Embracing Your Inner Businessman
Check out this article by Deanna Isaacs from the business section of Chicago Reader. This is AWESOME! I love this guy. I found this in my inbox this morning. Here ya go.
So You Wanna Be an Artist?
Sculptor Bob Emser says embrace your inner businessman.
By Deanna Isaacs
December 4, 2008
Bob Emser
Sculptor Bob Emser switched his college major from business to art 35 years ago but never left commerce behind. If you’re an artist, you are in business, Emser says, and your success is likely to depend as much on your management and marketing skills as your talent.
Take the glossy, hardcover coffee-table book, Bob Emser American Sculptor. Published by Emser this fall with 60 full-color photographs, an interview, and an appreciative essay by art journalist Jeff Huebner, the book is available at local stores and on Amazon.com. But Emser’s not thinking of it as a source of revenue. “I look at it as a very comprehensive, very expensive business card,” he says.
It’s hard to imagine anybody doing it today—the people I know who have jobs are desperately trying to hang on to them—but 13 years ago, with two kids to support, Emser walked away from a tenured professorship at Eureka College to become a full-time artist. The economy was friendlier then, Emser’s wife was supportive, and, he says, he’d surmised that a faculty job was not the leg up on an art career that it had been: “With the explosion in how we communicate now in all the arts, the university connection is not that important.”
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Emser says he entered a lot of competitions and participated in a lot of outdoor art fairs. He also had a couple of major part-time gigs: he cofounded the Contemporary Art Center of Peoria and headed it for five years, then got himself a studio in Chicago and spent 18 months running the Pier Walk sculpture show, back when it was the biggest outdoor exhibit of its kind in the world. But it’s easier to land commissions when that’s your single focus, he says. These days most of his assignments are coming from colleges and museums, which have an appetite for his big, streamlined abstractions and “don’t tell you what to do.”
A consummate networker, Emser says he tells aspiring artists, “If there’s someone you want to meet, call them. Ask for their advice.” With people who can be helpful, he says, “I count the touches”—the number of interactions. “It’s like a courtship.” But the real secret of his success may be the series of life coaches he’s hired, starting with the one who prompted his move to Chicago by telling him to “find your purpose and live up to your values.” Since then Emser’s had a coach who specializes in artists, another who’s a marketing maven, and, most recently, a “visibility coach.”
Emser follows a business plan and has analyzed the amount of time he spends on things like administration and marketing. The right balance for a full-time artist, he says, is 75 percent on managing the career, 25 percent on making the art. Does that sound inside-out? Emser says it’s not. But “Inside Out” is the title of a show featuring his work and the rubber-tire sculptures of Chakaia Booker, running through January 11 at the Elmhurst Art Museum.
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