Recently, the new book "The History of Chinese Art" launched by Reader Culture and Yi Gongzi was listed for 48 hours, and the first 50,000 copies were directly sold out. How did such an unpopular art book become an industry hit?
Art history with a stalk: breaking the stereotype of art's high and cold
In recent years, with the popularity of programs such as "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City" and "National Treasures", and then to the frequent appearance of programs such as Henan Satellite TV's "Tang Palace Night Banquet" and CCTV's "Only This Green", the boom of traditional Chinese culture has fully recovered.
However, as the essence of traditional Chinese culture, Chinese art still seems to be a bit "Yangchun White Snow", when the word "Chinese art history" is mentioned, everyone's first impression is serious, boring, academic, want to appreciate but unable to start. It may be precisely because of this that the ingenious "Big Talk" form of "Big Talk" has won the favor of readers in one fell swoop and become the hottest art book of the year.
In order to allow more readers to easily appreciate Chinese art, "The History of Chinese Art" follows the author Yi Gongzi's relaxed and witty style in video science, the language is simple and funny, and the content is "sentence and sentence have a stem": Gu Hongzhong's "Han Xizai's Night Feast" is the art version of "Mission Impossible", Li Bai's "Balcony Post" is a middle-aged workplace crisis, etc., so that readers can enter Chinese art without pressure. Considering the long history of Chinese art, "Big Talk About Chinese Art History" chooses to use the metaphor of a person's life as a metaphor to describe the history of Chinese art for tens of thousands of years in terms of structure, so that its main line is clear, and readers can quickly build a cognitive framework and read 10,000 years of Chinese art history in one breath.
In addition to the content of the book itself, "The History of Chinese Art in Big Talk" has also made great efforts in the title and binding, just to narrow the distance with the reader, the title of the book uses the word "big talk", lowering the reading threshold, and the Song Huizong on the cover wears sunglasses, which makes people can't help but be amused, and they are full of interest in Chinese art at a glance.
Art Science Pioneer: Yi Gongzi and her empire of tens of millions of fans
The popularity of "Big Talk About Chinese Art History" not only makes us see the strong demand for art science among Chinese readers, but also makes more people start to pay attention to Yi Gongzi, who is known as the "first person in art science popularization". The hard work of Yi Gongzi and his team over the years has cultivated a group of fresh forces in the field of art consumption in China.
Yi Gongzi, formerly known as XiaoHan, was originally a host of a local television station, and in 2013, he and his partners launched the "Accidental Art" project, which aims to promote the art of gao leng to the general public in a relaxed and fun way. She directed the first domestic art talk show "Is Art Difficult" for six consecutive seasons, receiving hundreds of millions of views, and also received a high score of 8.8 in Douban, which has always been strict in scoring. Yi Gongzi, who appeared in the image of a cool green dress, although he did not have a professional background in art, but with the advantage of his previous host's professional experience, he seized the advantage of being able to think from the perspective of the public - he understood the pain points of the public's appreciation of art, so from the beginning of the production, he determined the path of grounding and taking the popular art as the entry point, and the simple and bright language plus the humorous and dry content quickly attracted a large number of fans on the video platform.
In 2021, Yi Gongzi became the most commercially valuable artistic aesthetic v of Weibo of the year. At present, under the Douyin account of Yi Gongzi, the column "Yi Gongzi Talks About Chinese Art" alone has 400 million readers. The "National Treasures are Dramatic" column launched on Douyin by the China Cultural Relics Exchange Center was exposed to 560 million topics in just 14 days, and then launched the second season in full swing. Through high-quality content and stable output, it attracts a large number of users on the short video end, and then consolidates and cultivates its loyal fans through a mature community operation model, which is also an important source of purchasing power for the "Big Talk" series of books.
In 2020, Yi Gongzi's debut novel "The History of Western Art" was planned and published by Reader Culture and appeared on the annual art book bestseller list that year, which can be said to be the first to emerge. As soon as the new work "Big Talk Chinese Art History" was published, it created an overnight popular "industry miracle", in addition to the chinese people's interest in traditional art culture in recent years, the good reputation of the previous work, as well as the marketing promotion of the publisher, it is also inseparable from the author Yi Gongzi's tens of millions of loyal fans. Identify the target group, determine the style method, firmly grasp the pain points of the public for art, and take advantage of the increasingly hot east wind of short videos, Yi Gongzi successfully pushed art to a wider range of people. Many fans said that because Yi Gongzi's books and videos were deeply moved by the ancients and art treasures of thousands of years ago, they had a strong interest in Chinese art. Among them, there are senior students who are preparing to take the graduate school in art history because Yi Gongzi is interested in art, there are art teachers who play Yi Gongzi art explanation videos in class, and some people buy "Big Talk Chinese Art History" as a gift for the younger generation.
"Because Yi Gongzi opened the door to art", "the emergence of The history of Chinese art in Big Talk, I believe it will be a beginning to change yourself from the inside out", "I feel face-to-face communication with the ancients", under the "Big Talk Chinese Art History" entry on websites such as Douban and Dangdang, such loyal fan comments occupy half of the country. Yi Gongzi used his plain and interesting language to open up a wider and wider path in the "art desert", so that the art that was originally high and low, and even considered to be high, became more and more familiar to the general public.
Hualiu is the top stream, and cultural self-confidence has made Chinese art popular
The mainland is a big consumer of traditional culture, and traditional culture, art, history and other content have always been important art and cultural consumption themes. In recent years, with the development of society, the cultural self-confidence of the Chinese people has become increasingly enthusiastic. Whether it is the stunning Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Tiger, "Only This Green", or the countdown propaganda film of the 24 solar terms at the Beijing Winter Olympics, it has touched the hearts of tens of millions of people. The elements of traditional culture and art shine on the bigger and bigger stage, and the cultural genes in the bones of the Chinese seem to be reawakened. In today's increasingly high demand for mass spiritual culture, with the development of new Internet media, art pan-knowledge science bloggers have also come into being.
At present, the art science on the Internet is mainly divided into three categories: one is the traditional combination of pictures and text push, the second is the fun short video (which is also the most popular way at present), and the third is the audiobook combined with pictures and texts. These three modes of art science popularization are all related to art knowledge in a short period of time, and pay great attention to the fun of reading and watching, so as to attract potential target groups. For example, "Yi Gongzi" and "Yan Bojun" on Douyin, and "Gu Ye" on Weibo are all KOLs with a wide audience and very influential influence in the industry. This kind of art science knowledge content producers drive more and more art science consumers, the public in the acquisition of free art introductory knowledge at the same time, but also gained the confidence to learn art, feel the fun, break the misunderstanding of art is difficult to approach. Art science is also gradually no longer considered to be a high-level and niche discipline.
However, some of the fans attracted by such online art science bloggers will continue to pay attention to the knowledge content in the field of art science, but there are also more possibilities to pay attention to the art science bloggers themselves. The latter's focus is to form a business model in the new media era: bloggers can get more business resources under the premise of receiving attention, and recommend their products or brands to followers. "The History of Chinese Art" is a successful product produced under the blogger brand of "Yi Gongzi".
As the producer of the "Big Talk" book brand, when the book was listed and marketed, in addition to a large number of promotions in vertical channels such as art and traditional culture, the reader also paid attention to the outstanding advantage of combining the operation base of the author's Yi Gongzi fan community, and arranged the Douyin new book conference, the new book video and the ten-point reading host Yajun dialogue, the public channels and related vertical celebrities together, successfully brought a large number of new books.
With the transformation of contemporary cultural communication media from text to vision, today's online information consumers have developed a browsing and reading mode that is more willing to accept short, fast, interesting and highly entertaining information. How to get them to return from short videos to paper media again and pay for published bibliographies is also a difficult point in the promotion of such art books. The success of yi gongzi's "Big Talk" series of books may be a successful case that can be used as a reference. Art has never been a hobby of a small minority, but it lacks a way to guide the public to discover it and understand it. At a time when the demand for the spiritual level is getting higher and higher, art can tear open a corner of life, allowing ordinary people to enter the perch and soothe the soul. Under the development of new Internet media, the dissemination of art science is more convenient, they drive more people to art, understand art, and create more artistic commercial value.