One question kept returning: how do you market a work without imposing a form on it?

For a long time I circled a sentence I knew to be true: artists convince not only through their art, but also through effective marketing. (I later found it phrased that way by Andrea Jacobi, who writes on self-marketing for visual artists.) I knew I had not yet found the marketing that fit me — and that I needed it.

The harder problem was the concept itself. Explaining it was difficult. Explaining its finer points, harder still. And having it done properly: too expensive.

Working with AI changed something. Not because it replaced thinking, but because it could follow the logic of the work, question it, and help turn it into a coherent communication strategy. The understanding came first; the tool followed the work’s own logic — quickly, and at low cost.

The real shift, though, was how I saw marketing itself. Not marketing in the classical sense, but as Verständigung — a term I borrow from the sociologist Stefan Kühl, of Metaplan, and use in my own way: understanding reached between two sides — building a shared frame of thought, where I adjust my own view as much as the other adjusts theirs, until we read the situation alike and can settle on something that holds. No one has to win.

The practice comes from Kühl; its ground lies in the rule. Ludwig Wittgenstein lends a lens: for a large class of cases — though not for all — the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Use is something people do together, though not always as equals. Under a rule that negotiates nothing, understanding cannot be handed from one side to the other. It is reached between them, or not at all.

And it turned out to be the right decision. The marketing did not sit beside the art as a separate skill bolted on top. It began to reflect my approach. To be fed by the work itself.

Marketing-as-Verständigung only works once the work’s poetics — the principle of the work itself — find expression in it. It states rather than sells. It observes instead of promising. Nothing announces itself as marketing. The viewer discovers it — or doesn’t. One person addressing another, on equal footing.

The form does not wrap around the work — it comes out of it.

The goal was never marketing that works in general. It was marketing that could only have come from this particular art.