Text About Galleries

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The text about galleries will be extremely practical (it was written under the influence of Ekaterina Schulmann), but first a bit of philosophy. The gallerist as an important figure in the art environment emerged in the 1950s. Why? Because while previously the main person in the market was a connoisseur of the past—an expert capable of distinguishing the work of a great artist from his students, and even more so from a forgery—now the key figure is the one who sees a future cultural heritage in a young artist: a "connoisseur of the future." Not the distant future, but literally tomorrow. This visionary is the gallerist. Why this happened, I will explain in the text on the criteria for evaluating art. For now, let's move on to how a gallery is set up.

A gallery is a place (an address, a space)—and the address is important, not only the city, but also the location within the city. What is nearby? How do you get there? Serious galleries do not stand on tourist trails; they sit slightly aside, but not too far. Often wall-to-wall, forming entire districts. If the city has a museum of contemporary art, they are nearby.

A gallery is a name. Most often, the name of the owner. Pairs of owners happen too, but since everything here is built on artistic preferences, on a personal vision, it is hard to find someone just like you, so most often it is one person. Connected to this is the opinion that this is not a business at all, since it is difficult to sell it. Or impossible. If I decide to go into this business, I do not buy an existing one with someone else's name; I create my own. However, there are exceptions, and I will describe them below.

A gallery is a circle of artists. These are concentric, nested circles:

• those whose works can be bought here,
• • those who have had exhibitions in the gallery,
• • those who have a contract with the gallery.

The activity of a gallery is like a five-pointed star:

1. ORGANIZATION OF EXHIBITIONS—most often solo ones, on its own territory, but not exclusively. Significant galleries sometimes collaborate with museums. Plus expositions at art fairs, so you can consider the gallerist to be a CURATOR.
2. SELLING ART—yes, a gallery is a kind of expensive store selling art to collectors, interior designers, corporations, and museums.
3. THE ARTIST'S PRODUCER—the gallery represents his interests, looks for new markets, handles the press and contacts with curators, and invests money in production and the artist's promotion.
4. THE COLLECTOR'S CONSULTANT—helps both in selecting authors for a collection and in finding pieces on the open market at the collector's request; can represent him at auctions and fairs.
5. INVESTOR—the gallerist often buys works himself, either by young, unknown, but in his opinion promising artists, or as compensation from the artist for promotion expenses; sometimes he just agrees on favorable terms with an artist he believes in.(It was precisely the fifth point that made me a wealthy man. Commissions from sales cover the gallery's expenses and allow the family to live, but it is precisely the works bought for two thousand and sold ten years later for fifty thousand that constitute real commercial success.)

It is important for an artist to understand that since a gallery is a private business, there are no "gifts" here. It is just that many of the gallerist's actions are venture-based, so the business model is not obvious. For example, I paid guaranteed stipends to many artists and received works in return. This looked like scholarships, like charity. The artists are grateful, but this is definitely not charity; it is an investment. A gallery may help a museum "free of charge" in organizing an exhibition or pay for the production of an artist's participation in the Venice Biennale, but this means it expects prices to rise after these events, and it holds an exclusive contract with the artist. But these are "high relations" that only self-confident characters like me can afford.

1. Organizing an exhibition is an expense. The gallery covers the minimum ones, but if it comes to a catalog, it is in exchange for a work. Everything here is out in the open. The exposition, good lighting, and the curatorial text are extremely important. Preferably the artist's text too. Journalists themselves do not understand anything, and if you do not give them content, they won’t write anything. The vernissage. The exhibition runs for a month, but the main thing is the vernissage.
2. A 50% commission on sales was a general rule until recently. Now it varies, but overall it stays around that. Here one must remember that if an agent appears, he is paid out of the gallery's percentage. If a Kyiv gallery does an exhibition in a Berlin gallery, the artist always gets his 50%, and they split the rest. Discounts to museums come at the expense of both the artist and the gallery; discounts to regular clients of the gallery come at the expense of the gallery. Today, due to social networks, the distance between the artist and the collector is sharply closing, and often they easily connect directly. To avoid the desire to cheat the gallery, but on the other hand, so that the artist does not pay half of the income for nothing, in recent years I practiced two figures: a sale by the gallery is 50%, a sale by the artist in the studio is a 20% agency fee.
3. When signing a production contract with a gallery, the main thing to remember is that the moment of its termination will inevitably come. If the promotion is successful, you will receive a new, much more profitable offer, and holding you back is unethical for the gallerist and unfair to you. If the promotion is unsuccessful, the gallery does not understand how it will cover its expenses, and you will want freedom to search on your own. In other words, you need to agree right away: if you leave, what portion of the works remains with the gallery. Then it will even be glad that you went up, and they have works that are increasing in value.
4. Consultant—selecting a collection regardless of whom the artists work with or from whom the paintings are bought. This is a case where the collector and the gallerist have a trusted relationship. It is what a gallerist builds his reputation for. This is the "easiest" money. The conversion of trust into the expansion of professional connections. Here, the only advice to the artist is: your gallerist's or agent's percentage must be sufficient so that he is willing to share it with such a consultant.
5. Investments. If your earnings in the market are insufficient or your art project requires large production costs, you look for an investor. An investor looks for you. Or you need to spend at least one year focusing only on creativity, giving up side jobs. If for an already created work in a gallery you receive 50%, then for a future work—not yet created—you can count on 30%. Therefore, try to conclude an investment contract for one year maximum. But in general, remember: collectors are important, but five investors will do more than 20 collectors to promote an artist. A collector simply waits for you to make a career and rejoices in it. At best, he will recommend you to friends, but an investor—the one who owns not just one of your works, but say, ten—will take real steps toward your promotion.

Prices. Well, about prices elsewhere. The main thing in all agreements with galleries is to try to fix prices for a year (maximum for two, if dealing with contracts with foreign galleries). Or use the practice of different prices when selling an exhibition for the first works and subsequent ones. Say, there are 20 works in an exhibition—the first 5 works have one price, an incentive price; then the next 10 are higher; and the last 5 are expensive.

Overall, it is important not to forget that the current type of gallery is only 70 years old, and it has practically exhausted itself. There will be other forms of institutions.

P.S. I mentioned above another type of gallery that I encountered in New York. Five investors—people who pay a million or more in taxes per year—find a museum curator they trust and set up a gallery around him. They buy from every exhibition. This creates a guaranteed income for the gallery. The rest depends on how commercially minded the curator is. This is related to American legislation. According to it, if you donate a work to a museum, and the museum issues you a paper stating that, yes, John Doe made us a gift worth a million, then 30% will be written off your taxes. That is, if you bought a mid-career artist for 20 thousand and five years later he reached museum level, and you donated his work to a museum, and the museum gave you a paper for 500 thousand, you can consider that you made 130 thousand in pure profit, since 150 will be deducted from your taxes. This is exactly why in New York, the search for young, undervalued artists is simply a mass obsession.

P.P.S. And one more exception is the Secular Gallery. It is usually created by the wife of a wealthy man as a club, and there may very well be non-market "gifts" involved. There is no concern about breaking even, and the relationships are not as rigid. On the other hand, since the gallerist is not interested in money, she does not secure it for the artist either.

However, there are plenty of exceptions; there are galleries created by a commune of artists, and some artists living in Berlin turn their studio into a gallery. They invite artists from other cities to hold exhibitions and sell their works to their own collectors. There are monster galleries—Gagosian, Pace, Marlborough—they have already made so much money on artists who became stars that they look more like museums or cultural institutions than the "individual entrepreneur" I described.

P.S. The photo shows a work from the project Gelman & Plus Minus Comma—First of all, It's beautiful, May 25 in Berlin. In a certain sense, this project is not about a nuclear explosion, but about the contemporary market. That is precisely why it will be held not in a gallery, but literally at an art market.

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