The Art of Self-Promotion: Balancing Visibility and Authenticity

Ah yes, self-promotion. That old chestnut.

While self-promotion is essential at some level to safeguard artists against obscurity and clear the path to recognition in a competitive landscape, it is not without its challenges and ethical considerations. Negotiating the pitfalls can enable artists to take a balanced and genuine approach.

Self-promotion serves to increase artists’ visibility and reach. With savvy use of digital platforms, artists can now share their work at the click of a button. If done well and consistently, this promotion builds a brand identity, and helps people connect with artists and their art on a personal level. That strong brand presence could also lead to differentiation in a saturated market.

Apart from direct connection to supporters or buyers, self-promotion opens new opportunities for networking and collaboration with other artists or allied professionals, potentially leading to collaborative projects, exhibitions, or other artistic ventures.

But it isn’t all plain sailing. One of the pitfalls of self-promotion is the risk of sacrificing authenticity for the sake of hype. While marketing is essential, it has more impact when the message is honest and driven by your vision and values.

I sometimes struggle to find the balance between creating work and attending to the necessary business elements, including self-promotion. This balance includes the allocation of time of course, but also the sensitivities of maintaining artistic and ethical integrity while promoting my work effectively. It’s a unique conflict – how to find the space between a natural humility and the need to promote? How to effectively share my work with the world, while preserving the purity of my artistic intent and process?

Walking that line requires honesty and transparency. It’s easy to see why self-promoters may be tempted to buy followers, or exaggerate achievements to stand out. I get it – swimming upstream is frustratingly hard work amid the torrent of noise in the digital-social world. But faking it devalues everything about the entire artistic process, and it’s just not the path for me.  

Rather, my path is about story-telling - and those stories are about the motivations, inspirations, and struggles of my work, and ways in which I express how I respond to life’s experiences.  

Attending to social media, writing blogs and posts, going to art events, collaborating with other artists, creating content for promotional opportunities, all while making art and, in my case running a city-based gallery can be overwhelming. But at the end of the day, without marketing, I would be creating in a silent void. By approaching self-promotion with integrity and authenticity, I can reach a broader audience for my artistic expression while fully honouring the truth of that expression.

An artist couldn’t really ask for more than that.