• Why the art world's obsession with pricing formulas misses the point entirely I recently sat through yet another webinar promising to reveal "the secret formula" for pricing artwork. Width × height × experience factor ÷ mysterious coefficient = your price. Neat, tidy, mathematically satisfying. Also completely useless. After fifteen years working with artists, galleries,...

    July 15th, 20254 minUncategorized
  • Your museum just scored a major feature story in the regional newspaper. The coverage drives record attendance, your board is thrilled, and social media engagement spikes. Six months later, you're back to struggling for any media attention, wondering how to recreate that success. Sound familiar? Most cultural institutions approach media relations like they're planning...

  • Your contemporary art exhibition just secured a thoughtful review in the local arts weekly. Your experimental theater piece got mentioned in the university cultural magazine. Your new sculpture installation was featured on the regional arts blog. And your attendance numbers remain stubbornly low. Here's the uncomfortable truth: most cultural institutions are trapped in an...

  • Your communications team is drowning in deadlines. The exhibition opens in three weeks, and you need a press release, website copy, social media posts, newsletter content, and promotional materials. So naturally, someone suggests writing five different versions of the same announcement. There's a better way. Smart cultural institutions write one strategic exhibition announcement that...

  • Your beautifully crafted press release about your “groundbreaking new exhibition exploring the intersection of…” gets deleted in three seconds. Not because your exhibition isn’t newsworthy, but because you’ve structured your announcement like an academic paper instead of a news story. Here’s the reality: journalists receive dozens of press releases daily, most of which they...

  • It took me three months to finish Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World. Three whole months for a 294-page book. In our swipe-left culture, that feels almost embarrassingly slow. But here's what happened during those three months: I didn't just read that book—I lived with it. I argued with it over coffee....

    July 8th, 20256 minArtist coaching, Essays about art
  • We love our origin stories in the art world. The narrative goes something like this: genius emerges, fully-formed, with a distinctive voice and unwavering vision. Think Basquiat exploding onto the scene, or Banksy materializing with a complete aesthetic philosophy. These stories are compelling, romantic, and almost entirely fiction. The reality is messier, more interesting,...

    June 30th, 20254 minArtist coaching, Essays about art
  • A view from my son's bedroom: notebooks full of experimental marks and unauthorized wall drawings that somehow capture the essential human need to create The evidence sits right there on my dining table, scattered across my son's bedroom walls, and honestly, in every corner of human civilization: we are compelled to make marks, to...

    June 26th, 20255 minEssays about art
  • While you're waiting for the "right moment," someone else just submitted their application. Here's an uncomfortable truth about creative careers: the perfect moment doesn't exist. It's a mirage that keeps talented people perpetually preparing instead of actually doing. And right now, while you're reading this in June, thinking you'll "get serious" about that project...

  • Sunday evenings have this particular quality of pessimism, don't they? That Sunday scares feeling when the week ahead looms with all its uncertainties. It was during one of these contemplative moments — after watching Star Trek with my husband…because we’re nerds and proud of it — that recent conversations and news stories crystallized into an...

    June 17th, 20257 minEssays about art
  • In today's ever-changing digital landscape, museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions face the challenge of keeping pace with technological evolution. As custodians of our shared heritage and champions of artistic expression, these organizations must reimagine their roles in a world where physical and virtual realms increasingly overlap. This shift isn't merely about adopting new...

    June 5th, 20259 minEssays about art, Uncategorized
  • Or: why your social media algorithm should probably be designed by an art therapist We've been thinking about art all wrong. For the past century, we've treated art like it's this precious, separate thing that belongs behind glass in climate-controlled rooms, visited by hushed crowds on weekend afternoons. We've created an entire industry around keeping...

    May 24th, 20256 minEssays about art
  • Why Narration Matters Think about the stories you’ve read on social media that hooked you from the very first sentence. Were they personal revelations that spoke to you, or just raw information about something that has happened? Just like in the physical world, nobody will listen to your story online if you can’t keep their...

  • As my 18-month-old constantly sees me writing notes and scribbling exhibition plans in my notebook, he's developed an interest in drawing himself. So, I decided to sit him on my lap and let him start drawing in my notebook since he refused to draw with or in anything other than what I was using....

    April 13th, 20258 minEssays about art
  • Or: No, I Won't Write a Forward Just Because Your Check Cleared Yesterday, I had one of those conversations with my husband that left me wanting to simultaneously laugh, cry, and deliver an impromptu TED talk in our living room. The topic? Whether I, as an art historian and curator, am "obliged" to write...

  • There's something almost magical about Bob Ross's voice. That soft, gentle tone telling you that mistakes are just "happy accidents" has transcended American borders to become a global phenomenon. From Tokyo to Berlin, his soothing presence and paintings of serene landscapes have captivated audiences worldwide. But where does Ross sit in the broader conversation...

    April 6th, 20255 minEssays about art
  • Ever stood in a gallery feeling like an imposter? Or wondered why certain artists keep getting exhibitions while others remain invisible? You're not alone, and Deleuze might have something to say about it. After years of navigation between academic theory and public art spaces, we've become fascinated with how the art ecosystem operates as...

    March 22nd, 20255 minEssays about art
  • It’s not easy being an artist today. Instead of spending most of your precious time creating art and focusing on what’s important to you, you have to be your own art manager, content creator, marketing specialist, photographer and videographer, among others (as if that’s not enough), to reach your target audience and financially gain...

    February 19th, 20256 minArt management
  • "Derivative! Bullshit!" If you've ever felt intimidated by an art gallery or confused by a critic's impenetrable prose, there's a brilliant piece of satire that perfectly captures why. In an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Danny DeVito plays Ongo Gablogian, an art critic whose name cleverly plays on Larry Gagosian (one of...

    February 3rd, 20254 minEssays about art
  • ...To be an artist meant to choose a different life-style—to live minimally, with cheap rent and minimal needs and somehow survive. Today no one can afford that romance.1It’s 1977 and Jenny Holzer is writing her Truisms (1977–1979) on papers, printing them and pasting them on buildings, walls and fences around Manhattan. Fast forward to today:...

    February 3rd, 20254 minArt management
  • Following the creative work of Tea Morić Šitum over the past few years, we witness a continuous process of artistic distillation. From early works featuring recognizable maritime motifs, through the gradual stylization and reduction of form, to a complete immersion in abstraction, the artist guides us through the process that transcends mere artistic exploration....

    December 10th, 20243 minCurating exhibitions
  • The obstacles we face can sometimes uncover something deeply hidden in us—positive defiance pushing us forward and encouraging us to find happiness in the little things. This defiance was recently uncovered by thirteen-year-old Klara Palada, who has been painting intensively for over a year, searching for inspiration in religion and the endless beauties of...

    December 6th, 20242 minCurating exhibitions
  • We live off of and through nature and the land, bound to it since the dawn of human existence. Yet, over time, this bond between nature and humans has grown tenuous, distancing us from our own nature as well.Our ancestors, from ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome and beyond, venerated nature. Conscious of their subjection to...

    November 1st, 20243 minArt management, Curating exhibitions
  • Have you ever walked into a contemporary art gallery and found yourself puzzled, thinking, "Is this really art?" Maybe you thought: “I could do that”. You're not alone. Many people struggle to understand contemporary art, especially when it includes unconventional materials like trash, or when it's based on ephemeral concepts rather than traditional media...

    October 10th, 20246 minEssays about art
  • The Big Bang was not as we imagine it – dazzling like fireworks, accompanied by celebration and fanfare. On the contrary – its light took hundreds of thousands of years to break free and illuminate the universe, and living beings were not yet there to celebrate their own existence. During the Big Bang, stars...

    February 25th, 20243 minCurating exhibitions, Exhibition reviews
  • Walking the quarries, searching for the almost invisible, Josip Mijić does not only explore the physical space; the earthly. This (almost) invisible thing he is looking for is not necessarily immaterial either, even though that contrast between the material and the immaterial will be the backbone of the Aranea2 cycle. Mijić goes in search...

    February 25th, 20244 minArt management, Curating exhibitions
  • Each of us has our own language that may or may not be understandable to others, but often not even to ourselves. It usually consists of associations, signs, symbols, empirical, conceptual, or emotional fragments and is truly individual. Our inner monologues are unique but also something we sometimes have to decipher. Our thoughts are sometimes...

    February 23rd, 20242 minExhibition reviews
  • As you gaze from the shore at the azure sea, the brilliant sun shines in your eyes. You squint, but through your closed eyelids, the dazzling whiteness of the day still peeks through. Such white visions gazed back at us from the azure walls of the Studio 21 Gallery in Split. Their creator is...

    February 22nd, 20242 minExhibition reviews
  • If you've ever visited or lived in a foreign country - truly foreign - you might have felt the strange looks of people on you. You might have felt different but wanted to belong. In a world where people are often divided into “us” and “them”, locals and foreigners, even the tiniest gesture of friendliness...

    February 10th, 20241 minExhibition reviews
  • The polemical question today is "what does it mean to be a woman?" Our aim is not, nor is it possible, to answer that question in a single post. However, what we can do is present one perspective on this fantastic being called "woman." In the recently opened Retrospective of artist Petar Jakelić, we...

    February 3rd, 20242 minExhibition reviews
  • There is a stereotype of women being the more emotional gender, more intuitive, more in touch with themselves. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but woman is much more than that. The title of the group exhibition by Alma Čača, Karin Grenc, and Tea Morić Šitum, called "Intuition," opened at the University Gallery...

    January 27th, 20242 minExhibition reviews
  • Recently, for the first time, I dirtied my shoes while exploring an exhibition. Why is that important, you may ask? It speaks to the level of interaction the exhibition demands. In this case, I am referring to the work "Luminous Light" by Ugo Rondinone, which the artist presented at the Kula Gallery. The exhibition...

    January 20th, 20242 minExhibition reviews