What a Gallery Actually Does for Fifty Percent
The commission looks enormous until you cost out doing it yourself.
Fifty percent is the standard commission and it provokes the same reaction from every painter who has not yet had a gallery.
What It Buys
A room in a city where people who buy paintings already go. Crating, transport and insurance. A mailing list built over decades. Photography, a printed list, a press release that gets read. Somebody who will spend an hour with a hesitant collector, then follow up twice over six months, while I am in the studio.
What It Buys That Is Harder to See
Institutional credibility. Museum curators and prize juries do look at where work has been shown. A solo show at a gallery with a serious programme opens doors that no amount of self-organised exhibiting does, and that is not a comment on the quality of self-organised exhibiting.
The Arithmetic of Doing It Yourself
Hire a space for a fortnight, print, photograph, ship, insure, staff it, and market it to a list you do not have. Then sell perhaps a third of what the gallery would have sold. The fifty percent starts looking like a reasonable deal at about the point you price the insurance.
Where It Does Go Wrong
Galleries that do not pay on time, do not report, or hold work indefinitely without showing it. All three happen. The answer is a written agreement covering payment terms, consignment periods and who insures the work in storage — not the absence of a gallery.
