SALZMAN INTERNATIONAL has been providing the most professional & talented illustrators in the world
for over 30 years...
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| www.salzmanart.com Partial List of Clients Include: Conde Nast, Adobe, American Airlines, Electronic Arts, Stanford University, Mother Jones, Anheuser Bush, Purina, Simon & Schuster, Bayer Corporation, Discover Magazine, Playboy, Publicis, Nickelodeon Channel, Hyatt Hotels
MOLLOY: Did you ever consider a career as an artist yourself & speculate on your own self- promotion?
SALZMAN: No, never. From an early age I've frequently been accused of having a creative approach to life, but I have neither the aptitude nor the inclination to endeavor a career as a creative myself. Electoral politics is my avocation and maybe the skill set that comes most natural to me, but 35 years since choosing this career, I still find my role as an agent for some of the world's greatest commercial illustrators extremely rewarding.
MOLLOY: You've mentioned that you currently represent, almost exclusively, European artists.
I understand in the 80's, you were repping primarily NY artists..how do you explain this shift?
SALZMAN: While our publishing and advertising clients were, and still are predominantly based in New York City, the majority of the artists I started with in the early 1980's (living at that time in San Diego, very much a secondary market in our industry), as well as the additional artists I signed during the heydays of the 1990's (after having relocated to San Francisco), were mostly based on the West Coast. While I have had a Manhattan phone number since 1984 I've never lived in New York. Near the end of that decade and into the early 2000's there was a precipitous drop in business for freelance illustration (as well as commercial photography), which I attribute primarily to the impact of readily available stock image libraries that technology made greatly more efficient and practical as searchable digital databases of images -- fed in large part by creators without the foresight to see they were selling the farm for a year's worth of seed money by providing an entire careers worth of images to these stock houses, the very worst of which include those selling royalty free images, which is to say, turning an artist's work into the equivalent of clip art.
There was a significant exodus and/or merging of Reps and Repping firms industry wide during these economically lean times in the communicating arts. Many who thrived (or at least survived) grew to be mega-Reps with up to several hundred artists each. Others who choose to stay boutique operations such as myself went all but dormant over the following decade. It was in 2000 during these economically difficult times that I relocated to Humboldt County, Trinidad to be exact. The height of the dotcom boom on San Francisco housing prices came just as my landlord in The City decided to sell the house I'd been renting from him since 1990. Luckily the advents of technology also meant it no longer mattered where any of us were located. While the industry downturn of the late "90's" and into the early aughts was very real, I compounded a bad situation by declining to sign any new artists during this time. I based my reluctance to enter into new contractual relationships based on the accurate but misguided fact that since I was no longer able to keep the artists I was currently Repping, and had been for the past twenty years, at sustainable income levels, it would be irresponsible of me to commit to taking on additional artists. When you are an artist's exclusive Rep, and they are unable to make a living, it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on you and your conscience. During this time, technology was making it less and less relevant where an artist lived in relation to where the clients were located and more and more of the artists who were soliciting me were from outside the USA. By 2009, I'd signed Mark Smith, who lived in Exeter, England. I decided at that time that I would let any foreign artist keep all the business from their home country as "House Accounts". My logic being that a successful artist should already be making a living from their domestic clientele relieving me of the self-imposed stress if I was unable to secure them additional work in The States, or other markets outside of where they lived. Mark Smith had an immediate and meteoric rise in the industry and from that point on I decided to focus primarily signing artists based outside the USA and have signed fifteen new artists from Italy, England, Spain, and Israel among other countries. During the last decade my business has rebounded to beyond where it was at it's height in the mid "90's". I still have about ten illustrators in my group that are a combination of specialist and legacy artists, many of whom I've Repped now for over thirty years. Ironically, the very newest artist I've signed: Jeff Hinchee, is my first New York based artist. So there are no hard and fast rules here. More than anything it is about the personal relationships between the artist and myself. MOLLOY: It sounds like you have been able to successfully use your own creativity to adapt to the changing markets. SALZMAN: One lesson I learned is that while the volume of original illustrations being assigned had dropped precipitously at the end of the "90's", I had not taken into account that for some artists, even though they may well have been at the top of their game as to the mastery of their style, that style may also have faded in popularity. Meanwhile these younger artists I was signing from around the world had more contemporary and popular styles. So while it is true that fewer clients were commissioning freelance illustrators, even fewer were commissioning the ones I was Repping whose popularity may have peaked decades earlier. The day to day is pleasant enough, but the real rewards come on those occasions when I can get a chance to get an artist the compensation they deserve on the highest profile assignments. Less appealing, and thankfully less often necessary I also find it rewarding when I'm required to exercise my responsibility of protecting the best interest of an artists from any attempt of exploitation or otherwise being taken advantage of them contractually. MOLLOY: Thank you for your time & insights. |
