Artists cut

I am not a 'paint' artist (I'm a musician), but today I was reading in Interview magazine an interview with artist Jenny Saville. The interview

Usually around Phila galleries will take 50%. Adding to that cost are the frame and or glass and mat, materials, model's fee, and promotional materials that the gallery does not pay for. A tube of paint can cost up to 54 dollars. I have heard of galleries taking up to 70%. They will cast you away like hospital waste if you don't maintain high sales.

Jane

Lucky is the artist who finds a gallery that will buy the work outright. Most galleries work on a consignment basis and charge a commission, usually fifty percent of the sales price. That doesn't keep the gallery from 'discounting' the price to good customers, and in such cases, the 'discount' should come out of the gallery's commission, not the artist's income. But it' a cuthroat business and anything can happen if the artist doesn't have a binding contract with the gallery - in writing!

Depends on what's written into the contract between the artist and the gallery. Most artists would not sell their copyright to the gallery. But some will and do.

Fifty percent commission means the gallery gets half and the artist gets half of the sale price. For that kind of commission, the artist should expect the gallery to pay for promotion and to actively promote the artist and their work. But once again, it's a cuthroat business.

There's this guy in Lambertville who was a nurse but had a nervous breakdown and now just makes artwork, self-taught. He tried to get a gallery and nobody would show him until this very thing happened, that they became very collectable. But he still held out as should we all, telling them to just buy them at the flea market like everyone else. >; )

That may be true in the galleries that have reknowned artists they represent, but for the large majority of galleries, they could care less about an individual artist since artists are literally a dime a dozen these days. The only artists a gallery will bend over backward for are the ones who they are profiting from.