A Video I made today about a show that I'm having and the costs involved in having it, followed by the visual aids I made for the video followed by an essay I wrote around 2016 about working with galleries versus self representation on the web.
An Essay I wrote in 2016 about working with galleries.
There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
It’s whether or not I should work with galleries. I really don’t want to sound
like sour grapes but I do believe that for most artists it’s a bad idea to work
with galleries. There are exceptions to this rule and I want to explore them
here. Let me begin by saying that I’m going up start with the negative aspects.
The three main reasons why I think working with galleries might not work for
most artists are economic, emotional, and career building.
The most rational thing to base my decision on is money.
However, I want to point out in the beginning that the main reason is really
economic. I’m 52 years old and I’ve been showing with galleries for around 25
years or so. With the exception of two or three incidents I have never made
back the majority of the money that I’ve invested in any one gallery show. This
includes group shows.
Let me lay out the finances for you in my situation. For the
last 10 to 15 years each year I’ve sold somewhere in the range of $20-$30,000
worth of artwork. In the last two years I’ve been able to say that I’ve been
able to pocket two thirds of this money. This is because in the last several
years I started selling my work on line through several venues which include,
etsy.com, eBay, Amazon, and several other venues. I’ve found that the most
successful venue has Etsy.com.
Before this, I’ve had shows in some really reputable
galleries that include, Karen Jenkins Johnson in San Francisco, Klaudia Marr in
Santa Fe, as well as several galleries in Dallas and other parts of the
country. Those are just the most reputable. I don’t want to trash talk the
galleries that’s not what this is about. I do however have tons of horror
stories about working with galleries.
The empirical evidence is that whenever I’ve had a gallery
show I have ended up spending almost all of the money that I made from sales in
that gallery on the following, shipping the art, helping with gallery
promotions such as catalogs and postcards, and travel expenses. I am leaving
out the costs that involve making the art including the art supplies. In each
instance I usually sold between 2 to 7 works of art and sometimes these works
of art went for as much as $5000. So my art was not cheap and sometimes on a
show I would sell around $10-$15,000 worth of work. Sounds good doesn’t it? But
it wasn’t. The gallery, which is standard took 50% on each sale. I don’t
begrudge the gallery because they are paying overhead expenses and their
investing in me. That would leave me with around $7000 left. Shipping art to a
gallery especially out-of-state can cost as much as $1000-$2000. So now I’m
down to about $4000 that I’m putting in my pocket. Next factor in airfare if
it’s out of town and hotels. I think you get the point. At the end of the year
I got hit with taxes.
I want to bring up one notable exception to this. It took me
about five years of work but I completed a graphic novel and each one of the
panels was a separate watercolor. Just after I retired a community gallery in
Tracy California, whose directors named Will Wilson, contacted me and offered
me a show. Included in the show was a stipend, which was pretty considerable,
as well as extra money for painting a mural and they took care of most of the
other costs. This even included a hotel if I wanted. So I walked away from that
show with a considerable profit. Thank you William Wilson!
So even though it looked like I was a successful selling
artist I was only really pocketing at the most, and this includes studio sales
around $8000 at the end of the year. I am so lucky I had a tenured teaching
position at a community college. In fact, I use my art career as a write-off at
the end of every year to decrease the taxes I pay. At the time, I was making
about 110,000 year teaching at a community college. My wife and I are not big
spenders and I managed to put aside the ton of money in retirement which I
won’t touch till I’m 62 or 63 in 10 years. At the age of 52 now I have
“retired” and I paint full-time because for the last five years or so I was
able to figure out my finances well enough by selling work online that I can
afford to paint full-time.
Okay so I think I’ve laid out my more pragmatic or economic
reasons for not working with galleries. Your company emotional ones.
Again I don’t want to sound like someone who’s overly
negative or complaining about specific galleries, although I could tell you
some horror stories but that would make me look like an kind of Dick. So let me
talk about it in the most general ways I can.
In the most basic way working with the gallery is a
collaboration between the artist and the gallery director. Gallery directors
have a different point of view about what kinds of art the artist should make
and also what kind of shows should be offered in the gallery. It’s their right
they own the gallery. This kind of stuff, and it really makes a lot of artists
very bitchy, can really add up by the time you get to the opening reception.
Especially if the artist is bit of a prima donna. I also know this from
personal point of view because I ran a gallery for about five years at Ohlone
college in Fremont and believe me artists are really tough to work with often
have an attitude that far exceeds the quality of their work. So this is not a
slam on any particular gallery director it’s just pointing out that
collaboration is really hard and can lead to a lot of hurt feelings and
conflict.
Emotionally, I’ve also personalized the lack of sales at
galleries because I have seen the gallery director what I consider to be fumble
a sale or not make enough effort. Whether or not this is true, in my subjective
perception that is how I felt. And you have to think that most artists are
going to personalize the experience of showing their work because the artwork is
themselves. So let me just say I feel that a lot of gallery directors have not
sold work when I thought they could and I’ve had a strong emotional reaction to
that. Many of the artists that I’ve talked to often describe an angry or
irritable relationship with the gallery directors who represent them. Often, I
am surprised by the vitriol and anger that some of the artist will express
about gallery directors even though I think the gallery director has worked
really hard and is a good person. They mean you no harm in fact they’d like to
help you but often we as artists have bad reactions to stuff.
Here’s another kind of drag emotionally about galleries and
that has to do with gallery receptions. Unless you really like a party and you
like art receptions and find it really easy to talk to people, gallery
receptions are a nightmare for people who have a hard time being the center of
attention and or have any kind of social deficits and problems. That type
person is me. You wouldn’t know about it reception because I appear to be very
outgoing and I also know how to schmooze people. However, inside I am just
crawling with anxiety. My armpits are soaked my suit jacket. My little bald
head is sweating. The experience is a total freak out for me and I really don’t
like it.
That brings us to the next and final idea of why I think
what you shouldn’t work with the gallery. I’m in a basic on my experiences and
I will also bring in the experiences of two or three other artists and their
stories. I will not name the artists to protect the innocent.
Case study number one. This artist is way better than me and
managed to wrangle an exclusive contract with a very important gallery that
worked with some other “blue-chip” types of artists. The experience that this
artist described in terms of whether or not that gallery built this artist
career is that it didn’t. The gallery had promised to promote this person’s
work, take care of expenses, and you have the artist really did have some nice
shows and was able to do some cool stuff at the gallery but according to them
they didn’t: a profit and over coffee the artist was constantly complaining
about the lack of promotion and the lack of empathy gallery had. In short, the
gallery promised to represent this artist and to really promote them and make
them into being is important artist and they didn’t. I’m not blaming anyone,
this gallery actually have to shut down even those pretty famous.
Case study number two. During the studio visit to an artist
studio while I was director of the school’s art gallery, again over coffee and
during the visit, one artist complained about the gallery that they’re working
with for nearly 2 hours. I don’t begrudge the artist, the I guess I do a little
bit, but the gallery according to this artist didn’t sell enough of the artists
work even though they sold everything they made and often cock blocked them
when they had studio sales and wants as a percentage of the profits from the
studio sale. I don’t really know what the reality is because my experience of the
gallery in general was pretty positive because I also showed with them.
However, I understood how the artist felt.
Both of these artists, in my opinion, are top shelf artists.
Honestly, they are so good that I’m jealous of their work and yet the gallery
itself didn’t really, or wasn’t able to because they didn’t have the juice, to
make their career. In fact one of the artists has gone off on their own and has
been getting shows all over the world and has started their own organization
and is doing fairly well by promoting their own work. They are still going to
gallery root however, they don’t have an exclusive contract with a so-called
important gallery again. I think they’re happier for it.
Okay, I have a lot more experience and a lot of anecdotes
that I could share to back up all of my observations, but I do want to make one
sort of positive comments about working with galleries.
Occasionally, galleries really to make an artist’s career.
Historically, there artists like Picasso and Basquiat who have had very
fruitful and excellent experiences working with impresarios and art galleries
that have given them salaries and promoted them as artists and literally made
their career at times. Art history is full of these notable exceptions. Perhaps
some of the artists that I really appreciate, such as Bo Bartlett and Malcom
Liepke, have had some really good experiences with galleries and have had come
out to be a career building experience for them. I do think that in the
contemporary world now, because of the egalitarian nature of the Internet and
the fact that people can buy stuff online, this might be less possible. I’d
love to hear your opinion.
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