Different Expectations
What do people expect from Open Studios?
Well, we have just had back the results of our Artist and Visitor Surveys for Forth Valley Open Studios, an event now in its third year.
It has thrown up some surprising facts.
Visitors expectations and those of artists are wildly different.
Less than 10 per cent of visitors go to studios with the intention of buying work. They go for the experience of being inside an artist studio, often for the first time, and they welcome the opportunity to talk to an artist about his or her work and their creative processes. It is for them a learning/educational experience.
This is in stark contrast to many artists who view Open Studios as a commercial opportunity.
In my own case I chose not to sell any work this year, partly because of the difficulty of trying to price work that is produced on an ipad and iphone yet the number of people visiting my studio was the same, even though I was open for less days.
I even had a couple who turned up a month late having mistaken the date on the brochure which they had picked up from our local museum which still had an exhibition of Open Studios work.
They were a young couple, one Dutch and the other Japanese.
I asked them why they had chosen my studio out of the 70 other venues to visit especially as I had made it clear I was not selling anything.
They said it was because I was working with new technologies and they wanted to see the process.
