I remember sitting in my small gallery office, staring at a pile of application fees from a local non-profit that promised “unparalleled exposure” to a curated group of collectors. It was a beautiful lie. Most artists approach these opportunities with a sense of reverence, as if they are applying for a priesthood, but the truth […]
I spent twenty-six years watching bright, talented people walk into my gallery with a lifetime of technical skill and absolutely zero idea how to actually value their own hands. They’d arrive, eager for the “prestige” of representation, blissfully unaware that the gatekeepers were often just waiting to take a fifty percent cut of a price […]
I remember sitting in my old gallery back in 2015, staring at a stack of invoices and wondering why the “digital revolution” hadn’t actually made life any easier for the artists I represented. Everyone promised that the internet would democratize the market, but all I saw was a new breed of middleman charging hefty fees […]
I remember standing in the back of a cavernous exhibition hall in Basel, nursing a lukewarm espresso and watching a young painter stare blankly at a crowd of collectors who were looking everywhere but at her canvas. Everyone tells you that art fairs are the ultimate shortcut to a career, but most of that advice […]
I remember standing in a drafty convention center in Basel, nursing a lukewarm espresso and watching a colleague spend three thousand pounds on a booth that looked more like a high-end boutique than an art space. Everyone around me was whispering about “brand visibility” and “market penetration,” but all I saw was a frantic, expensive […]
If you think getting a feature in a major art journal requires a glossy, five-figure PR agency and a black belt in corporate jargon, you’ve been sold a very expensive lie. I spent twenty-six years watching “experts” charge artists a fortune to send out generic, soul-crushing press releases that editors treat like junk mail. The […]
If you think “how gallery marketing works” involves a high-priced publicist, a glossy coffee-table catalog, or some mystical ritual of sending invitations to the right socialites, I have some rather sobering news for you. For twenty-six years, I sat in my gallery and watched people mistake vanity for visibility. Most of the “marketing” people talk […]
I remember a young painter named Julian who sat in my gallery back in ’98, staring at his price list with the expression of a man facing a firing squad. He had priced his large-scale oils so low—out of a misplaced sense of modesty—that he wasn’t even covering the cost of the linen, let alone […]
Oil on canvas, 60cm x 80cm, 2014. I remember looking at a particularly luminous landscape during a mid-winter opening, feeling the exact moment the room shifted from polite chatter to actual commerce. Most people think a private view is just a glorified cocktail hour where people sip cheap Prosecco and pretend to understand abstraction, but […]
I remember standing in my gallery during an opening in 2008, watching a serious collector squint at a piece of mixed media on linen, 40 x 40cm, 2005. He wasn’t looking at the brushwork; he was staring at a wall label that read like a thesis on post-structuralist semiotics. He looked utterly lost, and frankly, […]