Santa Fe ArtWorld and the American Dream
There are many who do not like honesty as it does not serve their purpose. It is not my intention to harm those who are misled in such a way. However, I would like to talk about the American Dream and how that translates to the new frontier of cyberspace.
There are many enlightened speakers who talk about our virtual reality and how we create our own experience. They say if you create the illusion of abundance, you will have it. I have a tendency to believe what I am told at face value, so for about 20 years, in my spare time, I imagined myself free of financial burden and never admitted what a daily struggle life is. I thought in my efforts to attain enlightenment, this is what those renowned individuals spoke of.
In my search of finding something real and affordable to promote others and myself as artist, I learned that some people knew exactly what creating the illusion of wealth, prosperity, and power meant. These people were exercising it and profiting from it tremendously while selling nothing but the American Dream and illusions thereof leaving all who followed them to fail while they gained.
A few examples:
A popular website offers monthly rental space on their internet directory and they have a newsletter that goes out to say 35,000 recipients' spam boxes each week, plus they get 10,000 hits a day with 30,000 pages opens with 2,000 of those returning visits. Pertaining to artists: Once the artist has paid and is posted, they tell the artist that their job is not finished, that now they must go out and sell to their sphere of influence. Need I point out the obvious, if the artist had been successful marketing to their sphere of influence, they wouldn't need a site that presumably markets them. Secondly, the artist doesn't realize they just paid that entity so that they, the artist, might work for them.
How does this illusion look?
Well, let's say this entity gets 10,000 hits a day with 30,000 page opens. The first question is are they real time hits? One must examine the way these hits are made.
Many organizations base their ability to charge upon their hits achieved and their newsletter, but a larger percentage of these may be false.
Let's say the artist sends out news of their posting on this site as requested of them to 50 people who send on to an average of 2, and then 2, and then 1 or 2 before it dwindles out, they have generated approximately 400 hits of people generally looking out of curiosity, or support of their friends' interests, but not necessarily real business in the essence of the word. What happens if you have 20 artists promoting themselves on that site? That's 8,000 hits. What if they get serious about it? Or they get lucky and get caught on a forwarding train, or have a lot of friends or an extended family?
Now, lets say that a multitude of businesses post with that entity, maybe 5,000, and within those 5,000 businesses there are approximately 3 people within their organization who receive the newsletter as they have to keep track of what is happening. That's roughly 15,000 newsletters each week that do not count, nor the hits resulting to ensure all is well on the site - which do not count either. Based on these numbers alone, they should be charging for optimistically 20,000 newsletters, and a lot less hits. I'm not going to take the time to do the math as there are too many variables to consider, but it doesn't take Einstein to see the numbers falling.
One must also consider the number of hits calculated as a result of marketing their site with newsletters and then deduct them which further diminishes both.
A common way for sites to get hits is to profess to promote artists by charging them a fee they can afford and then the artists not only market themselves, but have a contest in which the artist pays a fee to participate in the contest, then whoever gets the most votes wins. The outcome of the contest is not based on the merit of the art, but who has the most friends and family. Generally when one goes to vote on these pieces, if they are able to figure out where to vote after flipping all over the site (more page opens), they find the site is so bogged down they are not able to complete their commitment, so they have to return 2 or 3 times increasing returning visitors. All of this creates more hits for the site for which they are able to charge more for while creating the illusion of more perceived interest as they have so many returning visitors.
One must ask of these sites is the opportunity real? What about the hits? And the newsletters?
What I find interesting about cyber entities is we pay for these things, hits, returns, and newsletters to patrons who pay us to promote them, and false hits they create so they can charge more.
Moving into reality based businesses, if you went to a store would the price of the product/service be based on how many people looked at the product and/or service, or would the price be based on the actual value of the real product provided and/or service rendered?
When you went in would they tell you: Our cell phone service costs more because we send out newsletters to our 3 million customers to keep them updated with what we are doing (for them) so they can remain continually informed. Of course as these newsletters go out in bulk, they generally end up in Spam, but that's not the point. Who cares if they are read? That does not seem to be what matters. Moreover we have information available about our phone on line which is difficult to find so we are able to charge you more as there is a great deal of interest in our phone which you can see for yourself as look at all the pages opened with all the returning visitors. We make the site difficult to navigate so that people are not able to find their way around it or the information about our phone, or to find that page they were just on so they have to jump all over it again in search of it as well. Further our phone company site is continuously under construction so that page you marked before, you won't be able to find it again, causing you to search our site for it again. All this we attribute to our rapid growth and interest in our phone and we will charge you for it.
If the average person went into an average store and heard essentially this, they would laugh, yet we readily purchase it via the Internet because it is the illusion of prosperity and power. We want the American Dream, so we will buy it.
Further since it generally takes longer to make the 10 minute transit period to purchase lunch and eat it and then return to work, we expect this kind of expediency to fall out of the sky with regard to our success. We think others sit there all day and have nothing to do but look at what we have done and make room for our immediate satisfaction. When we are in pursuit of the quick fix, not only will we step over the dollars to pick up the nickels, but also we will pay for the opportunity to do so. This has become the norm in many acceptable entities on cyberspace.
I don't know about you, but I never had that much money. Regardless, I have paid for those kinds of services before being so hopeful that my circumstance would change that I was willing to invest money I didn't have. I admit, I have done that.
Upon discovering I didn't have the 5 to 15 thousand dollars a year for someone else to market my work in the way it actually needed to be, I started a newsletter to real individuals, galleries, corporate collectors, interior designers, real estate professionals. It took me 7 years to find a little over 500 people who actually read them. In August of 2007 we opened our doors to other artists, some of whom I had mentioned in that newsletter without their knowledge prior to ever meeting them formally. Because what we do is real, and we don't count the artists' hits, nor our artists whom we send our newsletters to, nor our friends and family, but only those professionals on our list, in the month of Feb. 2008, our newsletter will be sent to more then 860 professionals. If we counted all those who don't count, or those our artists forward our letter to, the newsletter would be sent to approximately 3,000 people at this point.
We know many of our friends and family take our artists very seriously as they know they rigorously juried. We know our professionals take them just as seriously. We know all this. We don't know how many of our hits are real as we don't know what happens to our newsletters after us, and no one is filling out questionnaires when they log in, but we do know, from those we hear from, that the interest in our artists is very real.
Further, we are by artists for artists and our artists support each other in ways most do not know. Just as many of our artists never knew they went out in my news prior to Santa Fe ArtWorld, many of our artists do not have a clue what our other artists do for them merely because they love their work. When you're that busy and that giving, you generally don't tell others, wow, look what I did for you! LOL. It doesn't happen, people give because it's in their heart to do so and great art inspires much in others.
Myself, I used to promote my work, but now I promote others and find a great deal of satisfaction in it. Einstein once advised his stepdaughter of how to live life well: Give much to others and little to yourself. I find he was brilliant in many ways.
We don't ask our artists or galleries to give us anything beyond their personal information so that we can make news of it. I mention this as I am not only proud of the talent we represent, but of our artistic community as individuals for together we make Van Gogh's dream of community come true.
No we will not endeavor to build a false sense of success that you will never find because it is not there, but we will do our best for you in making sure others know you exist. If our marketing letters go out to less than others who charge more for less, and we get fewer hits on our site because we are not offering gimmicks to gain them so we can charge more, then please forgive us. It's my understanding that the hare was lost along the way while the tortoise ultimately prevailed.
What does winning look like? To us, it's not about who has the most in cyberspace so they can charge more for less, it's about creating something real in virtual reality (that's why the word reality is used) as our frontier fathers intended. We have the capacity to reach around the world with the click of a button, let's use it for developing real relationships, for offering real service, and real product, and in our case opportunity for artists. It makes no difference if you live in a large city and know no one; however, if you live in a small community and are known by everyone, that's something.
I don't write this as a means of self-promotion, I write it as I get so many artists who have paid in the hopes of winning the award for the most votes on their work. Granted, many of them deserve to win, but far more do not deserve to loose. I wish I could forward their emails to help them when they have entered a false arena, but I can't. They may have my vote, but I must say it's not a real prize, nor a real loss, though I am always happy to support others in their dreams - sometimes I think in supporting these sort of marketing schemes which take advantage of all involved, that in doing so I might diminish real dreams, but then I realize I actually go to view the work and see if there is value, see where we might help. I should say I am able to view the work more quickly when the artists send the link to their site to me as then I don't have to try to wade through the millions of people voting for their friend or family member.
I hope this helps anyone who reads it and wish you all the best. Most Sincerely in real time ~ Denise Williams