As a full-time artist and a gallery owner I am in the unusual position to see both sides of the same painting. Some artists own their own gallery or multiple galleries, such as in the case of the ubiquitous Thomas Kinkade, but these artists are mainly selling their own work. It is very different when you are representing up to fifty other artists.
I recently had a conversation with one of the artists I rep about the pricing of his work. This particular artist is a photographer and he reproduces his images as giclees on canvas. I explained that the normal way of pricing is to take your printing costs and double them in order to come up with your wholesale/commission price. Then I, as the gallery owner, would double that amount to establish the retail price. FYI: Most galleries mark up by 2.5 to establish their sales price.
Well, the next words out of the artist’s mouth, which I’ve heard from many other artists, was, “Why should you be making more money than I am?” This sums up one of the biggest problems that we gallery owners face not only with our artists but with our customers as well. The truth is that if we’re lucky and all of the planets are lined up just right, we make the same amount of profit as the artist. More often than not, however, the planets are out of alignment, and we wind up making less, breaking even, or even losing money. Thus, on balance, we usually never make as much as the artist on consigned pieces.
The fact is that no one, artist and customer alike, ever takes into consideration the costs involved in running a gallery. In my previous gallery that was located in a high-end shopping plaza with a minimum staff of one full-time and one part-time employee, my overhead was $20,000 a month. Besides the rent, utilities and staff there were the costs of art insurance, exhibition openings, advertising, off-site storage facilities, framing, and shipping. This is a snapshot of how the overhead for many galleries can be outrageously expensive. So if a month is slow, it is very easy for a gallery either just break even or to lose money! On top of all this, customers still try to bargain you down to nothing!!
It is disheartening to have your own artists think that you are taking advantage of them in some way. This is certainly not the case, and artists need to understand this, because the biggest problem that I have had is trying to keep their pricing reasonable enough to make sales for them as well as myself. And if customers want to enjoy the privilege of being able to experience art first hand and not just on their computer screens, then they should be willing to allow us gallery owners to make a living! After all, it’s one thing to buy art from the Internet that you are familiar with and have seen before in a gallery. But what happens when you force all the galleries to close their doors? Where will you see it then? I guess you’ll have to wait for that once-a-year street fair to roll around or hop on a plane to visit Miami for the week of the Art Basel insanity.
I’m sure that I speak for many gallery owners out there when I suggest, in all sincerity, that artists should try to see this business of selling their work from the gallery owner’s perspective. We are investing a hell of a lot of money by choosing to promote an artist’s work and for every piece of that work that occupies space on our walls it is costing us money. For every minute of every day that a painting remains on that wall and doesn’t sell, it is continuing to cost us even more money. So please, never, ever again ask a gallery owner, “why should you make more money than me?” You are lucky to have us…while you still can.
