This past Tuesday I attended a lecture and discussion panel with three gallery owners who talked about how they got into the business, what they see their role and relationship to the artist is etc. Someone in the audience brought up Internet sales and did they work with artist who also sold their work on line.
If you are currently doing both, selling via your website and through a gallery, what are the agreements that you have in place with the gallery? Do you sell certain types of work on-line but not through the gallery?
Bob,
What did the three gallery owners have to say about this? Would they not work with artists who sold their work online? What is the general attitude among art dealers regarding artists who try to sell online solo? I imagine either the dealers are not to happy about it, or they don’t see it as a threat because the artists don’t have so much success.
I haven’t had a show at a “real” gallery yet. But at my first show the only understanding was to not sell on the web for less; for the second, a co-op, anything is OK. At that first coffee shop show I sold three photos, non through the web, just about as I expected. I think anyone seeing art on the web and having a possibility to also see it in a gallery would go to the gallery. Thus the web site helps the gallery, at least as long as it doesn’t undersell.
Bob,
I do not currently have a relationship with any gallery, but my experience with them is: everything is negotiable. There’s no such thing as a “standard contract” in law — there’s just the contract that the gallery wants you to agree to.
Let’s say I spend a bunch of time and money promoting an artist, then he or she sells a piece (on the internet or not) that I’ve specifically contracted to represent. But the artist claims I didn’t sell it, he or she did.
That’s why there are contracts. That’s why one has to document time and money spent promoting. Selling on the Internet is the moral equivalent of selling out of one’s studio.
But buyers will not always truthfully represent where they first heard about an artist. They will sometimes intentionally bypass dealers to try to get better prices.
As a dealer, I would therefore insist that all the work I was to represent had to be in my physical possession. Otherwise, no deal. A website would need to point to my gallery for those works if the artist had even two brain cells to click together (and they would if I was representing them).
I’d let the artist sell their other stuff (as in different period or type) however they wanted though while advising them to not undersell too much, as that would not really be in their long term interests.
Currently I am not represented by a gallery, but if I were, like Rex I would have to work the question through formally.
I am interested in the perspectives of the gallery owners in the panel that you attended.
However,as a side issue, a consensus among collectors about on-line galleries is that they want to see prices, or at least to have some sense of a price range, on websites. This makes working with gallery prices a necessity, even if I’m not aligned with one at the moment. It’s the kind of thing that gives me a headache, too.
When the subject of on-line sales came up, there was very little comment from the panelist. One of them said that If she represented an artist who had a gallery site her gallery needed to be mentioned as the contact. The others did not say anything other then that this was a new challenge. Scottsdale has one of the most concentrated art “gallery row” in the US and most of the owners are mom/pop operations and I wondered if they felt they were in competition with artist with on-line gallery.
Bob,
Interesting that the dealers were not that talkitive about online art sales. I would think this would be a big topic for discussion. “A new challenge” as you describe the dealers description of the internet is also interesting. Is it a challenge to use, or a challenge to them as dealers?
The physical space of a gallery can have almost a holy feeling to it. I somehow don’t think online art could ever threaten that.
Karl,
The holy space of the gallery is perhaps why on-line selling of art might work. What if you don’t particularly care for that restrained worshipful attitude? I myself am rather fond of the calm and quiet of the galleries that I frequent, but judging from what I see and hear around me, lots of people aren’t.
Maybe the two clientele are very different?
June,
I think the clientele is different, certainly. That is the problem for online “galleries.” Here is the problem: we think of an online gallery as a place to look at pictures with convenience. Imagine extending this to mystery novels. The convenient way to present a mystery novel would be:
page 1:
It was a dark and stormy night, and:
1) Joe killed Mary
2) The butler killed Joe
3) Everyone else lived happily ever after.
Turn the page to find out the details . . .
That’s not the way mystery novels are written, because it would spoil the fun. But for some reason, people think that presenting art on the internet is something similar. Going to a physical exhibition space is an exercise in constraints: you go to see Joe’s art, not Rembrant’s for example. Online, you can see Joe and Rembrant in rapid succession. That is convenient, but it is not as interesting as it could be. This is not to say art websites should be inconvenient, but they could be more interesting. How? That’s a project to think about!