Debate: Should Art Galleries Split Commissions?

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.

Read More . . .

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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Listen to This

Alec Baldwin Interviews Artist Eric Fischl

I stumbled across this podcast the other day and I think you'll enjoy the conversation between Alec Baldwin and artist Eric Fischl. Although Baldwin is the kind of interviewer that will inject himself into the conversation (as if to say "Don't forget, I'm important and have smart things to say too") I can't help but like him, and I think his perspective as a performer leads him to ask Fischl some interesting questions that another interviewer might not.

Read more and listen to the broadcast



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