What is it about artists and money talk? Try discussing money or pricing with an artist and you would end up feeling like you have scaled the fenced high walls of an exclusive private property and got caught out in the process.
A trespasser in a land clearly not your own. Though difficult to comprehend by normal mortals, this peculiar ailment is a norm among the art community. A strange curse that affects us, with no cure in sight.
What is even more peculiar about this malady is that we are ready to bargain with the vegetable vendor, cross swords with the atrociously fleecing auto driver and carefully analyse our electricity bills. No hesitation there.
The problem arises only when the subject of financial scrutiny is one's own artwork or remuneration regarding one’s creativity. Any mention of that and you would encounter reactions that would take a lifetime or more to understand.
Try asking an artist, "So, how much do you sell your art for?" or something on those lines, in vocabularies familiar to you. Most times, you would be met with an eerily awkward silence, following which, two extreme responses would come your way.
Response Number One would be an embarrassed grin, some squirming that expresses discomfort with the question and a quick change of topic.
Just as you begin to wonder if all that wriggling is actually a characteristic manifestation of some Zumba class the artist must have enrolled in, you would find yourself conversing about the weather and the COVID situation, as if that was the question all along.
How the transition happened would leave you eternally perplexed! Response Number Two would start with the same eerily awkward silence, and then progress to a sudden look of cold, freezing anger. The icy rage that freezes you with its coldness, devoid of any words but a long, hard stare, can easily be explained.
It is the result of a sense of humiliation felt, imagined maybe, at having reduced our journey in art to a market commodity. How then, can artists ever sell their art, if this be the case?
How do artists transcend this malaise and earn a living, once the decision to tread this path as a career choice has been taken? Thankfully, the universe has devised its own ways of finding solutions for most of mankind's woes.
In the case of artists, galleries came up as miracle cures to end our distress with money matters. If they fancied an artist's work, they packaged and marketed it well enough to finally find it’s way to the right buyer.
Negotiations are fierce sometimes, discounts offered most times, yet the artist is spared the ordeal. The smell of those crisp notes is indeed sweet, once the sale comes through - a means to live, an affirmation of the recognition of our work and a motivation to plod on.
So, the next time you meet an artist, remember to leave the sales figures back in your office and chatter about the war, climate change or the latest gardening tool. Talk anything but moolah, unless you wish to witness another Zumba session for free!