effects of lower needs. Accept the world in all of its complexity, mystery and ambiguity. Take cues from the winners in this world, not the losers. Keep the company of the doers, not the talkers. Play your personal game on as many levels as you’re able. Fall in love with your processes, innovations, dreams and higher ideals. Be sensitive to and welcome the arrival of peak experiences. Have no guilt when you see yourself becoming compulsive and proactive. Allow yourself to be swept up in your personal “must.”
>
> Best regards,
>
> Robert
