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Rating: 
Summary: There are far better books than this one on the market.
Review: Barnes reduces the complexities of developing a career as a fine artist to short, opinionated paragraphs under multiple headings. It sounds condescending and dictorial. Some of the bad advice she gives includes suggesting you move to New York; courting gallery owners like her with flowers, limos, lunch, or buying art from her shows. If you are looking for a quick overview of the artist-gallery relationship from this particular dealer's perspective, you'll find that information here, but I suggest you try a worthy publication like Cay Lang's Taking The Leap or Carol Michels' How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist.
Rating:
Summary: You could have hung... yourself.
Review: From all the great AND SUCCESSFUL artists I have learned, the most important message that is conveyed to me by them essentially is "be yourself". This book suggests otherwise. Here are some insights from the book to "get hung":- Your look: The book suggests the artists go for an "art look", experiment new looks until "your style will emerge". - Your location: Moving to New York. - Your source of finance (to support your art endeaver): marry rich, work in an art-related occupation (not bad, but can we all do this?) - etc... I dropped the book at the end of chapter 2, after the suggestion of "moving to New York". All in all, the book consists of short examples of people who succeeded in selling their art to prove the author's points. At the end of each chapter, a list of bullet points is shown to recap. Valuable points presented in the book, such as networking, open-minded to critique, etc... are too basic for any discipline when it comes to marketing. Unfortunately, these cannot save the rest of the book. In my opinion, this book is NOT for a mature and responsible artist audience who has to break their back working odd jobs, yet still obsesses about art and making art.
Rating:
Summary: You could have hung... yourself.
Review: From all the great AND SUCCESSFUL artists I have learned, the most important message that is conveyed to me by them essentially is "be yourself". This book suggests otherwise. Here are some insights from the book to "get hung": - Your look: The book suggests the artists go for an "art look", experiment new looks until "your style will emerge". - Your location: Moving to New York. - Your source of finance (to support your art endeaver): marry rich, work in an art-related occupation (not bad, but can we all do this?) - etc... I dropped the book at the end of chapter 2, after the suggestion of "moving to New York". All in all, the book consists of short examples of people who succeeded in selling their art to prove the author's points. At the end of each chapter, a list of bullet points is shown to recap. Valuable points presented in the book, such as networking, open-minded to critique, etc... are too basic for any discipline when it comes to marketing. Unfortunately, these cannot save the rest of the book. In my opinion, this book is NOT for a mature and responsible artist audience who has to break their back working odd jobs, yet still obsesses about art and making art.
Rating:
Summary: In a word: lame.
Review: If you take out all the name-dropping and pointless anecdotes, there isn't much left to this book. What little advice it contains on the subject of succeeding as an artist seems to fall under the heading of common sense. (If you want to be a famous artist, move to New York, go to lots of galleries, talk to lots of people. It helps to look nice, and dating a famous artist doesn't hurt either. Do we really need an expert to tell us these things?) What little practical advice there is on subjects like having slides made of your work or sending out press releases is so general that it is of little use. These subjects are covered much better in lots of other books, Art Marketing 101 by Constance Smith and How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist by Caroll Michels to name a couple. One bit of advice from the author made me laugh out loud. She stresses the importance of proofreading a press release before you send it out (good idea!), yet it is obvious that this book was not proofread. There are so many typographical, spelling, and/or grammatical errors that at times I felt as if I were grading a high school term paper.
Rating: 
Summary: The best book for understanding the soul of the art world
Review: Molly Barnes and Pat Hilton, have created a very straight forward and truthful book on how to aproach the art world and what it takes to be successful in it. This book is pefect for imerging artists as well as a reminder to many succesfull artists on what it is to get hung.
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