For Artists: Pandemic Silver Lining?

Covid is horrible.  I personally have lost loved ones or seen people permanently ill from covid related disease.  It's the worst thing ever and it's been an incredibly hard few years for pretty much everyone on the planet.  We know that’s it’s been bad for a lot of people groups: for women, for children, for people of color, for medical professionals, and for people who were in the “essential worker” category and had to put themselves in harm’s way to make sure the rest of us were fed. It legitimately sucks and I hate it A LOT. 

 That said, the impact of a year’s long pandemic has changed the landscape for artists in a way that I think was a long time coming, and some of the changes are offering interesting opportunities.

 Shortly before COVID, I had a vision of a chess board in play, then thrown in the air. Time stopped. The pieces tumbled in the air in slow motion.  I did not know how they would land. 

 It seems to me, that COVID and the events of the last few years have absolutely been like a board game upended.  We still don’t know where the pieces will land, and though the trauma and loss has been significant, there are also some hopeful changes.

 There are a million horrible things that have happened, but some good things too as we have reordered how we live and what we care about.  For artists, the biggest changes have happened in 4 main categories. The first two are about how the pandemic affected the creative life of people, and the last two are about the shift in shopping patterns that naturally include how people buy art.

People Stayed In, Worked on Art

“Okay everyone, stop going to movies, to restaurants, to the theater, any kind of shopping, on cruises, on airplanes, out with friends.  Stay in your house.”

  Well, what are people going to do?  They are going to pull out their guitar, their watercolors, their woodworking supplies, their Italian lessons, their knitting.  I think creative hobbies got a radical boost during the pandemic just because so many options were eliminated.

People Decided their Jobs were Dumb and Quit

You’ve probably heard of the great resignation.  It’s unclear why this is happening, but there has been a huge movement of leaving conventional employment.  Maybe it’s because the pandemic has precipitated an existential crisis.  Maybe it’s because working from home suddenly made a lot of sense, but maybe you can NOT work for Corporate Chad and instead do something more fun. Maybe it’s because of the economic boosts from the government.  Whatever it was, when you quit your JOB job, you can explore other avenues of making money.   Entrepreneurism has become more mainstream.  People are realizing that they have skills that they can get paid for, and they don’t have to stay inside a conventional career to make it happen. There’s a lot of different forms this takes, but for the creative ones it’s an epic change!

Big Changes for Shopping

From the consumer perspective, there were really big changes for real life shopping and, though online shopping wasn’t exactly new, it came into full flower during this era.  I remember back in the day a friend wanted this obscure brand of boots, and she could only find a used pair on Ebay, so she used my account to bid for them and she was a complete wreck.  Handing over her credit card number to a stranger basically paralyzed her with fear.  Now of course we tap our phones to pay, send credit info through the airwaves fearlessly.

We have fully become used to ordering things to be shipped to us, and there’s far less discomfort with the process, even with expensive art.  An artist selling art via a website was completely unheard of 15 years ago. The dawn of amazon and etsy made us comfortable with online shopping, and etsy made us used to ordering handmade things online, but it took the pandemic to make that transformation complete.  What this means is that a jewelry designer in Boise can send a $1000 necklace to a stranger in LA and no one thinks twice.  This is a BIG change.

Art Galleries Closing

 The fourth and final shift I want to talk about is the changing nature of the art gallery system. Naturally, galleries have always been a luxury market and very minor economic disruptions will affect them first.  Art galleries closed by the hundreds in the first year of the pandemic, and there were always FAR more artists than there are galleries. Now the ratio is even worse if galleries represent the main way artists can make money.  But that method of art sales closed even further for many artists, so there was a need to find another way.  Enter: artists making sales directly with their fans.  The combination of social media, the artist influencer, and ease of online shopping made a whole new way to sell and buy art that is now only in its infancy. 

I don't see these trends fading when life returns to "normal".  I think we've seen a permanent shift, and artists and makers can take radical advantage of what I see to be a growth market. 

 If you need a little help, I have a super fun quiz called "Are you Ready to Sell you art? “ This short quiz asks you a few questions that will help place you on the roadmap of living YOUR DREAM LIFE and give you the exact steps to more forward!