Description
There’s a kind of advice book that solves a hard problem by moving it. The problem starts out in the world — stubborn, structural, mostly outside the reader’s control — and the book relocates it, gently, into the reader’s head, where at least it can be worked on. Miriam Schulman’s *Artpreneur* performs that relocation with skill, and watching it happen is much of what makes the book worth reading. It is also where the book gets into trouble.
Schulman is upfront about her audience: artists, defined as broadly as language allows — poets, filmmakers, anyone who once “twirled in the backyard to your own happy, made-up song” — who can make the work but not a living from it. Her account of why they struggle is psychological. They carry “limiting beliefs” and “thought distortions,” a vocabulary she borrows, with credit, from cognitive behavioral therapy. Correct the thinking and the income follows. The book’s spine is a “belief triad”: believe in your art, believe in yourself, believe in your buyer.
The borrowed science is where I first slowed down. Schulman leans on evolutionary psychology to explain the fear of selling: “Your brain doesn’t know the difference between the threat inherent in leaving your cave in the middle of the night and that of offering your art for sale.” It is a usable image, and there is something to it. But the cave does heavy lifting across the whole book, and it flattens a real distinction. An artist who hesitates to email a collector may be afraid. She may also have noticed, correctly, that her list is two hundred people who signed up for a free class and have opened nothing since. The framework cannot easily tell those two artists apart, because it treats almost every hesitation as a distortion waiting to be corrected.
That is the thread worth pulling. Schulman instructs artists to “Continue to take inspired action, creating your art and putting it out in the world no matter what—even when evidence suggests that your marketing may not be working.” Read that twice. The instruction is to discount disconfirming evidence as a matter of principle. A framework that survives every outcome — a sale confirms it, a year of silence proves only that you have not yet believed hard enough — is not a theory of how art careers work. It is a closed loop. And it is the same loop Schulman flags in *The Secret*, the book she is most careful to separate herself from; her correction is to bolt “inspired action” onto magical thinking. But action that refuses to update on its own results is just persistence with a better vocabulary.
Here is my actual disagreement. Schulman draws a clean line between a limiting belief and a thought distortion. A limiting belief is an opinion — art ought to be affordable — and cannot be settled either way. A thought distortion is a claim — art will not sell at high prices — and can be tested. A good distinction. The trouble is what she does with it. When an artist says no one buys art in her town, Schulman files the thought under distortion and prescribes the cure: hunt for evidence that the opposite is true. But a testable claim has to be allowed to come back false. She only ever runs the test in one direction, gathering confirming cases — yes, people buy art in Idaho — and never letting a disconfirming one win a round. That is not cognitive behavioral therapy. It is motivated reasoning wearing its clothes.
None of which makes the book empty. Set the mindset theory aside and the second half is practical and specific in a way the genre often is not. The pricing chapter — charm pricing against rounded “prestige” numbers, dropping the dollar sign to dull the sting of the transaction — is concrete and probably right. The sales playbook is better still. Do not open with “How can I help you?” Make small talk first. Build an email list rather than trust an algorithm that puts your post in front of under one percent of your followers. Anyone who has been cornered by a vendor at a craft fair knows the gap between a person who asks your name and one who recites a pitch, and Schulman has sold enough paintings across enough boutique tables to know it cold. This is the book at its best, and it has almost nothing to do with belief. It is craft, learned slowly, handed over plainly.
Which makes the foundation feel like a missed chance. The mindset chapters run almost entirely on success — clients hitting income goals, a ceramicist selling 350 pieces in six minutes, a $750 magazine ad that returned $9,500. The artist who did everything in this book and still could not make rent never appears. She is not a distortion. She is the missing data the book needs and cannot afford to print, because her existence would crack the triad.
*Artpreneur* wants every artist’s story to end the same way, and it does carry the tactics to move a fair number of them closer. It is a useful book wrapped around an unfalsifiable one: take the playbook, and hold the theology at arm’s length. The tell sits in plain view. To reassure a hobbyist that art sells online, Schulman points to Julie Mehretu’s $6.5 million auction record — an artist the book itself notes was, that same year, given a solo show at the Whitney. It is offered as encouragement. It reads as a category error. The distance between those two readings is the distance between what this book promises and what it can deliver.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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