After graduation, the unpleasant prospect became an even more unpleasant reality. Basically, an artist hopes to make a living from the sale of his work, and this usually means that he must become associated with an art dealer. The problem is that there are many thousands of artists and relatively few dealers. Dealers obviously will only contract with an artist whose work they believe they can sell, and even the most cautious are wrong more often than they are right. If they misjudge too often, they become ex-dealers, and this awareness helps to make them extremely careful in choosing the artists they represent.
Dealers specialize in art which they themselves like.
Therefore, from the artist's point of view, the only dealers worth contacting are those who deal in the particular kind of work which that artist does. Thus, it would probably be a waste of time for an artist who paints abstractly to contact a dealer whose gallery walls are hung with paintings by Grandma Moses. Unburdened with any awareness of such considerations as these, I was instead preoccupied with being a little fry in a small pan while wanting badly to be a big fry in a large one. Professional achievement for its own sake was among my chief goals. I also had a set of slides of the best examples of the four or five styles of painting in which I was then working, and a certain plodding tenacity, which I regarded as my special virtue.