Noah Becker's Advice for Struggling Artists

 Artist, saxophonist and Whitehot Magazine founder Noah Becker, New York, NY 2020

By NOAH BECKER February, 2020

Hey, Whitehot Magazine readers, hey art world. Noah Becker here, publisher of Whitehot Magazine. I have a few thoughts tonight - it's a snowy night in New York City.

I don't think people know how to promote themselves, especially artists, and they need art dealers and art business people to promote them and package them and sell their work - some don't. I know some artists that might as well be art dealers because they have a roster of collectors, and they have fans, and they don't need anyone else to run their career for them, and they're a huge asset to any gallery that they happen to get with on any level - and the galleries just love artists like that. So I would say get your operation together, get your cottage industry together. There are artists who work with their spouse and their spouse handles their career. There are artists who work with managers and studio managers and people who do emails and phone calls and all this kind of stuff for artists to prosper.

I personally don't have that, but I've worked with 500 different writers, and I've worked with a host of different galleries. Over time, you learn how the situation works with promoting yourself and recording yourself and creating community around your creative work - it takes time. But sometimes what ends up happening is after about a decade or so of really, really building up a lot of small different things, like different press clippings, awards, accomplishments - all of a sudden you realize that people are listening. For example, a lot of artists, visual artists, even musicians who after years and years suddenly, I contact them, and I've been a fan of theirs for years. And I realize that it's this mirroring thing happening between us. Where it's like the whole time they were a fan of me and I didn't know - I was also a fan of theirs.

So sometimes you can be more successful and more famous than you think you are for years and years on end. Then all of a sudden you discover that the people you admire were actually admiring you from the other side of the magical looking glass we call the internet - or what we call the universe. So don't be too down on yourself is what I would say - get to a point where you start to realize that people are listening. That might be illustrated to you in different ways, but basically any vibration that you put out there into the universe, (and I know this sounds somewhat wishy washy), but then I started to see the proof that this kind of thing is true.

You put a vibration out there and that vibration can go straight through the clouds and be heard all over the world. And I think BELIEF is a dying art. I think we're putting our emphasis on being sort of the neighbor that looks over the fence, the voyeur, the “looky-loo” so to speak. We want to look at other people's lives constantly on social media. We don't want to create a strong vibration from our own center and send it out there. Anyways, get with the self, believe in yourself, and others will believe in you as well. 

Noah Becker, Whitehot Magazine. Enjoy your evening. Ciao. WM

(text loosely based on a podcast from our Instagram)