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Art Gallery, Dealer, Agent Mailing Lists - Worth it or Not?

Q: What do you think about buying mailing lists with names of art dealers and galleries? I heard about a company that sells art dealer mailing lists. I can also buy lists of hundreds of galleries, agents, dealers, curators, corporate art collections, museum curators, and more in all parts of the country. I plan to send them information about me and my art. The lists don't cost very much.

A: First off, you can get much of this information FREE by going to your local library and looking through Who's Who in American Art, The Official Museum Directory, and The American Art Directory. Secondly, buying an art dealer or gallery or any other kind of mailing list is a complete waste of time and money, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, they won't do you one bit of good. Let's say, for example, that you live in Texas and you buy a mailing list of 200 art galleries in Texas. That mailing will include all kinds of galleries that sell all kinds of art-- art by living artists, art by deceased artists, abstract art, French art, Russian art, Chinese art, Native American art, representational art, paintings, experimental art, sculptures, glass and ceramic art, art by Houston artists, art by Dallas artists, art with Cowboy and Western subject matters, art with Gulf Coast subject matters, and so on.

No matter what kind of art you make, only a small fraction of those galleries will likely sell it. Only a fraction of that fraction will be looking for new artists to show. And only a fraction of that fraction of that fraction accept unsolicited submissions from artists who they've never heard of or who haven't been personally referred by people who the gallery owners already know and trust. So out of that list of 200 galleries, no more than a handful will even bother to look at anything you mail them. This is your best-case scenario.

And think about the money you'll spend (waste) after you buy the mailing list. The mailing list itself might be cheap, but designing and printing up hundreds of brochures or other promotional materials, putting them together, addressing the packets, and mailing them out can easily cost several thousand dollars if you want to do it right, not to mention the many hours of your time you'll spend (waste). The bad news is that no matter how much time and money you put in, most of your materials go straight from the mailbox to the circular file without ever getting looked at. Why? Because the recipients know the difference between serious solicitations and spam... which is basically what your mailer will be.

All art gallery owners will tell you that large numbers of artists continually approach them looking for representation or wanting shows, many of those artists having no idea of whether their art even remotely matches the art those galleries sell. They'll also tell you that getting involved with artists who walk in off the street is highly unlikely, and getting involved with artists who send information in the mail or who cold-call them by phone is extremely unlikely. And geographically speaking, unless you're already well-known in the region where you live and show, the farther away from a gallery you live, the less likely yet they are to do business with you.

Your best bet is to forget about mailing lists altogether and take a more hands-on approach. To begin with, get a free list of all art dealers in your area out of the Yellow Pages of your local phone book, or from arts and entertainment sections of local papers. If you have your sites set on showing your art in nearby geographic locations, get their Yellow Pages or newspapers and do the same. The less well known you are, though, the more you should focus on working your immediate area. If the place where you live has little or no art scene, and you're serious about becoming an artist, consider moving somewhere with a more substantial arts community.

Take your list and personally visit each gallery or dealer. Find out what they sell and see how closely it matches the art that you make. At the same time, begin to immerse yourself in your local art community. The best way, by far, to get your art seen is to get to know people socially, through organizations or community activities, and to personally show your art at every opportunity. This may sound difficult and tedious, but it's what you have to do in order to get noticed and eventually establish yourself as a working artist.

If you'd rather stay local in an area with little or no arts scene, you can experiment with other options such as selling art online, either from your own website or at gallery sites or at online auctions, but these tend not to work for the same reasons that buying mailing lists doesn't work-- you're too far removed from your market. The less experienced or known you are, the more difficult abstract approaches like this become. And as for making website sales, the overriding problem is that if people don't know who you are, then they can't type your name into search engines like Google.

Buying and working off of a mailing list might make sense if you're already an established artist, but only if you're experienced at representing yourself and handling all of your own business affairs. Then you can target specific galleries or dealers who show your kind of art, and you can present them with facts and figures about how much art they can expect to sell if they decide to work with you. The closer you can come to providing them with a complete show and sales package, the greater your chances of success. Even so, only a small fraction of galleries on any mailing list will be right for you. Getting names from art magazines, fellow artists, art organizations, dealers who already sell your art, and other art community sources will be a lot more effective.