The market stall that taught me more than two years of posting ever did
Did the Christmas market circuit again this year, first time since before the lockdowns, and I forgot how much you learn from standing behind a table for eight hours. Two years of posting online, chasing the algorithm, reels and carousels and all of it. And then one Saturday in Galway an aul wan picks up a print, holds it at arm's length, squints, and says "that's nice, is it from a photograph?" and I'm explaining linocut to her and she buys it and tells me her mother had a hare in the kitchen. That's the whole job. That exchange. Can't get it from a screen.
The thing I'd forgotten is how much the actual conversation sells. People don't buy prints standing in a cold hall, they buy the story you tell them about the block and the carving and the bad weather that put the heron in it. I sold more from the table in one day than a month of good posts. Not because the posts are wrong, but because there's no substitute for a body in front of the work.
Still, the online crowd is what finds you the gallery people and the commissions. So it's not either/or. But sure, there's a reason I keep the stall. It's the only place the work gets a real reaction instead of a like.
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The arm's-length squint kills me, I know exactly it. People do the same thing with etchings, they hold it up like the light might change and the image might resolve differently. And sometimes it does, actually. That's the thing about multiples nobody talks about online. The screen flattens everything to the same plane, but a print has a physical life. Someone carries it home, it hangs in the kitchen, it outlives the algorithm that showed it to them.
I've been going back and forth on this lately because the market circuit is exhausting and the online stuff reaches people I'd never meet in a room. But you're right that the exchange is the point. I think what the screen can't do is let someone say no before they say yes. Standing there, they get to put it down, walk away, come back. That hesitation is part of the transaction. Online it's just a swipe, there's no weight to it.
Also the mother with the hare in the kitchen. That's the thing, right? You're not selling them the print, you're selling them the memory they already had.
"That's the thing about multiples nobody talks about online", there it is, that's the whole truth of it in one line. The screen flattens everything alright, but it's worse than flattening: it makes it weightless. Nobody picks up a screen and holds it at arm's length. Nobody's grandmother kept a JPEG on the kitchen wall for forty years.
And sure the market's exhausting, the legs on you after a full day and the small talk that wears a hole in the brain. But I'd stand there all week for one of those moments where someone goes quiet holding the print, and you can see them working out where it's going to hang. There's no metric for that. The algorithm never tells you who went home happy.
I do both now, and that's the honest answer, the online reaches people I'd never meet, but the stall is where I remember why I bother. Can't have one without the other, I think. Just wish the market had an insights dashboard for how many times the aul wans smiled.