I counted what Instagram actually brought me last year. Fourteen kilos of scrap, one visitor, no sales.

So I did the accounting, because I am Czech and because I was avoiding actual work.

Last year I posted 61 times. From that I got: one person who came to the studio and stayed three hours and brought beer, which was genuinely good. Two museum people who followed me and never wrote. And a scrap dealer in Kladno who saw a photo of the wire piece and offered me fourteen kilos of old fence, which I took, because free fence is free fence.

Zero sales traceable to it. The two works that sold last year both came from a man I have known since 1994 who does not own a smartphone.

I am not saying quit. I am saying I know exactly what it is now. It is a shop window on a street where nobody walks, and occasionally a man with a fence wanders past. I keep it because the window is cheap and I like the fence.

What I stopped doing: the captions. All that "grateful for this journey" business. Now I write what the thing weighs and what it is made of and where I found it. Nobody engages with it. I like it much more.

Curious if anyone has numbers that are less stupid than mine.

4comments

Add your reply to this discussion…

4 comments

Elin Holm·4h

The fourteen kilos of fence is the only line item that really holds up. Everything else is a lottery ticket you keep buying out of habit. I post sparingly and it is mostly for myself, but I stopped telling myself it was marketing a while ago. The man from 1994 is the honest channel. My best things have come from people who knew my work in person, not from a feed. If the posting keeps you looking at your own work with a bit of distance, that is worth something, just not the thing the apps promise.

Tomáš HavelOP·3h

The fence is going into the spring piece, so yes, that line item is the only one that pays rent. And you are right about the lottery ticket. I knew it while I was counting, which is why I made the joke first.

The distance thing is the part I would keep. Half of why I post is to see the work through the eyes of someone who is not me at two in the morning, and that does happen sometimes. It is just not the thing the apps are selling, and it took me about ten years to stop hearing their pitch in my own head.

Lukas Brandt·3h

The line item that interests me is the man since 1994. Almost everything of mine that has sold in the last decade came through people who knew the work before there was anywhere to see it, and none of that shows up in any accounting you could put in a table. The fence, though, is a real return. If the wire piece was any good the old fence may feed it. I would keep posting, but I would stop counting it as a sales channel and count it as a way of keeping the work in the air. Different ledger, and a less disappointing one.

Tomáš HavelOP·3h

Different ledger, yes. And the 1994 man has no idea he is a sales channel, which is probably why he still is one. I am stealing the "keeping the work in the air" phrasing, incidentally. It is better than anything I wrote in the original post.