Art Doesn’t End At The Edge Of The Canvas
This post is by guest author Derek Sivers. Derek Sivers is a professional musician, founder of CD Baby and thought leader. This article originally appeared on his site, sivers.org, at sivers.org.ext. This article has been edited and published with the author’s permission. We’ve promoted this post to feature status because it provides great value to the FineArtViews community.
Imagine you see a caged feather on a museum wall. The sign underneath says the artist is a political activist in jail.
Imagine that same caged feather again. But instead the sign says the artist is a high school kid in Florida.
Or imagine that the only way to see it is to crawl deep into a shrinking tunnel that opens into a room of mirrors, where the caged feather is suspended by a thread.
Same feather. Very different perceptions.
The way you present your art, and what people know about it, completely changes how they perceive it.
Therefore, your art doesn’t end at the edge of the canvas. Your creative decisions continue all the way to the end.
Now think of the way you create and release music.
- You had a tiny idea for a song.
- You fleshed it out into a full song.
- You gave it layers of instruments.
- You chose its texture when recording.
- You came up with your artist name, album title, and visual look of your photos and videos.
Every step so far has been a creative expansion of your original idea.
So now it’s time to put it out into the world. Do you turn off all that creativity? Just upload the song to the usual places, and tell your fans?
No! Most do. Please don’t!
Instead, continue that creative path in your marketing. Flaunt your artistic freedoms, and have some fun with it!
- Set the tone.
- Decide how you communicate with the world, including why, when, and where.
- Create the story about the song, and yourself.
- Choose what you reveal, what you omit, and what you invent.
- Choose what you’re actually selling.
- Decide how, when, and where you’ll sell it.
- Choose what you’ll accept as payment, and what you give in return.
These are all artistic decisions you can play with.
Marketing is the final extension of your art.
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You can view Derek’s original post here.
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Editor’s Note:
