Difficulty: Almost impossible

You want to be an artist? Don’t be ridiculous! Everyone is an artist these days! That’s because everyone listened to Joseph Beuys, who said that everyone was an artist. So you’re probably just an artist who hasn’t realised it yet. For sure, you’re probably going to be an out-of-work artist fairly shortly, but don’t be so negative! Being an artist isn’t something that you do, it’s something that you are. Except when it’s something that you do. To guarantee that you’ll stay ahead of the artist pack, or at least head-above the sea of shit your peers will soon be swimming in, you need to become more than an artist; you need to become an art brand.

1: Work maketh the man, but artists get some other asshole to do it for them. Remember all that postmodern stuff about the ‘death of the author’? Well, in art, the death of the author turned out to be the birth of the factory owner. No point hiring a bunch of assistants to make one or two pieces of work when you can get them to crank out hundreds that all look the same, right? That’s because collectors no longer care about the uniqueness of their art object as long as it’s still the most expensive thing in their living room, and anyway more expensive than another collector’s uniquely mass-produced art object. And don’t forget that, while it may not be a unique art object, it can be made unique again by a small addition of a hand-painted highlight. Remember, if it’s good enough for the Power 100’s number 1 and number 100, you must be onto a winner.

2: Make your work look a bit like a toy, but for grown-ups: it could be by using imagery from pop culture – oh, say, manga comics, for example – or, I don’t know, drugs or something to do with being Gothic, like a skull, or a dead animal, or romantic, like a Hello Kitty alarm clock. An easy way to get the right level is to go to a comics shop where they sell those collector’s-edition statuettes of fantasy and sci-fi characters. Pick one out at random, and if it looks good when your assistants have scaled it up to around 16 feet high (perhaps with a bit of hand-customisation – stick on some sequins, spraypaint it), you’re there.

3: Make your work look like something you could sit on, but won’t: this is called design art, and because it’s a bit like art which looks like mass-produced design objects, and a bit like a design object that is too weird to be mass-produced, you hit collectors with a double-whammy of desirability. Don’t forget – collectors will already have a Murano chandelier, but not one that blinks the whole of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Morse code.