Here’s the start of last year’s comments about how bad a year 2008 turned out to be.
End Of The Year – Looking Back & Forwards
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
Well it’s happened again – one year is ending and another will soon begin. Frankly, I’m ready for 2008 to be good and gone and 2009 to begin – hopefully bringing a new era in the visual art community of the Carolinas.
Looking back it has been a rough year – $4 a gallon gas, the stock market tumble, the collapse of the financial market, recession finally acknowledged, a long drawn-out election, and dwindling advertising support for Carolina Arts. It was the trickle down theory in reverse. And, although gas prices have tumbled and may continue to lower – it is but one bright spot in a bad year – other than Carolina Arts Unleashed.
You can see the entire posting at this link.
Man, except for the $4 gas and the election – there wasn’t a lot of progress made last year – in fact – it even got worse. That can’t happen again this year – can it? I hope not!
If you go back and read all of my Looking Forward, you’ll find that I had hoped to be adding Podcasts to the website about the visual art community – that didn’t happen. I guess I’m lucky I’m writing about this year – as if we survived and I guess we did. (We – meaning the collective Carolina Arts family.)
So looking ahead to next year, 2010, I think we’ll still be in survival mode, so I won’t even bother to mention any hopes of what new we might be adding (except for more advertising) – some people might be keeping score.
But I guess survival isn’t so bad, as so many didn’t make it over the last year and a half. A lot of commercial galleries have closed and some are just waiting for leases to end – if they can do that. Many just disappear between the time I dropped off papers one month and the time I returned the following month. There’s no note left on the door – just an empty space where there once was an art gallery. I guess people should remember that image when thinking of the glamor of owning an art gallery. It’s a hard business even in good economic years.
For one thing – I hope more people – individual artists, commercial art galleries, non-profit art galleries, art museums, arts councils, artist’s guilds or anyone buys more advertising in 2010 and I hate to add this point, but it is relevant – I hope those who buy ads – pay for them. It’s a big problem we’ve been having.
And now that I’ve mentioned advertising – we’re going to be adding display advertising to our website – inactive and active – meaning some will just be a picture ad and some will be a picture ad that can be clicked to be taken to another place. That could be to images of more artworks, a website, a blog, or an article about an event.
We need to open our fairly large (all things are relative) online audience up to advertising opportunities. A lot of folks are wondering why we haven’t already done that long ago – beyond ads from Google, but you have to remember – we’re preparing a printed newspaper every month besides our online offerings and there are only two of us.
So here’s hoping we all have a better, much better 2010.