It’s Art Fair season! It’s almost summer and with summer comes art fairs, craft festivals, music festivals with art, and everything in between.

Are you someone who likes to buy art but are frustrated with the outdoor art festival scene?

I understand, and I think I know why many people are frustrated. There has been a gradual “cheapening” of fine art at art festivals in the last 10 years, and there is less quality fine art to choose from. I saw this trend happening as I was an artist who participated in art fairs, mainly in two different states; one in the North and one in the South. I sold art at most of these fairs, and some of them were very successful for me. However, gradually the sales tapered down as I could see the public was expecting lower prices and more crafty, gadgety, commercial things for sale at the art fairs, instead of real, original fine art.

At the same time, entering the art fair was very expensive, and it’s even more expensive today. Then there is the expense of all the damage to your equipment and your frames and artwork that you have to fix when the art fair is over. During an art fair your art might be dropped, touched, licked (yes, licked), scratched, blown down, blown away, rained on, smeared with dirt or food, or even completely destroyed. It’s very difficult to come away from an art fair with no damage to anything you have displayed or used to displayed your art. Obviously, when a painting you have made is worth a lot of money and represents a lot of your work and time, you don’t want it destroyed just because you decided to hang it outside in an art fair.

That is a big reason I developed Fine Art South, an online gallery where I don’t have to worry about my artwork getting destroyed because it’s being moved arond around and left to the whims of whoever walks by it after it’s hung up on my precarious metal walls basically outside.

Everyone shops for everything online – why not art?

The great outdoors is not an environment that’s any good for any art. Think of it this way: after you have spent $600 or more on a painting, would you even consider hanging it outside for 2 or 3 days? Or even just packing it up and driving it around in your car (with a lot of stuff stacked on top of it) for a few days? Especially in humid or extremely hot weather? Of course you would not want to do that to something valuable. You’d want to protect it and keep it from being ruined, so you’d probably want to keep it inside, in one place!

This is why so many artists are no longer participating in outdoor or even indoor art shows. It’s a good way to damage artwork. 

There is another less discussed reason that many artists no longer want to participate in annual outdoor art and music festivals. You are associating your fine art with a series of commercial products that you would not want associated with your artwork if you had a choice. The problem with art festivals is that you have no say in where they put you. One year I was between a man who carved cutting boards and wooden pens, and two women who made flavored olive oil. Now if I was to pick an art gallery or even just a nice store to put my artwork in, I would not choose one that sold olive oil and cutting boards, because by association, that lowers the perceived value of my artwork and confuses people. Also, I was selling artwork that was much more expensive than a $25 cutting board or a $25 bottle of olive oil. It lessened the perception of what my paintings should actually cost in the eyes of the public.

To be fair, there are some excellent fine art fairs that mainly just focus on fine art, but they are few and far between.

And in every festival you will see this going on: caricature artists, doing $10 cartoons of people that really look nothing like them. I saw that last weekend at an “art and craft” festival. Nothing against what they do, but I don’t think anyone expects to see fine artwork displayed next to that, or next to okra pickles, or next to knitted baby toys either. It’s just not where people expect to find fine art that they would be proud to hang in their home or office.

So here is the point: if you are an artist, you should build a website that showcases your fine art instead of displaying it outside in the midst of a crowd of people eating ice cream and fried food, where it is at the mercy of the elements and everyone who walks by. A website like this one, or one on a website like FASO where it’s easy to set up. My website there is ShellyFineArt, and I have others. But FineArtsouth is my main art gallery website.

And if you are an art buyer, don’t expect to find the best artwork for you at those places and events, especially the ones that call themselves “festivals”. The best artwork you can find will be displayed online – by the artist. That is where you should be finding the art you need to own.  Everyone shops for everything online – why not art?