 | Debate: Do Galleries Deserve Perpetual Commissions for Sales to Clients They Discovered? | | by Xanadu Gallery Owner Jason Horejs | | | Yesterday, I wrote a post on splitting commissions between galleries. The article resulted in an interesting and lively conversation in the comments, a conversation that raised additional questions. One of those questions was whether a gallery deserved an ongoing commission for all future sales to clients who discover an artist's work through the gallery.
Calvin wrote the following in a comment
What gets more complicated is when a collector buys a painting from a gallery where you pay a commission, but then that person becomes a collector and buys one or more others in the months ahead NOT through the gallery, but directly from the artist. Do you still owe a commission even though it is months (or years) after the gallery sale, and the gallery had nothing to "do with that sale"? Is this collector a "forever" commission-collector, because they were the initial client of the gallery? My answer would be no, because buying from you directly would be no different than buying from another gallery that carried my work. But I have had a gallery say that if it is "their client" and they claim that client forever and they should receive the full commission if I sold something directly. (We parted ways, and any future relationship, on that claim.)
There have always been questions (and even lawsuits) over this issue, but the internet brings it into even sharper focus as collectors are more easily able to connect directly with artists.
I'm going to try to tread carefully on this subject because I know that there are very strong opinions on both sides of the issue.
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|  | Debate: Should Art Galleries Split Commissions? | | by Xanadu Gallery Owner Jason Horejs | | | I recently received an email from an artist who ran into a bit of a dilemma (or at least she thought she did). She had been showing a piece of art in a gallery in her home town for a number of months. When the piece didn't sell, she rotated the piece, along with several others, to a gallery out of town. A short time later, she received a call from the first gallery saying that a client had come in and was interested in purchasing this particular piece of art and wondered if it was still available.
The artist's question to me was, "What should I do if the piece sells through the first gallery? Should I pay the second gallery part of the commission since it is now in their possession? How do I handle the situation without stepping on anyone's toes?"
I've heard countless variations of this question over the years, and I've heard reports of artists who have experienced real problems related to the issue. It would be great if there was some kind of universal standard of how to deal with the split commission, and a guidebook that we could all get the rules from; unfortunately, there isn't. Each gallery seems to have a different opinion and every situation seems to require a different approach.
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| | | My Love/Hate Relationship With Email How to Conquer your Inbox | Almost everything that happens in my life and business begins in my inbox. Email has become such an important part of my daily life and interactions that one could easily ask, "if something happens and there wasn't an email exchange involved, did it really happen?" This communication tool, which has really only been around for about twenty years, is now so ubiquitous it's hard to imagine a time before email.
Communication with a client? Almost always email. Need to get a message to the kid's teacher? Far more likely to get through by email. Question for one of my artists? Email.
Email offers so many advantages - and they're so obvious I hardly need to enumerate them here. It's safe to say we live in an email society. According to Mashable.com, each day there are over 144 billion email messages sent. Even when you consider that 65% of email is pure spam, that means that there are something like 46 billion real messages being sent every day. While social media are starting to eat into those numbers a little bit, email is the communications champ.
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