Multidisciplinary artists who want to sell work from all of their disciplines are breaking some rules of business.
Business rewards specialization in lots of different ways. Focus on one type of customer makes it easier to learn how to connect with them and to tailor a product to them. Combine that with a focus on one type of product and it becomes easier to get really good at making it and to build the consistency in your content that algorithms love.
It’s also easier to tell your mom what you do for a living. That might sound silly but being able to succinctly describe what you do is important every time you talk to someone new who you’d like to support your business. That happens all the time. It’s hard for businesses to thrive without effective conversations with new customers, new investors, new partners, and new employees.
So what should multidisciplinary artists do? Choose one medium and cut out the others? Or find a way to manage the difficulties of a multidisciplinary business, as this advice seeker suggests he’d like to do?
My name is Luigi and I am an Italian artist. I am a painter, an illustrator, and a tattoo artist, and this creates a lot of confusion for me. In addition to selling my work, I would also like to attract art galleries. How can I structure and divide my work into what I consider artistic research and what I consider purely sellable, pop artwork?
@stratidiblu
Don’t worry, Luigi. I’m not going to suggest you pick one medium. That would be like asking a duck to choose among swimming, walking on land, or flying. Ducks were made to do all three and the natural world adapts around them. You were made to be multidisciplinary and we can adapt your business world around you too.
The key to doing this is recognizing that business is actually your fourth creative discipline.
Business as a Creative Discipline
Most people view business as a technical discipline, like engineering. You have a fixed set of rules and formulas that you can learn in school and apply in practice to achieve predictable success. Build a business plan, execute the plan, grow your business.
Creative disciplines don’t look anything like that. Instead of natural rules, you have creative constraints, most of which are actually loose suggestions. Creative disciplines are a place of exploration, experimentation, and invention. Artists are rewarded when they break through constraints to make something the world has never seen.
My own multidisciplinary nature is relevant here. I studied chemical engineering as an undergrad and started my career as an engineer just over 25 years ago. Then I went to business school and switched to a career in business where I built businesses all over the world. Now I teach at an art and design university where I help creatives build businesses around their work.
Business looks more like a creative discipline than a technical one. It’s not guided by the rules of nature but the rules of markets which are as diverse, dynamic, and complex as the billions of humans within them. It’s not predictable or business failure rates would be closer to engineering failure rates which happen but are notoriously low. Economic collapse would be nearly impossible. Like artists, business leaders are also rewarded when they break through constraints to create something the world has never seen.
What does that mean for you? Treat the business rules I opened with as creative constraints. Build a multidisciplinary business that recognizes them and then breaks through them.
Building a Multidisciplinary Art Business
Here’s what that might look like.
You have three creative disciplines: painting, illustration, and tattoo art. The rules of business say that you’re selling three different products to three different markets. You’re running three different businesses. One serving fine art buyers through galleries. One serving pop art lovers, probably through e-commerce among other channels. And one serving tattoo enthusiasts in a physical shop. Different products, different buyers, different channels.
The rules of business say you should separate them and pick one.
But wait. Some assumptions buried in that analysis matter:
There’s an inherent difference between fine art and pop art.
Fine art lovers don’t love pop art and only buy through galleries.
Pop art lovers don’t buy fine art and never buy through galleries.
Neither of them get tattoos.
Those assumptions don’t hold up to broad trends. The boundary between fine art and pop art is blurring. Galleries are struggling because more buyers want to buy directly from artists. Tattoos don’t carry the stigma they once carried. They’re often a badge of honor, signaling participation in the creative world.
So while the business rules might tell you to separate your businesses and find a way to position them that makes sense, I say you should combine them. You have a strong description of an ideal customer to build one business around:
They don’t differentiate between fine art and pop art.
They love both and have the money to buy both.
They don’t care where they buy as long as they get a chance to connect with the artist.
Being a participant in the creative world is an important part of their identity.
They signal that to others by treating their skin as a canvas.
If I were you, I’d explore building a business around that customer. Does that description sound so outlandish that not enough people like that exist to build a business around? I don’t think so. But it’s possible to find out for sure with experimentation.
One interesting thing about this approach is that it happens to address all of the rules of business that I opened with. You’re specializing in a customer group, not a discipline. That makes it easier to get great at serving them with whatever you do, enabling your creative practice to actually expand instead of contracting. It makes it easier to tell people what you do. And it addresses the niche focus that algorithms love.
My Advice
Treating your business as a creative discipline tells you what to do next. What I’ve suggested is just an idea to experiment with. Treat that experimentation like your artistic experimentation. Build on it with your knowledge of your creative practice, then bring it into existence so you can step back and observe it. Start finding people who would embrace all of your disciplines, share your ideas with them, and listen to what they have to say.
That will teach you more about your business than my knowledge of business rules ever could.
Yeeees, but also look for the constant: the Artist. This is why personal branding is such a powerful tool: it solves for much of the differentiation and difficulty, and it allows artists who are naturally multidisciplinary to keep their boundaries open to new things. The sale becomes not just the product but the producer.