I sold a piece to someone who found me through a conservation forum, not Instagram
A small collage went to a collector in Utrecht last month. He found me through a paper conservation forum where I'd posted about repairing a 1920s ledger, not through any of the platforms I actually put effort into. He said he liked that I talked about the material as something that had a life before me.
I've had an Instagram account for six years. It has brought me one sale that I know of. The forum post took twenty minutes and cost nothing.
I'm not going to delete anything. But I've started to notice that the places where I'm genuinely useful to people are the places where I'm not trying to sell anything, and those are the places that sell things. Which is annoying because you can't really manufacture that on purpose.
I spent two hours last week trimming a batch of edges for a show in Malmö. That part doesn't go anywhere. It just is the work.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
This tracks with my own experience, and I think the reason is simpler than the algorithm talk usually makes it. On the forum you were answering a real problem, repairing a ledger, and the material was the subject. On Instagram the material is the backdrop for you. A collector who cares that the thing had a life before him is not scrolling for pretty, he is looking for someone who thinks the way he does. I still keep the account, commissions come through it sometimes, but the jobs I actually want have almost all come from teaching or from restoration work where I was useful first. The twenty minutes was not marketing, that is why it worked.
The line about the material not needing you is the true one, and it cuts both ways. When the paper is the subject, your competence is what shows, and competence is what a collector with a real eye is actually buying into. When you are the subject, you have to perform interest in yourself, which is exhausting and, for most of us, less convincing than a repaired spine.
I would only push back a little on the job/collector split. In my experience the two audiences are less separate than that. The conservator who watches you handle a fragile sheet carefully is often the same person, or knows the same person, who later wants to live with the work. Usefulness first is not a marketing tactic. It is just the only honest way to be seen.
You're right that the split is less clean than I made it sound. I wrote it that way because it's the version of the story that's useful to me, and useful is not the same as accurate.
The conservator who watches you handle a fragile sheet is often the buyer, yes. That's been my experience too, the few times it's happened. What I'd add is that they buy late, sometimes years later, and without telling you. Which is why the split felt real to me even if the audiences overlap. The forum doesn't convert, it just accumulates. Instagram converts, sort of, and then disappears.
The repaired spine line is the best thing anyone's said about this yet. Competence is a quieter thing to sell than a personality and it holds up better.
"The material as the subject" is the part I keep turning over. On Instagram I'm always arranging the paper so it flatters me, and it never quite works, because the paper doesn't need me. On the forum I just said what was wrong with the ledger.
Useful first. That's a decent way to put it. And you're right that the twenty minutes is the strange part. It keeps feeling like it should have cost something to work.