Seeking understanding for artists, pt. 1

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece on my Substack about what I called “tastemaker marketing.” The message was pretty simple.

The art world is filled with tastemakers — people who tell others what to like — but excelling at tastemaker marketing often makes it hard to know how to listen. How does your audience hear you, and how can you do a better job of telling them what you want them to know?

Artists like to be liked, but they love to be understood. When you connect with an artist about what their work means, you connect with them on a deeper level than just what it looks like.

Ricard Serra at Dia: Beacon / © Claudia Aran / Unsplash

Richard Serra’s “Blind Spot”

I was recently doing some research for a client on Richard Serra’s large sculpture, Blind Spot. When I Googled the work, the top results were a couple of pages on his gallery’s website:

Related in both form and scale, Blind Spot (2002–03) and Open Ended (2007–08) entail similar concentric structures, each consisting of six weatherproof steel plates.

Source: Gagosian

And secondly:

Blindspot carries on from where the configuration of Serra’s Torqued Spirals and the shapes of the Toruses and Spheres of the earlier exhibition left off. It is composed of six plates, three spheres, and three toruses.

Source: Gagosian

But, I wanted to know more about the work — where the idea came from, what the artist was thinking, and, most importantly, how it was different from the Serra sculptures that we already know and love.

Where can I go to find the information I’m looking for about this work if it’s not available on the gallery’s website? Who is responsible for helping the public understand this piece, if not them?

The Guggenheim Foundation has a page about this work with a great biographical text about the artist, but almost no information about the sculpture.

This is so common. Work that artists put their heart into is left adrift in a world of images, and the words that can help the public appreciate their work for what it means never get written.

Writing about visual arts

As an artist communications professional, my job is to seek understanding for artists. I make artists my clients to create relationships with them and their work that go deeper over time than a gallery or curator can while juggling all of their other responsibilities.

In working with artists, I help them get to a deeper understanding of their own practice through long conversations and deep research into their careers. When you prioritize the artist’s vision, you get deeper truths for them, yourself and the public.