Coloured Mud

I won’t pretend to really know what’s what or who’s who in the more commercial world of art galleries. My own experience is akin to wading in the shallow end while other artists are fully immersed in the far side of the pool. I’m partly a little intimidated by the more commercial world and partly I’ve had decent enough success showing through non profits and on my own to not desperately need the offering of a professional gallery. Out of art school I thought unequivocally that the number one goal of a painter was to get his/her work into a commercial gallery and while that may not be the absolute, it’s probably a cog in the machine of an art career. As the words “sustainable career” have crept more often into my thinking I am rekindling a desire to foster relationships with commercial galleries because they can offer potentially more consistent sales than I can muster on my own.

In the past four years I have had assorted dealings with five different commercial galleries (a commercial gallery for my definition is a gallery whose number one priority is to sell art and stay in business.) The interactions happened as follows;

One gallery showed and sold a few pieces but the owner didn’t seem all that interested in pursuing much more than a group show or two. This was despite a personal relationship I had with this owner and a record of good sales in the region and good sales from this gallery when I had work on the walls. This gallery went out of business a few years later so who knows what was up.

In two other cases, I received cold “calls” (emails actually) from two galleries that I vigorously followed up with the best intentions of creating a working relationship in some manner. Hey, they called me so they must be truly interested, right? In the first case, I left off with the gallery owner asking what I could do next to get the actual pieces in front of her eyes – deliver them, arrange a studio visit or something else. Nothing ended up coming of it despite those efforts. In the second case, I followed up in much the same manner and after a few weeks got a curt email disregarding the interest and citing the bad economy as a barrier to taking on a new artist. I was a little pissed because the gallery had approached me and that the interest waned within a few weeks after considerable investment of my own time and energy was frustrating.

The fourth gallery is a gallery that is just starting up and I initiated the contact with them and they have had great intentions with limited success. The last gallery I’ve been in contact with came from a recent and similar cold call / email with the great success of being included in a show next week. (click to check out this gallery)

I’ve worked to put myself in the shoes of a gallery owner to better understand their side and I’ve come up with a few conclusions. First, as difficult as it is to find the “right” information for a career in the arts it seems triply hard to find any information on how to open a gallery. Are there any programs or classes out there? I doubt it. It seems you open an art gallery with good intentions and maybe a business plan and learn as you go (sounds familiar to my own career.) Second, I think most gallery owners love art (or should) and like any artist have a vision of expression that they want their gallery to bring to the public. Unlike artists, they have an immediate overhead that is almost always costly in the four walls they rent and the shingle they hang out front so they must navigate a more slippery slope of vision versus commercialism. I don’t envy that position. Lastly, I have worked in sales myself, years ago, and even with a commodity that people need (I worked in a shoe store, deli and fish market among others) you will navigate utterly strange tales of woe and triumph from your customers in the buying and selling process. Magnify the difficulty and interest (or lack of) by ten in negotiating selling a commodity that has little pragmatic value, (art is important but not necessary in the same way as food and shoes) is often expensive, and can be interpreted in dozens of ways and selling art seems a challenge under ideal circumstances.

On top of it all, galleries need artists and they need customers so they are in the unenviable position of catering to the needs of both sides. I’ve often heard the description of the job of wait staff in a restaurant to act as a buffer between the war of the customer and the kitchen. Is the parallel to the gallery staff similar? Let’s not even mention each of our own peculiar tastes in art and you can doubly imagine how difficult a job it must be to sell art.

One of the biggest issues I imagine a gallery deals with is trust. From my point of view, I am going to do everything in my power to promote and sell my own work. If that includes open studios, online or other venues, I will do it. A commercial gallery doesn’t want you to do that because they don’t trust you won’t undermine them with personal sales to their own customers. They want to control you as a commodity so they can leverage that control into sales. (The remedy is to make sure you don’t change your prices from gallery to studio so the public has no benefit from their side as to where they buy the work – Try to find a Mac computer cheaper at Best Buy than their own website, doesn’t happen) In furtherance of trust, whenever I have a show at a gallery I send all of my customers notice no matter where they came from.

The biggest issue I feel in relinquishing all control is that I plan on being here for the long haul and I see way too many galleries disappear in a puff of smoke. What happens to the artist when their gallery goes out of business? I want to retain my own ability to sell and promote my work because I hope for a long life and the world in general (never mind the art world) seems in so much flux that the old paradigms don’t seem to fit as well. I say diversify!

My own resistance to being part of the more commercial word I feel is coming to an end. I need what a gallery can offer and (I hope) they need what I can offer. Ideally, I hope to find galleries that are willing to build a relationship for the long term and that can be mutually beneficial. It takes too much time and energy to do it all on my own. I certainly didn’t get into this art making to simply sell but for those words “sustainable career” to be realized, sell I must.