Blog / 2026 / Breaking Art World Rules

I handed her my card without a second thought. It was 2006: I was 25 and I’d been a full-time artist for three years. My business cards may have been printed on an affordable lightweight card stock, but I felt grounded in the practice of handing one over every time I met someone new.

A few months later, after having encountered this person several more times at various events, she waved me over to the side of the wine-drinking and art-looking crowd in which we’d been mingling.

“When I was starting out as an artist, handing out business cards meant you were a sellout.”

I guessed she was about twice my age, placing her “starting out” period in the 1980s. She went on to explain that fine art needed to be kept separate from other fields and industries. She belabored the fact that business cards were easy to forgo, leaving the subtext unspoken but still very clear: why hadn’t I simply done without them?

This artist wasn’t wrong: I agree with her that art is different from other human endeavors. Ten years later, in 2016, I’d speak at an art business conference about how to make money with art, and I’d start the talk like so:

You have probably been told throughout your life and in so many ways that artists aren’t good at business.

There’s the consoler: “You’re not good at making money with your art because real artists don’t have any business sense. Your poverty is proof that you’re a real artist.”

The berater: “Have you read any of the marketing books I’ve given you?”

The degrader: “Art is just a hobby. Don’t try to make money with it.”

What the consoler, the berater, the degrader, and all the rest don’t understand is that it isn’t us.

It’s not that artists aren’t good at business. It’s that the art business isn’t like any other business, because the so-called “products” that artists make aren’t like anything else on earth. They are little pieces of ourselves that we break off and shape before launching them into the world. They are love letters to people we’ll never meet. Blood, sweat, and tears. Our art is what keeps us alive, what makes life worth living.

You can watch the full talk—it’s been a decade since I gave it, and I still stand by everything I said, except the detail about my gender identity.

For today though, my point is that the art world has a lot of rules, they are mostly silly, and they change based on the whims and tastes of the times. Why not break them?