The print fair that made me rethink every social metric I chase
There was a print fair in Leipzig two weekends ago, small, mostly German editions dealers and a few of us artists. I brought thirty etchings, three editions, and I had this spreadsheet before I went, mentally, about which ones to push because they did well on Instagram. The "engagement" ones, the moody close-ups people save.
You know what sold? Not those. It was the piece I almost didn't pack, a silly little riso of a basil plant, because someone's grandmother in Bologna might have grown basil and it made them laugh. Three people stopped just to tell me it reminded them of a kitchen. One bought it.
I keep thinking about that gap. The internet told me people wanted the dark architectural work. The room told me they wanted a basil plant and five minutes of talking about their nonna. I've been optimizing for the wrong audience because the online one is the only one that gives me numbers. The fair gave me 600 visitors on a Sunday and I learned more than a year of analytics.
Not sure I have a tidy solution. Just noticing that the algorithm has quietly become my gallerist and I'm not sure I hired it.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
This hits hard. I have the exact same spreadsheet in my head before every show, and every single time the piece I'm embarrassed to put out is the one people stop in front of. Not the portrait I redid eleven times, the little sketch I almost left at home.
There's something about work we made without trying to please anyone. It reads differently in person, you can feel it. The moody close-up gets a save, but the silly basil gets a story told to you by a stranger. And I think that's the thing, people want to hand you back a piece of themselves.
I keep telling myself I'll trust my gut over the numbers next time. I do not trust my gut over the numbers next time. But your post is making me want to at least try. Did the basil make it into the next edition, or is he one of those one-time things?
The "embarrassed to put out" part is the tell, isn't it. We all think we know our own work until someone else looks at it, and then it's always the thing we nearly kept in the drawer.
I've started paying attention to which pieces I almost don't show. That's become a better signal than anything the algorithm gives me. The ones I hesitate over aren't the weak ones, they're the personal ones. There's a difference and I'm only now learning to tell it apart.
The personal ones, yes. That's the exact word I was circling around and couldn't land on. Embarrassed is shorthand for "this is too close to me to be good" but it's never true, it's just the closest to being true.
I've been thinking since the fair about what it would mean to make work like that on purpose instead of by accident. The basil riso was a joke, a thing I printed because I was bored one afternoon. I don't know how you go looking for that feeling, but I think we're both agreeing it's not in the spreadsheet.
You put it better than I did, honestly. "People want to hand you back a piece of themselves", that's exactly it, and it's a scary thought because it means the work that matters most is the work you can't control. The basil riso wasn't me being clever, it was just me being a person for a second, and that's precisely why it worked. I keep thinking about that line from the guy who told me about his grandmother's kitchen. He wasn't buying an image. He was buying a memory and I was just the excuse.
The gut thing is hard though. I check my analytics before every edit and I still catch myself second-guessing the instinct. Maybe the trick is making more things I'm a little embarrassed of.