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Thursday, November 24, 2016
The Real Competition Is Inaction
Butts In the Seats: As he often does, Seth Godin is speaks right to the arts and culture industry when he suggests that we welcome an environment where there is a lot of activity similar to our own rather than viewing it as competition.
3 comments:
Cassidy Pearsall
said...
This is interesting, especially the last sentence. The idea that amateur artists (in comparison to professional ones) provide too much competition (in a fiscal sense) has always been prevalent in my life. I do commissions for paintings and cards and stuff for people, and have been since I was about 16. I never really advertised online, but I saw a lot of people I knew who did. They would advertise their services for incredibly small amounts of money, and they would get a decent amount of work! As a youngin', I never realized how little they were charging for their hours spent on the piece. Twenty bucks for a full size rendering and stuff isn't a lot. Also, many older artists would get upset because all of the customer went to the youngin's pages for commissions, not theirs, as they charged a decent amount for years of work and skill.
But, these youngin's, while maybe not benefiting the older folk in the short term, were keeping alive the interest in such work. Was it the most respectful way? Maybe not. But by inspiring other people with their work and success, they possibly brought in many people who may have never deigned to pick up a pen.
I think this is a very similar issue to shopping cooperate or shopping at a small business. Cassidy is right, it is easy to fall into the trap of paying someone a small amount of money you know should be larger for the same work. People do it every day when they choose to go to Ikea instead of my dad's furniture store. Art like anything else you can sell is a business, and in any business there is competition, or someone willing to do the work for less money because they want to get their name out, or because they are so poor they will do it for less. I think all of this is natural and as a business owner you should want your product to be good enough that people buy it in spite of your competition not eliminate your competition completely because lets be honest that is never going to happen. Amateur artists do present a kind of competition for professional ones but shouldn't we be encouraging that competition as we do in every other market in the world? Shouldn't we be pushing for our professional artists to be the best, and thus not let them sit on their heels without any pressure? Also, all of those professional artists were amateur once and someone let them climb the ladder, so we should do the same.
I love this! In an ideal world, artists should never feel as if they are in competition with each other. At the end of the day, the project you're on right now is gonna end, and the guy or gal that you were looking at sideways that whole time may be up for a collaboration. This translates to theatre tech too. In a given geographical area, so much of the technicians are interchangeable throughout all the companies that are working there, meaning that you can't really allow yourself to create a loyalty to a company on a gig basis, because then you're missing out on other gigs. Conversely, you can't really grudge the person who got that over hire gig you really wanted down at the Fox, because a bit later you two are together doing load-in for the Exit theatre downtown.
3 comments:
This is interesting, especially the last sentence. The idea that amateur artists (in comparison to professional ones) provide too much competition (in a fiscal sense) has always been prevalent in my life. I do commissions for paintings and cards and stuff for people, and have been since I was about 16. I never really advertised online, but I saw a lot of people I knew who did. They would advertise their services for incredibly small amounts of money, and they would get a decent amount of work! As a youngin', I never realized how little they were charging for their hours spent on the piece. Twenty bucks for a full size rendering and stuff isn't a lot. Also, many older artists would get upset because all of the customer went to the youngin's pages for commissions, not theirs, as they charged a decent amount for years of work and skill.
But, these youngin's, while maybe not benefiting the older folk in the short term, were keeping alive the interest in such work. Was it the most respectful way? Maybe not. But by inspiring other people with their work and success, they possibly brought in many people who may have never deigned to pick up a pen.
I think this is a very similar issue to shopping cooperate or shopping at a small business. Cassidy is right, it is easy to fall into the trap of paying someone a small amount of money you know should be larger for the same work. People do it every day when they choose to go to Ikea instead of my dad's furniture store. Art like anything else you can sell is a business, and in any business there is competition, or someone willing to do the work for less money because they want to get their name out, or because they are so poor they will do it for less. I think all of this is natural and as a business owner you should want your product to be good enough that people buy it in spite of your competition not eliminate your competition completely because lets be honest that is never going to happen. Amateur artists do present a kind of competition for professional ones but shouldn't we be encouraging that competition as we do in every other market in the world? Shouldn't we be pushing for our professional artists to be the best, and thus not let them sit on their heels without any pressure? Also, all of those professional artists were amateur once and someone let them climb the ladder, so we should do the same.
I love this! In an ideal world, artists should never feel as if they are in competition with each other. At the end of the day, the project you're on right now is gonna end, and the guy or gal that you were looking at sideways that whole time may be up for a collaboration. This translates to theatre tech too. In a given geographical area, so much of the technicians are interchangeable throughout all the companies that are working there, meaning that you can't really allow yourself to create a loyalty to a company on a gig basis, because then you're missing out on other gigs. Conversely, you can't really grudge the person who got that over hire gig you really wanted down at the Fox, because a bit later you two are together doing load-in for the Exit theatre downtown.
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