THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: What the global art market grew last year. Art collectors are still spending. Art is selling at 5000, 10,000, 50,000 and right now in 2026. So if your art isn’t selling, the economy isn’t the problem.
Speaker 2: It’s The Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Podcast, an art world Insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Hey, it’s Miriam Schulman artist, author of Artpreneur The Step by Step Guide to Making a Sustainable Living from Your Creativity, and founder of the Artist Incubator Program, where I teach artists how to get past the six figure mark. And today we’re getting into something that I’ve wanted to revisit for a while, because the conversation has never been more important than it is right now. Because in all the years I’ve been an artist, there has never been a year where I haven’t heard, we’re in a recession, or we’re about to be in a recession, or there’s a recession right around the corner. So when I hear that, I just do a giant eye roll. Because if you’re telling yourself that story, it’s costing you sales. Because I’ve got real market data, a client story that’s going to make you rethink everything about how you’re talking about your art and a few things about Instagram that nobody wants to say out loud. But guess what? Somebody has to. So by the end of this episode, you’re going to have a completely different lens on your art business. Let’s go. I want to talk about a story I hear from artists all the time. It’s the economy. People aren’t spending now. There’s a war. There’s uncertainty. There’s a recession coming. It’s a pandemic. An election year. An earthquake in Turkey. Now, I want you to notice something. I’m calling these stories, not excuses. Because to you, this sounds real.
Miriam Schulman: And you’re not making up excuses. But this is your brain doing exactly what it’s designed to do. When things feel uncertain, your brain’s going to look for a reason. If it can find something outside of you to explain why your art isn’t selling. The economy, the news cycle, the algorithm, then you’re off the hook. You don’t have to change anything. You don’t have to take uncomfortable action. You don’t have to sell. You don’t have to send that email. You just have to wait. Now, that’s not weakness. It’s human. That’s every single one of us at some point. But here’s what I want to offer you today instead of just that story. What if the economy is not the reason your art isn’t selling? Because I’ve been looking at what’s really happening in the art market, and the data tells us a very different story than the one your brain has been feeding you. Now, before we dive in, I want you to share with me in the comments. Why do you think your art isn’t selling right now? I want to know what you’re up against. The real market data. Hey, I know the world feels maybe a little scary and uncertain, and yet I can tell you that from personal experience, not just from reading the headlines. Because this past March, my husband and I were in Israel. We were supposed to be there only two weeks, but the war started and our flight got canceled, so we ended up staying five weeks.
Miriam Schulman: And yes, we were in and out of bomb shelters with air sirens in the middle of the night and sleeping in our clothes. Yeah. Living in genuine uncertainty. The kind where you don’t know when you’re going home, when you’re refreshing flight apps at midnight only to find out that the US Rescue Mission flight was also canceled. But if you want to take a bus to Jordan, hey, they’ll help you get to the border. So we were trying to make peace with not being in control and not knowing. But in the middle of all that, I was coaching clients, delivering workshops and recording videos from my hotel room. Now I have to tell you, by week five, I had not dyed my hair in a very long time. I looked like Professor Polanyi. Bad internet, bad lighting, very dramatic routes. Not my best content moment, but I knew I needed to keep recording videos anyway. Not to wait. And one of those videos I recorded went on to over 32,000 views in a week because I had something to say that I felt artists needed to hear. Now, I’d hope that you feel that your art is important to not to wait. That video became one of my most viral videos to date. It’s called What Art is Selling Right Now. I’ll link to it in the show notes in case you haven’t seen it, go watch it after this.
Miriam Schulman: But here’s the thing. The reason I’m coming back to this so soon is because when I wrote the script for that, it was before the war had escalated. And then I felt like, well, wait a minute, now that the war had started and oil prices are up, how has the art market responded? Because the art market was also worried that the global events and the rise in oil prices would affect the art auctions and the art sales. But here’s what the data shows before we get to right now, let’s just rewind a bit to last year. Last year I was hearing from a lot of artists, oh, people are thinking about art, they’re protesting, or they’re worried about tariffs or they’re worried about Trump. But last year, the global art market grew by 4% in 2025 to an estimated $59.6 billion, and public auction sales were up 9%. And I know you’re thinking, oh, man, that’s the high end of the market. Everything happens in the high end of the market, trickles down to the middle of the market and to the low end of the market. And during those same exact weeks that my husband and I were navigating canceled flights and bomb shelters, London spring auctions were some of the strongest in years. Sotheby’s and Christie’s evening sales were up 110 and 52%, respectively, over the prior year.
Miriam Schulman: Sotherby’s sold out every single lot, and Christie sold 96% of the lots offered. So yeah, the world was uncertain, but the art market wasn’t waiting. If this is already surprising you, I’m just getting started. Now, this is what I do here. Every single week I bring you the real data. Not the paranoia, not the fear, not the naysaying. And by the way, not the Pollyanna version of this either, but the real stories, the facts, and the strategies that actually sell art. If you don’t want to miss what’s coming next, make sure you hit subscribe and even the notification bells. Now, you might be thinking, Miriam Sotheby’s is trophy art. That’s billionaires. That has nothing to do with me. But stay with me, because here is where it really gets interesting. At Art Basel Hong Kong just this past spring, the most active price range was not the million dollar bracket. It was works selling between 5000 and 50,000. And here are the real examples. And Buckwalter Still Life with dahlias sold for $8,000. Movana Chen works on paper sold 5000 to $10,000 each. Li Ting Ting sold for 5000 to $10,000 each. Zhejiang sold art between 14,000 and 65,000. Quiet balance sold for 50,000. Harvey Raynor sold for $12,500. Peggy Cooper sold between €8000 and €50,000, and at Expo Chicago, one booth sold five works on paper at $2,500 each. Small paintings at $5,000 and larger work for 20,000. All by the first evening at Art Expo, Gerald Gibbs sold out at 5000 to 15,000.
Miriam Schulman: Listen, this is not a dead market. It’s not a dying market. This is a thriving art market. Collectors are still buying art. By the way, for those of you who are curious about the highest end of the market, just to prove the point that collectors are actively spending, I just want to share with you Henry Moore. King and Queen sold for 26 million pounds. Francis Bacon self-portrait sold for 16 million pounds. Yvonne Wells fabric works. Remember we talked about fiber art recently sold between 50 and $60,000 at Frieze Los Angeles. This is all in 2026, by the way. The money is there. The buyers are there. So when your brain tells you it’s not the right time if your art isn’t selling, the economy is not the first place to look. You’ve got the wrong man. Now, if you believe the story that the economy is the reason why your art isn’t selling, then you don’t have to look at what you need to fix. Now, I’ve been coaching artists for over seven years and I see this pattern constantly. When an art doesn’t make sense, when an artist doesn’t make sales, the first thing they usually look at are the circumstances. It was a bad venue, the economy. They may tell me where they live. They might say, it’s been a busy time. Right now the weather, the weather’s good, the weather’s bad.
Miriam Schulman: But if you’re telling yourself that it’s not the right time or it’s the circumstances or something like this, especially the right time argument, then a year goes by and you’re still waiting for the right time. Here’s the hard truth the art market has always had uncertainty. There was uncertainty in 2008. There was uncertainty in 2020, and in both of those years, artists thrived not because the economy handed them a win, but because they kept showing up and they kept working on their positioning. If your art isn’t selling, it’s not the economy, it’s your positioning. Why art doesn’t sell. Let’s talk about what positioning actually means, because I think a lot of artists misunderstand this. It does not mean I posted it on Instagram. Positioning is the full picture of how your work shows up in the world. Your presentation, your pricing, your story, and the clarity of your offer. So here’s what I see most often. So let’s start with number one presentation. Your photos are dark. They’re cropped awkwardly, or your website looks like it was built in 2011 or worse. Thousand and eight 2005. I’ve actually seen photos of art online get worse as the years have gone on rather than better, and that is because people are taking pictures of their art with their smartphone rather than cameras. I actually had an artist ask me recently if the photos on her website were important.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, yeah, they are the most important thing collectors will buy with their eyes. Firth. And if your art doesn’t look valuable and the places where people first see it, they won’t believe it is number two. We’ve talked about this already on this channel, but it’s the pricing mismatch. Maybe you’re underpricing, which trains buyers to think of your work as more decorative rather than collectible, or your prices are inconsistent, which creates confusion and erodes trust because collectors will notice if a 12 by 12 is $300, but a 12 by 16 is $2000 or $1000. And that signals that you’re guessing. Number three is lack of clarity. If someone lands on your website or sees it at an art show and can’t immediately understand what you make, who you are, and why it matters, they leave. Not because they don’t like your art, but because they didn’t feel strong enough. Pull to stay. And I’ll add one more thing to this list. Are you asking them to buy it? Because I was coaching an artist recently and this conversation happens all the time. But for this particular one, she was in a group show with only two other artists, and she said there was a decent amount of foot traffic, lots of compliments, and she wanted to blame the venue, the venue. So I asked her a really uncomfortable question. I asked her, did you ask anybody to buy your art? So the question to ask yourself is, does my work look like something a collector would be proud to own? Not just love, but proud to own? That’s the bar.
Miriam Schulman: And did you follow through? I want to give you a client case study, because I think this will help you understand the problem better than anything abstract that I could say. Right now I’m working with a client, Greg. If I get his permission to use his full name and his art, I definitely will. Greg is not a struggling artist by any conventional measure. His artwork is technically excellent. He’s sold internationally, and he’s been a top seller on a major platform, and his art sells between 5 to $7000 a canvas that’s oil painting. It’s truly exquisite work, but his art isn’t moving the way it should be. So together we did my signature excavation process for helping artists dig their real story out and turn it into positioning that actually works. Before we did our excavation together, when I asked Greg what his work was about, he said something like my work explores identity, memory, and perception, inviting viewers to interpret meaning. Sounds good right? But also completely forgettable. And here’s the problem with language like that. It’s vague. It’s safe. And sorry, Greg, it’s a little bit boring. Explores, invites. Interprets. Those words. Do not help a collector decide to buy. They don’t make anyone feel anything. They’re the artistic equivalent of saying I’m a people person on your resume.
Miriam Schulman: Does any of that sound familiar? If you’ve ever written something like my work explores the relationship between light and memory, or I invite viewers into a dialog with the canvas. I see you. I do keep listening because what I’m about to say is going to change how you talk about your art. So we dug deeper and here’s what actually came out. Greg grew up in a strict religious environment where truth was handed down from above. Where he wasn’t believed when he told his own truth, where questioning was not just discouraged, it was dangerous. And at the same time, his grandfather was the opposite free, expressive, creative and artist. So Greg had been living inside that gap his whole life between imposed truth and personal truth. What mask was he putting on and noticing how other people were also masking and what it cost them to mask. Living between what you’re told to see and what’s actually there. Then he said something to me that cracked the whole thing open. He told me he’s not painting to express something. He’s painting to expose something. Specifically, he’s exposing how easily we’re manipulated into believing what we see, how perception isn’t neutral, how truth isn’t stable, and how the viewer, without realizing it, brings their own bias into the frame and mistakes it for truth. That is not about painting identity. That’s about painting the instability of truth itself. So instead of I explore identity and perception, Greg’s positioning now sounds more like I manipulate what you see until you can’t trust what you’re looking at.
Miriam Schulman: And then that moment of doubt, you catch a glimpse of how your own mind constructs reality. You see the difference. Do you feel the difference? Before, what he talked about makes you nod politely. The new way of talking about it makes you want to stand in front of one of these paintings and really look. Collectors don’t buy medium. They buy meaning. Now, here’s a challenge for you. If this is inspiring you to rethink how you talk about your art, give me your best line in the comments. Not your whole artist statement. Just one sentence that gets at what your work really means. I dare you. The most powerful meaning of all is when a collector looks at a piece of art and feels like it was made for them, like it seized them. Like it says something about who they are or who they want to be. And give me a thumbs up if you believe that. Because if you do that one shift in how you think about your art. It’s going to change everything about how you see and talk about and position it. This is what Greg’s work does now, not because he changed his artwork, not because he changed his audience, but because he changed how people understand them. When your positioning is clear, everything shifts.
Miriam Schulman: Your emails will land differently. Your website will convert. Your work feels more valuable, and the right collectors don’t just appreciate your work, they need it. If you’re describing your art with words like explorers, invites questions, there’s a good chance you’re hiding your own real signal. And that’s the most important work I do with my private clients. If you’ve been selling your work for a while now, you already have a website and a track record of sales. You know your work is good, but something is still missing. Something still isn’t converting to sales the way it should. And you’re so close. But you don’t know what it is. Maybe you’ve already invested in coaching our courses, trying to crack this open. You’ve learned a lot, but the needle still hasn’t moved the way you expected. And perhaps you’ve been doing everything you’re supposed to, but it’s still not enough. Now, if that sounds familiar. My inner circle might be exactly what’s been missing. This is the only way to work with me directly. One on one. Not a course, not a big group program. Just you and me doing deep work, excavating your real signal, fixing your positioning and making sure that the right collectors can finally find you and understand your art immediately. The next cohort begins in June and it’s by application only. To qualify, you need a track record of sales and an e-commerce enabled website.
Miriam Schulman: This isn’t for artists who are just starting out. It’s for artists who are already in motion, but are ready to stop leaving money on the table because there’s a version of your art career that you’ve been imagining for a long time. The one where your work sells not because you got lucky or dropped your prices, but because the right people found you and immediately got it. Go to SchulmanArt.com/BIZ to apply. The link is in the show notes and the next cohort starts soon. I’d love to see you there. Why Instagram is no longer working. Here is the other thing that’s often true when art isn’t selling, the right people don’t know you exist. But here’s where I want to challenge some advice you’ve been probably following. Maybe you’ve been told that social media is the answer. Post consistently. Show your process. Be on Instagram every day and if their advice isn’t working, you just need to post more. So you do. You spend hours crafting posts, writing captions, filming your studio, editing reels, investing in caption vaults using their method for creating carousels. And then, according to rival IQ, they analyzed billions of Instagram posts across every major industry. The median engagement rate across all industries is 0.36%. That’s already pretty sobering. But you know what the engagement rate is for home decor, the category most comparable to art. I’ve been saying 0.15, but it’s actually 0.14%.
Miriam Schulman: That’s less than one and a half person out of every 1000 engaging with your post. And again, that’s not shopping, that’s liking. So I want you to be honest In creating content for Instagram zooming, actually making content for Instagram, writing captions, filming reels, editing. Drop your number below. Can’t wait to see it. Now, if you’re spending hours every week creating content for a platform where fewer than two out of a thousand people even double tap. We need to talk about math. Now, I’m not saying get off of social media entirely, but I want you to understand what you’re up against, because a lot of artists are pouring enormous creative energy into a platform that’s structurally designed to give you almost nothing back. Instagram engagement dropped about 24% and keeps changing the rules, is losing relevancy and expecting artists to keep hustling. But here’s the deeper problem even when your posts do get seen, you’re mostly reaching other artists, not collectors. The algorithm shows your work to people who already follow you and people who look like them. And if you’ve been building an audience of fellow painters and crafters who love your process posts, that’s who you’ll keep reaching. Lovely people. I’m one of them. But maybe not your art collector. And yes, artists do buy art, but you shouldn’t be limiting yourself to other artists. So what actually works? I want to talk about a shift in thinking away from chasing reach and toward chasing relevance.
Miriam Schulman: A lot of marketing culture is obsessed with going viral. Get the most views. Reach is the most important blow up. And for certain creators, that strategy makes sense. Or it did at one time. But for artists selling original work, especially art for 5000 10,000. And yes, let’s get you there, my friend. $25,000 range. Going viral is not just unnecessary. It might actually be the wrong goal. So think about it this way. If you’re painting sells, once that buyer is done, you don’t need thousands of people to see it. You just need one person who loves it and has the means to buy it. The most impactful marketing does not aim for broad viral exposure. It focuses on precise targeting. Getting the right message to the right people. Luxury brands figured this out a long time ago, and you’re not mass market. You’re in a luxury market. And that requires a completely different strategy. So let’s talk about who your actual buyers are. There are consultants, interior designers, corporate art buyers, gallery curators, architects, and yes, wealthy art collectors, perhaps C-suite executives who are already in the market. These are your people, and I’ll tell you exactly where they’re spending their professional time right now. Linkedin. I know I can hear you groaning even over the internet. Mary on LinkedIn is for people posting about their promotions, humble bragging about synergy and job searching, I get it. But hear me out.
Miriam Schulman: Linkedin has an average engagement rate around 5%, which is significantly higher than Instagram’s lousy 0.14% for our category. And because it has a professional discussion oriented audience, that’s not a small difference. That’s a completely different universe of attention. But more importantly, the type of person on LinkedIn is fundamentally different from who scrolling Instagram on LinkedIn, you can find and connect directly with people who make decisions about art. An interior designer who just posted about finishing a commercial project, and our consultant who’s talking about their client’s collections. A corporate foundation announcing a new acquisition budget. These are not passive consumers. They’re professionals with purchasing intent. And here’s the thing about LinkedIn that nobody talks about for artists. You don’t need a big audience. You need the right audience. If 200 are consultants, follow your work on LinkedIn. That’s worth more than 20,000 artists following you on Instagram. You’re not trying to go viral. You’re trying to be visible to the right people. So you can think small, think targeted, think. Who are the three types of professionals who could either buy my work, refer buyers to me, or place my art in spaces where it will be seen. And then you can go where those people already are. That’s a completely different game than chasing the algorithm, and it’s one that you can actually win. By the way, I do have training on LinkedIn. It is zero fluff. It is concise, highly impactful, and it is available on demand.
Miriam Schulman: So we’ve linked that in the show notes too. It’s SchulmanArt.com/LinkedIn. So now you know where to find your buyers. But here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter where you show up. If what you’re saying when you get there isn’t landing. Which brings me to the most important shift in this entire episode. Collectors don’t buy medium. They buy meaning. And now I want to talk about something that I think is the most important shift that you can make in how you talk about your art. You’ve probably heard marketing advice like this sell the benefits, not the features. And for a long time I agreed with that. A feature is your painting is four by six feet. A benefit is that it looks great above the sofa. Makes sense right? But I’ve come to believe that even benefits aren’t enough, because what people are really buying isn’t a feature or a benefit. They’re buying how it makes them feel. Let me give you some examples from outside the art world. Nike. You would think Nike’s job is to sell sneakers, and you’d think the pitch might go something like this. These shoes have superior cushioning. They’ll improve your split time. They’re made with breathable mesh. That’s features. Or maybe if they’re focusing more on benefits, it would sound like this. You’ll run faster. You’ll feel more comfortable. Your feet won’t hurt.
Miriam Schulman: But their actual slogan is just do it. So what is Nike selling? Not sneakers. Not the benefit of better performance. Nike is selling motivation. They’re selling the belief that you’re someone who doesn’t make excuses, who gets up and does the work. When you buy Nike, you’re buying an identity. And here’s another great example. Clairol and L’Oreal both selling hair dye. And these are competitors that have gone head to head for decades. Clairol’s campaign was does she or doesn’t she? That’s a benefit pitch. The hair dye looks so natural no one can tell. She gets to have colored hair without anyone knowing. It’s really clever. L’oreal had a harder problem. Their product was more expensive. So how do you sell a pricier version of essentially the same thing? Their answer? Because you’re worth it. It’s the last few seconds of all their commercials. Think about what they’re actually selling. Not the hair dye. Not even the benefit of beautiful hair. They were selling self-esteem. They were telling women, you deserve to spend money on yourself. You’re worth it. That’s so much more powerful than it looks natural. And that campaign didn’t just sell hair dye. It became a movement. Women don’t just buy L’Oreal. They identified with it. So here’s the question for your art. What identity are you selling? What does it say about someone when they own your art? What did they feel when they walk past it every morning? Because futures tell someone what they’re getting.
Miriam Schulman: Benefits. Tell someone what it does for them. But meaning tells someone who they are. This is exactly why leading with your process usually backfires. Most artists, when they talk about their work, describe how they made it. It took me 40 hours. I used cold wax and encaustic and three layers of oil. I built this canvas myself and I get it. That effort is real. You want people to appreciate the craft. But here’s the problem. Collectors, they don’t buy effort. They don’t buy technique. Now, yes, other artists appreciate technique, but collectors buy the emotional experience, the memory, the aspiration, the beauty, the provocation. If you lead with your process, You’re speaking probably to your peers. When you lead with meaning, with the why behind your art, not your why, not why you made it, but with what you want your viewer to feel with the story behind a particular series. Then you’re speaking to art collectors. Now I want you to think about the last time you described a piece to someone. Did you tell them how much work you put into it, or did you tell them what it meant? That’s the shift. That’s the work. And meaning is what collectors buy. Now, I want to ask you something before we wrap up. Where were you in your art business a year ago? Were you making roughly the same amount of money that you’re making right now? Were you trying the same things, telling yourself that this year it would be different? Maybe you’re bringing in 10,000 a year from your art.
Miriam Schulman: Maybe 15,000, maybe 25,000. But you’re working hard for every single dollar you’re creating, you’re posting, you’re showing up, but you’re exhausted. Here’s the question I ask artists who are trying to decide whether or not to work with me, and it wakes them up every single time. If you keep trying to figure this out on your own a year from now, will anything be different? Because here’s what I know from working with artists inside my inner circle. Brett Netherly added $30,000 in new sales in just a few months. Megan Mayberry added $40,000 selling her headdresses in six months, and Bo Saffire made $120,000 in a year. These are not outliers. These are artists who stopped trying to figure it out alone. The question isn’t whether or not you can afford to join the inner circle. The question is whether you can afford another year of staying exactly where you are right now. If you have a track record of sales, an e-commerce enabled website, you can apply right now. Go to SchulmanArt.Com/BIZ, the link is in the show notes and the next cohort start soon because a year from now, you’ll either be exactly where you are today or you won’t be. But that decision starts right here and you’re worth it.
Miriam Schulman: What to start doing today? Okay, here’s what I want you to take away today. The market is still moving and our collectors are still buying, but they are buying with intention. And that means you need to show up with intention to before you blame the economy. Look at your positioning. Look at your presentation. Ask yourself who can actually see your art right now and ask whether you’re leaving with meaning or just effort? And are you even asking for the sale? You’re not Nike, but you can think like Nike. You can stop selling the materials and start selling what it awakens in the person who lives with your art. Collectors don’t buy medium, they buy meaning. Now, if something in this episode hits you, I want to know which part. Was it the market data. Greg’s story. The Instagram numbers. Drop it in the comments. I read every single one. But here’s something I want you to do right now. And I mean right now before you close this video. A lot of artists never post their sold work and I get it, once it’s sold, you feel like it’s old news, you’re done with it. But sold art is social proof. It tells collectors that other people have already trusted you with their walls and their their investment. It tells them your work moves. So if you have sold work sitting in your camera roll that you’ve never posted, that is a missed opportunity every day.
Miriam Schulman: So here’s your action step. Go post that art that you’ve recently sold or even sold a while ago right now and tag me. I’m at @SchulmanArt on Instagram. I want to see what you’re making. And when you tag me, maybe I’ll reshare it, which means your work gets in front of my audience, too. Free visibility. Use it. Now, if this episode resonated with you, share it with an artist friend who needs to hear it. And if you want to go deeper on pricing, positioning, and building a real business around your work, my book Artpreneur is a great place to start. The link is always in the show notes. Okay, now I want to tell you what’s happening next week because I’m so excited for next week’s episode. So I’m always getting asked should I show the price of my art on my website. I know this is a big controversy in the art world, and a lot of galleries are not showing prices on their website, and a lot of artists do this as well. But is that helping or hurting you? I’ve done the research, I have the facts. I have the data. I’ll be answering that question on this channel next week. So if you want to know, make sure you hit subscribe and the notifications and I’ll see you back here. Same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Podcast. Connect with us on facebook at facebook.com/SchulmanArt, on Instagram at @SchulmanArt, and of course on SchulmanArt.com.
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