We Made it to Romania

John Bishop Fine Art : Podcast

Bogdan and I made it to Romania this week, and have been hiding out at his mom's house in Campulung, eating like kings, and waiting for the jet lag to subside. We have ventured out a couple of times into the mountains nearby, and have been enjoying the beautiful landscapes and the remarkable people from this area. So beautiful.
We've just gotten word that our Romanian company has been approved by the Ministry, and we are official Romanian businessmen now. All we have to do next week is finalize some paperwork with the attorneys, get set up with a Romanian accountant, and open a bank account in this country. Funny, because I make it sound as if this is the end of a process, and really it's only the beginning.
We've been struggling with ideas of how we could make living here, even part time, a success, and it is a daunting task. I think we find ourselves running into three main obstacles. One is Ignorance, another naivety, and ultimately, arrogance.
We really don't know a thing about the art scene, the art market, or the decorum needed to approach people in art here in Romania. While there is nothing wrong with asking questions and learning new things, there is the chance that we are going to look super dumb as we try to introduce ourselves around. I'm a little afraid, given how relatively small the art community is here in Romania, and how tight knit that community is likely to be, that getting branded as dumb early on might be a badge we continue to wear into the future.
The second pitfall is related to that, and it's naivety. Americans are known the world over as being nauseatingly positive, Pollyannaish, and all around dreamers. My experience living in Eastern Europe, and being married to an East European for 21 years is that these folks are not overly optimistic. These are glass-half-empty folks. I have spent years trying to get Bogdan to dream big, see possibilities instead of barriers, and to have the self-worth to give himself permission to succeed. When we show up out of nowhere, and have the hopes of building an art empire here in Romania, I'm not at all certain they won't laugh in our faces.
Finally, and perhaps most dangerous, is the fear that we will be perceived as arrogant. My experience tells me that if I'm a bit dumb, and kind of a dreamer, my attempts to assert myself into a network of artists, all of whom are likely more trained than I, I may appear to be presumptuous. Already we have written to some gallerists mentioning that we will be in town, and asking if we might stop by and introduce ourselves. Who do we think we are assuming that established gallery owners would wan to meet us?
I'm afraid that coming from the USA, where you don't need an art degree to succeed as an artist and you don't need to have been working for years as an artist's apprentice, or have been shown in all the right galleries and art fairs, we could come across very badly. And again, once that perception appears, it may be very hard to correct.
So how do we avoid these pitfalls? I'm not certain that we can. I do however believe that the best approach is to strive always to be as humble, curious, respectful, inquisitive, and deferential as we can possibly be, while always being as honest as possible as to how we feel, what we are asking, and how appreciative we are of anything given to us. If we can just hold our heads high, while being totally honest and completely interested in learning about their world, we should be fine.
So next week we will be in Bucharest, and the real experiment begins. We're gathering information on the cost of living, looking for advice on how to proceed, scoping out relationships that we might need to develop, and trying to do all of that in a way that doesn't make us look