Artist Diane Kraudelt BLOG

Web Musings
by artist Diane Kraudelt

Have You Noticed That......

Has rudeness become the norm?
Surly shop clerks (even in the South!), defensive waitpersons, and down-right bad-mannered web sites are the rule, not the exception today. My latest rant includes websites which do not bother to reply when they are the initiator of the inquiry. True, gallery websites probably receive an inordinate amount of email. But, to not reply when they are soliciting new artists is too gauche. Discoveredartists.com comes to mind for down-right poor manners. I guess they feel they will never run out of Barnum's favorite people. Boundlessgallery.com was noted for rudeness especially when site problems occurred. Their current site appears to function much better. WHY do web people (certainly most are not "masters") insist on using FLASH??? another peeve.
On the other side, there are several excellent web gallery sites which function competently and are professional; FineArtAmerica.com and ArtQuest.com are two which immediately come to mind.
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Spent a few hours searching for more art sites and I still cannot decide what search terms are best. Does one use "online art galleries" or online art gallery" or "paintings for sale" or "original art"? Because I am an artist, I have no idea how the other half thinks in terms of 2D art. The FineArtAmerica.com site does list their top searches but their site is already an online gallery. The question is how to get those looking for art to my site?
There are (of course) numerous web articles about marketing your art on the web. But, from what I've read, these articles are either very general, no "real" help, or tell you how to pay sites to increase your search engine ranking.
One method to increase search rankings is to join a no-fee art site where your web URL will be displayed. Thus the search engines and any customers will have your site, eventually. I think this all gets down to what I first started my site for - to have potential customers and gallery operators see a representation of my artwork, nothing else.
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During the past few weeks, I've been looking at gallery web sites as other venues for selling my art and I have not much good to report. I've been displaying my original artwork (not prints) on sites besides my own for 5 years or so, always on "free" sites. There are now several significant differences between then and now.
Too many sites and too few actual customers is one major problem today. Actually, there are several major problems.
1. Knock-off sites offering "masters" for a fraction of the price of original art. These sites remind me of the "starving artist" sales of the 1970s and 80s, often held outside on sidewalks. Typical offerings were landscapes and still life paintings done in the style of "learn to paint in 5 easy lessons". In a sense I guess they were artists, scam artists.
2. Too many "artists" competing for the very small market of actual customers.
Because of so many artists competing, online galleries have realized many will pay money, often quite a lot of money, to be on their site. But when a site has thousands of artists, each featured with an unrecognizable thumbnail of their art, what exposure is being generated? Realizing that some may realize this fact, many sites now jury you onto their site with a guarantee they will "promote" you. Thus you feel better about paying so much to them and after all, you must be a really good artist for getting onto their site, right?
There are NO galleries out there wanting to help emerging, established, or any other kind of artist; it's all about the money, honey.
January 20, 2010 DK

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Updated 02/26/2010