By Hugh McLeod
This cartoon is not a cartoon. It is a ‘social object’.
Says Hugh MacLeod, a successful American copywriter, cartoonist, blogger and book author.
A social object, he says, is something that causes people to talk, share and connect on social media.
In short: a conversation piece.
Or, since we live in 2011, content. (Preferably viral).
And since MacLeod is targeting office dwellers, his social objects are office jokes he scribbles on the back of business cards.
Great office jokes.
He sells them as business card designs or as prints, to be hung on the walls of office cubicles. (American office workers typically work in large spaces, where privacy is provided by movable walls around their desks. Hence the term cubicles.)
The prints he sells he calls ‘cube grenades’.
Yes, Hugh MacLeod understands art marketing. He’s showing that weekly on his popular blog The Gaping Void. Which he started very early, in 2001.
He’s been showing it ever since he started drawing cartoons on the back of business cards, in the late 1990s.
I only learned of him recently.
Although he says a million people downloaded the e-book that was the precursor to Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, it was totally new to me.
So I bought the book.
39 keys to creativity: sounded good.
I was in for a surprise.
MacLeod is one hell of a copywriter, and he made me think hard.
Ignore everybody, he says. Do what you want to do most. But don’t quit your day job. Keeping the job will give you the freedom to do as you please: to turn down commissions that you hate. To stay away from people you don’t want to work with. Maybe you shouldn’t even turn your hobby into a job. Whatever you do: don’t give up too soon.
If you have the creative bug, says McLeod, do not kill it out of fear.
Give it a fair chance. But do it for yourself, just so that you won’t regret later on. Because even if you are successful, life will go on as it always did. Success is not a beginning nor an end. You will still have to do your shopping and mow your lawn. The biggest success of all is to do work that you love and enjoy life.
That is part A of his book in a nutshell.
I agree with all of that.
And then there is part B.
Part B is the part about how to become a successful artist.
(Part B is intermingled with part A, by the way. I am sure McLeod did not even conceive of the book as having two parts – it is loosely built from a collection of blog posts.)
The problem with successful people telling others how to reach the same success is always that they are already there.
As we all know, being successful is, for a big part, a matter of luck. It is only afterwards that those who were lucky think they followed a method.
So, what method does MacLeod advise?
‘Ignore everybody, find your true voice.’
MacLeod claims he only started being successful after he quit worrying about what other people would think of his work. Which is when he started scribbling on those tiny cards.
But is he right?
Will success only come once you stop minding other people and opinions and speak out in your own, most authentic voice?
Or rather, even if you do that, will it come at all?
Most likely, for you and me the answer still is: no.
First off, we need a definition of ‘authentic’.
Secondly, it totally depends on the field you work how authentic a voice is called for. In art and design trends are leading. In reality, the amount of authenticity that is tolerated is marginal. Authenticity is partly a myth.
Or is McLeod maybe talking about High Art, about Magnificent Art even?
Maybe he is.
Just look at the examples he mentions:
Van Gogh, Pollock and Picasso. Hemingway, James Joyce and Bob Dylan.
And himself, of course.
When he talks about why you should follow your dreams (part A) he seems most reasonable and down to earth.
When he talks about becoming succesful, his standards are all of a sudden academic and romantic (as in: 19th century romanticism).
The same goes for his marketing advice.
‘Do something totally new and market yourself in an innovative way.’
What kind of advice is that?
Are we supposed to sit down and come up with not only a totally new medium, material, technique or content, but also a totally new marketing technique, each of us, creatives?
Is there not still a large market for well painted portraits, beautiful photographs, witty cartoons, political art quilts? Sold via galleries and exhibitions and online shops?
Did Picasso, Van Gogh and Bob Dylan invent new marketing techniques?
No, they didn’t.
There is a lot of myth making after artists reach the top.
We cannot, all of us, sit down and think up innovations.
In real life, innovations are usually stumbled upon.
Just like McLeod stumbled onto the internet in 2001.
He started a blog, when there hardly were any yet, and his work got known.
That just happened to be his path. Not repeatable per sé.
McLeod’s business card drawings are a great gimmick.
His jokes are witty and his blog proved a great marketing vehicle for his type of work.
Actually, his work is all about marketing.
Which, indeed, is what artists need to think about nowadays.
As they have always had to do.
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Kitty, I agree with you about his marketing advice: “Do something totally new and market yourself in an innovative way.”
While I haven’t read the book although I know of Hugh’s cartoons – I don’t really agree with having to reinvent the wheel every time. Nothing is original, everything has been done. HOW it’s been done and HOW people will market themselves in the future will be based on things that they’ve seen before that worked. Little innovations along the way!
Right. We agree. You know what – everyone needs to market him/herself as a guru nowadays.. it is getting tiresome. Even though it DOES work. I bought the book, didn’t I? And he sure can write and make you think!
Hi Kitty. Being authentic and making a living are sometimes incongrous notions. An artist’s way has to be to follow the true soul of the art, otherwise why bother creating it? But if people like what you do and you do more of it because they will buy it, is that wrong. I don’t think so. It’s only wrong if you do it only because they want and your heart and soul is telling you to stop doing it.
I think this is why so many people separate their art from their paid work. They have a Chinese wall between them that says this is what I do for my art and myself and this is what I do for money.
I know because I have done this.
I am a poet but I do not sell or publish it. I write it for the art and to satisfy my muse.
I write other stuff to satisfy my need to eat.
Am I always authentic. Not always
Mike
hi Kitty, I couldn’t agree with you more. I followed him on Twitter about two years ago but am. Ready to unfollow. he’s a bit full of himself. Now that’s really tiresome.
I love this Kitty.
I disagree with Hugh on a number of key points (the main one being that artists must “balance” jobs they “dont like” with jobs they “do like” (a meme that shows up often in his cartoons, and one I believe you tacitly agreed with lol)
As for the “must we be innovative” question you posed to artists, I’d like to reference a quote I love, but can’t remember the source.
“If you’re not at least as creative in your marketing/communication as you are in your art, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.”
Sounds painful.
It also makes sense, at least, to me.
Creativity doesn’t have a limit.
The world is filled with talented, masterful, skilled, genius artists and musicians who drop the ball so hard on creative marketing, it’s almost sad.
I sat back and waited for the world to find my brilliant creations for years, until I smartened up and realized that creation, without communication (and self-promotion) is … not recommended.
So, yeah, Hugh’s brilliant, I have some areas where I differ and I’d love to have a chat with him, and I do think he’s right — although not very clear — about creative ‘communication’.
I mean we do not have to be innovative marketing geniuses all the time. We can’t be. There is not enough of it to go around ;-) And anyway, all this insistence on innovativeness is a bit of a myth, too. Life would be hell if everything were new all the time. Anyway, Hugh stumbled onto something new at the right time, but he cannot prescribe that as a common recipe, is all I mean. Btw I find his tweets very cynical.. as opposed to his books. And coming from me.. well.. it says something.
Or is everything is new all the time? ;)
Is that what life IS?
Every experience unique, every single one has not come before…
…hmm… food for thought :D ?
Hey Kitty,
Great post! Thanks for taking so much time to write this… I’m glad you cared enough to do so :)
I think, looking back, the whole thesis of the book (whose first draft I wrote a while ago- in 2004), was that the art-and-commerce, art-and-business, art-and-marketing, art-and-whatever paradox has always been with us, and alway will be, and will never go away.
That this “tense duality” between the two is perfectly natural, as natural as the paradox between life and death.
So if you do find paradox, that’s fine. The whole book was about paradox, to begin with :)
Godbless,
Hxxx
Hugh, I adore your work and creations. I love the cartoons. I share and recommend your stuff, and I think it’s awesome you came by to weigh in here.
This ‘tension’ aspect that recurs in your book has never sat well with me.
I’m going to take a moment and put this ‘paradox’ to rest.
There is no paradox between Life and Death, or Art and Marketing.
*Death* (and birth) is an inevitable phase / transition / reward – it’s a part of life.
*Marketing* is an inevitable part of delivering / offering / sharing- it’s a part of art.
They are completely, and utterly, linked and inseparable from each other.
Saying there’s a tension between them, to me, is like saying “damn, we can never seem to have a house without ‘walls’, why can’t we just create a *Pure House*, without all these annoying walls?” — walls are part of the very definition of ‘a car’.
If art is a message, “delivery” is an integral part of what a ‘message’ is.
If art is relationship, “reception” is an integral part of what an ‘relationship’ is.
If art is expression, “medium” is an integral part of that ‘expression.’
See? They play nice, they are part of each other, not two separate things fighting one another… unless we want them to :)
Anyway, thanks for listening (and thanks for the interesting discussion and space to share, Kitty.)
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