Art Shmart

It’s simple, it’s free, it’s easy and it doesn’t take 100 years. All you need is a computer of sorts to take you online and you create your little account on the semi dead MySpace if you are a musician (still usable – if you don’t have a website you can just use it as part of your online presence and have people listen to your music, you use it not necessarily as an entity part of a community that is pretty dead anyway but you redirect people to it from other online platforms); you can make use of Facebooks pages for bands but also of individual Facebook profiles, you can use Twitter or you can create a profile on DeviantArt if you are an artist and you want to showcase your stuff.

I passed these guys on Grafton Street on Easter Monday. There was a large crowd gathered around them and I could not get close enough to see who they are (they had some CDs for sale). I would have liked them to have a sign with the bands name. I could have looked for them online. A sign. A simple sign. And I would have went online, listened to their music and maybe bought their CD.

This gentleman here.. I wonder if he has any online presence. Create a Facebook page, go onto DeviantArt, get a community around you and just make your stuff more available. That is what it’s all about. Big company or small, make your stuff more available and you will see results.

Go to people and offer what you have not when you need them to buy it but when they need to buy from you. What does that mean? By just standing on the streets and waiting for someone to come to you while you need them to (between certain hours, between you fulltime job, family obligations or weather restrictions) you will not get very far. Creating your online presence by using all these free tools will allow others to come to you when they want to or need to. I might not want to buy a painting every day I walk up and down on Grafton street (I might be going to the office, I might be meeting friends) but I might want to buy a gift that is different and has more value – art. So build that Facebook page and remind people that a painting from a local artist is a better purchase than some trinket from China. Not that I have anything against stuff made in China. Everything is made there anyway. But you know what I mean.

Simple steps, a cardboard sign with your bands name, a webpage, a blog can help you get your message across. And that is what you want. Once you have something valuable to offer, people will notice.