I feel there is a misunderstanding in the art world, that may or may not be a reality for you, depending on where you are and how strong your local art market is. But in Slovenia and many other countries, it is very much an enormous issue.
A lot of the artists I know do not get the real function of a gallery or agent. Their beliefs are that such people are financial vultures; praying on the poor unsuspecting artists who are trying to produce great work and butchering their creative passion with turning something sacred into a commodity item on sale.
But I hope we can all agree that this is absolutely not the case, at least for most galleries and agents — those that actually care about the artists they represent (there are of course some that don’t, but you get such people in any profession, so the art world obviously is no exception).
To really understand what the point of having a gallery or agent represent your work, we have to look into the nature of creative work.
Many creatives (me included) tend to like their time alone, they are prone to create their work in solitude (public performance and other similar mediums excluded), where no outside distractions can disturb their work flow. As such, many of us really aren’t textbook extroverts or exceptionally good with people.
The point of art as an object though is that as soon as it leaves the hands of its creator, it becomes a public object, intended to be experienced by as many people as possible. And by people I mean the right people — obviously showing religious art to Richard Dawkins won’t do, but showing it to the right community that shares ones beliefs will.
This is where galleries and agents come in; they embody the other half that most of us introverts lack. Both fill the gap between the public that wishes to be exposed to new and interesting experiences and the artists that create them. It’s actually similar to what Ford did with automation; it all comes down to specialisation and the division of labour:
Obviously an infrastructure of gallerists, receptionists, technicians, accountants, lawyers and marketeers will be incomparably better adapt at selling art than if the artist decided to just go at it alone. And as such they do demand a fair amount of compensation.
And I am sure many of us may believe that giving up 50% of our sales (more or less the industry standard) is an outrageous amount and that we, as the creators deserve a much higher percentage — because if it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t have anything to sell in the first place.
But if anyone takes their time to look into how much technology distributors take when margins are calculated, well, you will just find that the people that produce iPhones (I mean Apple, not the actually workers in china, bless their exploited hearts), the profit margin on an iPhone is in the 40% range.
Now, if you deduct your material costs from the 50% of whatever art piece you sell, you may end up in the 40-49% range (depending on how expensive your materials are and how high the sale price was), so profit margins are more or less the similar to one of the most popular pieces of tech today.
(If your profit margins are much less than that, you should consider reevaluating your prices, because you’re absolutely undercharging for your work.)
Considering that your art probably isn’t as popular among the masses as the new iPhone, but you still get more or less the same profit margin, I’d call this a good deal. And I hope my blunder may help clarify (even if just for a bit) why galleries and agents are important and absolutely deserve a fair share of the profit for their work.
Because if we find a good one to represent our work, they can focus on what they know best — selling our art — and we can focus on creating more, rather than spending our time on becoming a jack of all trades and a master of none.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://survivingart.com/2019/03/24/the-reason-why-agents-and-galleries-exist/
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