Thank goodness the art fairs of December are over. I was starting to get hassled for not showing up at a few openings. I am still giving finals, with the last one being tonight in about an hour. I have a web updating job that’s going to pay my real money. A couple of my sponsors on Miamiartexchange.com were trying to get me feature them during the fair. Sorry. I chose work that I thought was good and I could write about pretty quickly. I covered all the major venues and that’s as much as I could do. I didn’t attend a single party although, there were LOTS of them around.
The problem, as age old as it is, is that artists don’t have the luxury to create their work then go out promoting it too. In reality, it takes just as much time to promote the work as it does to create it, if not more. That’s why artists seek out galleries and dealers. And, dealers are not interested in promoting work that isn’t easy to sell, unless they really like the work and see potential in it and or the artist. That is the reason dealers and gallerists take up to a 50% cut of the selling price.
Based on those terms, dealers get very territorial, literally and figuratively. Unless you have a written contract it might be problematic on some level to have another dealer promoting your work. There are advantages and disadvantages to both having and not having a written contract.
Museums don’t normally get into the business of selling artists work but, if you see a wall label that says, “Collection of the artist,” it means the work is most likely for sale. In those situations collectors can probably get work at a lower cost and the artist won’t have to give up a cut of the money.
Commissions, public and private, are a whole different matter. Just the process itself can be taxing enough to make many artists never do it more than once. Public commissions require the artist to do the bidding of many people one would not normally deal with in the creation of ones art.
Anyway, I’ve gone way beyond the art fairs-as-exhibition spaces, and beyond the first week of Decemeber having become the MOST important week for ANY and EVERY artist living in Florida. The faculty of UF even had a exhibition in Miami! Gainesville is 800 miles north of here!