May 2013
1 post
Shake Your Money Maker
Ignore the crassness of the title of this blog for a second and stay open for just a bit. I work with a lot of artists. I help them manage their finances and often times I’m helping them deal with the lack of funds and the unpredictability of cash flow. I work with artists at varying stages of their careers and varying degrees of success. But most of them have one thing in common: they reject...
April 2013
1 post
The Buddy System
The Buddy System
I’ve been thinking about this idea that everyone has something to teach. You may not agree with their occupation, their religion, their lifestyle or their use of money, BUT there may be some sliver of an opportunity to learn something valuable from your most reviled enemy. Let’s take for instance an investment banker.
What is the utter opposite of an artist? To me it’s an...
March 2013
2 posts
Keith Chen Ted Talk →
Savings and Sci-Fi
Back on the wagon. Back to the topic of finances or lack there of.
I listened to an interesting Ted Talk while enduring traffic driving past downtown LA. Check out Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money? <http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_affect_your_ability_to_save_money.html>
According to Chen I’m not to blame for my lack of savings. The...
February 2013
3 posts
Artists & Taxes Redux
Here’s an updated blog post from last February.
Let me preface this by saying I am not a CPA (Certified Public Accountant / aka Tax Guru) and am only giving mere suggestions here in this blog. Please seek tax advice from your accountant.
So you’re an artist and you have expenses, you probably file a Schedule C for your art practice where you deduct studio rent, studio utilities, health...
A B C's of Business Entities
I’m taking a little break from the financial experiment for the next few weeks of blogging to address a few things that I’ve seen come up recently. My dad asked me to give him a quick breakdown of the different business entities, and I realized that I get asked this question a lot. This is just meant to be an introduction, and I highly suggest that before you set any of these up that you consult a...
Attack the Debt Part 2: My Austerity Measures
So let’s fast forward a year ahead, and I’ve got all my credit card debt paid off, and I’m celebrating and feeling great about what I’ve accomplished. I’m free and light and really proud. I should reward myself. Then it dawns on me; I’ve felt this way before. I’ve actually felt this way several times in the course of my life. I mean I’ve paid off my debt many times over before, yet I end up back...
January 2013
4 posts
Attack the Debt - Part 1
I recently read an interesting yet obvious fact: all millionaires have one thing in common; they all live within their means. Of course they do. And you’re thinking, well sure it’s easy to live within your means when you’re a millionaire. But the obvious point is that they didn’t get to be millionaires without living within their means. Since college, I have not lived within my means. I’ve had...
Occam's Razor
I felt really awful after I wrote the last blog post. I couldn’t really put my finger on it. Maybe it was because the post was so boring and dull and really obvious. How was I really helping anyone by stating the obvious? I think what bummed me out was that there was no creativity to it. I believe that every step of this process deserves more than what’s expected. A practitioner of Jungian...
Resistance is Futile
Step 1: We know we need to change the way we deal with money. Yes.
Step 2: We have a few tools to help with this seemingly insurmountable task. Got it.
Step 3: So now how do we go about planning the attack? What do we do next? I look at this challenge as a giant imposing mountain, and right now we are standing at the bottom of it. Or maybe we are at the first two toeholds but still very far from...
A Few of My Favorite Things
Okay so it’s official, a lot of artists are on the bandwagon to embrace money and get control over their finances. Cool, I’m not alone. Now the question is how do we accomplish this together. I’m a lover of many things. And I truly believe you should use the things that you are into to help solve problems. I’m not sure if it’s the chicken or the egg, but I think you are drawn to certain things...
December 2012
2 posts
The New Year: An Experiment with Money Part 1
The New Year always makes me want to attempt something new. Not like a New Year’s resolution that could eventually be broken or forgotten, but something much more transformative. What real problem or issue needs to be addressed and resolved now? What issue has consistently come up this past year with my clients that needs solving immediately? The answer is clear: Money.
I know you’re probably...
Day Jobs and Selling Out
Art making is often times a solitary endeavor. Most of the artists that I’ve worked with believe that they alone struggle with problems that pervade only their lives. I currently work with about 20 artists at various stages in their careers, and I get asked a lot of the same questions and run into a lot of similar issues and situations. Sometimes artists think I’m blogging about them...
October 2012
2 posts
Be Prolific Be Loved
I recently met up with an artist client of mine and we were discussing his tepid relationship with one of the galleries that represents his work. He’s been somewhat concerned about why he feels like his gallery basically blows him off. He wondered if he was just being paranoid or had actually made some kind of artist-gallery faux pas.
At first I thought maybe he was being paranoid but after we got...
Paper Trail
A few weeks ago I was listening to NPR and heard a story about a remarkable paper trail. The paper trail related to a Renoir painting that had been bought at a flea market for $7. The only way the Baltimore Museum of Art may be able to recover the work is because it kept a record of the work in their card catalogue. Since 1937 there was a card indicating that the BMA had the work at the museum...
September 2012
2 posts
Stimulating Your Economy
I don’t think it’s possible these days to avoid the barrage of news about the staggering economy and the various dismal job’s reports that seem to roll out on a weekly basis. Lately every time I tune into NPR I get depressed. But it got me thinking about my own economy. How could I stimulate my own work life and do more?
And then it hit me: I could become an employer. How much better would my life...
Benefit Art Auctions
Since I’m currently ensconced in planning a benefit art auction right at this very moment, I figured why not blog about all the reasons participating both as an artist and a gallery matters.
If you’re a gallery or an artist, I’m sure you’ve been hit up by various institutions, at least a few dozen times, to donate work to help raise money for the arts. Since we don’t live in Germany, the art...
August 2012
2 posts
Non-Exclusive License Agreement
Copyright law is incredibly complex so I’m only going to tackle a small part that I think has the most usability for artists and galleries.
We all pretty much know the basics: if you are a living artist making work, you own the copyright to the work. You (or your designated agent, i.e. your gallery) can grant certain licenses to use / reproduce that work because you own the copyright.
If you...
Why Consignment Splits Between Galleries Vary
What do I mean by consignment split? It’s the amount of commission that is shared by two galleries upon the sale of an artwork.
Here are a couple of scenarios that could alter the consignment split.
Let’s say an artist has their primary gallery in LA, Gallery A, and that artist has a solo show in Paris with another gallery, Gallery B. Gallery A creates a consignment of the artwork on behalf of the...
July 2012
3 posts
Consignment Invoices
Here is another Gallery post but as I’ve said before, it’s good for artists to understand how income is split when their work is sold, especially when there are multiple galleries involved.
If Gallery A (Consignor, entity doing the consigning and often times the primary gallery of that particular artist) consigns artwork to Gallery B (Consignee, entity being consigned the artwork)...
Artist Statements Revisited
A few of you were confused by the Artist Statement sample that I posted on June 13th. So I’m going to break down the calculations just to be clear about how production and payment is split between galleries and artists.
The initial calculation seems confusing because of the order of the calculation so I’m going to show you two different ways to look at it.
The underlying theory is that a gallery...
Why artists should always maintain their own...
I know I promised a few gallery-centric posts, but this question was actually brought up at one of my gallery clients the other day. They started working with a new artist and the artist’s other gallery wasn’t prepared to share the artist’s archive with them. They were in a bind because this artist never kept his own archive. So this incident prompted the following post.
Why...
June 2012
1 post
Artist Statement from a Gallery Perspective
I’ve been blogging a lot for artists lately, but I’d like to dedicate the next few blog posts to galleries. This information is still incredibly useful to artists though. I think it’s important to understand how the other side is thinking and what their priorities are.
In my 14 years working at art galleries, I’ve done artist statements many different ways but I’ve finally come up with a...
May 2012
2 posts
Tracking Production = Making Money
As the old saying goes there are two ways to make money in business: increase sales and decrease spending. But I’ve figured that in the art world there is a 3rd way: track production costs.
As I’ve stated in an earlier blog post, if you track your production you will more often than not be able to recoup half of those expenses from the gallery that sells the work. Typically a gallery will split...
3 tags
Commissions
I recently had this discussion with a client about how to structure a commission deal. There are two main aspects of a commission that an artist should consider, the work and the money. If an artist is represented by a gallery and the commission went thru the gallery then the gallery will negotiate the logistics. For working out the logistics and for setting up the deal, the gallery will take a...
April 2012
2 posts
3 tags
cost efficient tips to "putting yourself out...
So if there’s one thing I’ve learned after spending nearly 15 years doing marketing for many products and services and then launching my own business is it’s much harder to market yourself! It feels so icky and networking feels taboo but the reality is, both marketing and networking are necessary evils to success.
As we explained in our last post, starting with who you know is a great way to...
It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.
Three months into the new year and you don’t have much to show for it.
You started off the year ready to make some sales, ready to get a gallery, ready to get that coveted grant, ready to meet new curators.
Three months later you wonder why very few of those emails or calls were ever returned, why few sales have come thru and why you haven’t made many new (genuine) contacts.
You could blame it on...
March 2012
2 posts
Asking your gallery for money
Asking for money is often times an awkward situation to be in, especially for an artist.
I have an artist client who recently asked me for advice about asking their gallery for money in preparation for a solo exhibition. The exhibition is a year away and the work is incredibly meticulous and time consuming. So it will take working day and night only on this show to get ready for it.
Artists, this...
How to really get organized. Step by Step and all...
Okay everyone says they want to get organized, but how do you actually begin? Everyone says I want to manage my expenses better, I want to know how much I make, I want to have a budget, I want to save a little money, I want to pay myself a salary, I want to pay my taxes throughout the year so I don’t have to scrape and scrounge every April 15th. In this blog, I’m going to walk you thru step by...
February 2012
2 posts
Artists and Taxes
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about tax deductions from artists lately so I just wanted to address them in the blog this week. Let me preface this by saying I am not a CPA (Certified Public Accountant / aka Tax Guru) and am only giving mere suggestions here in this blog. Please seek tax advice from your accountant.
So you’re an artist and you have expenses, you probably file...
Contract Labor as Production Cost
Okay so you’ve got the Material Costs organized and well tracked. Now let’s talk about Contract Labor. Your time and labor will never be reimbursable unless you are working on a large commission for some public work project, and you will submit an invoice for your artist fee. I don’t see any other exception to this rule. But the labor that you pay for can go towards Production Costs. Now if you...
January 2012
1 post
Production Costs - Get Organized, Get Paid
Let’s begin the New Year by getting organized and getting paid.
Have you ever asked yourself how much does it cost to make your art? There are a lot of expenses to factor in: studio rent, utilities, insurance, contract labor, materials. Let’s discuss the latter expense: materials. Your production costs can include contract labor and materials, but let’s just stick with materials for now. Did you...
October 2011
1 post
Preparing for a solo exhibition at a gallery
I want to readdress an earlier blog post about the role that a gallery plays for an artist when it comes to their solo exhibition. Lately, I’ve been talking with a lot of artists that are having minor to severe disagreements with their galleries about their upcoming show. The disagreements surround the issues of what to show. Now this is an important role of a gallery that may get stretched a...
Blogging from PULSE LA and thinking about...
So you got an invitation to do a booth at an art fair in Europe with a gallery in Portugal (this is just an example, I’m not condemning Portuguese galleries). And you are incredibly excited since it’s the first time your work will be shown internationally. The art fair is in one week. You quickly pack up the five drawings they want to show and FedEx them off to the gallery. They arrive. The show...
September 2011
8 posts
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY?
In an earlier blog post I discussed How A Gallery Functions as an artist agent / manager, i.e. galleries represent artists. What does that really mean though? Besides selling the work and talking the curators, press and other galleries, what does a gallery DO to earn their 50% cut? Well, it actually varies quite a bit, but here is a comprehensive list of all that a gallery COULD do for an artist...
How a Gallery Functions: Part 3 Exhibiting Artwork
EXHIBITING ARTWORK:
I think the one thing that is most obvious to people is that galleries exhibit artwork. What I truly love is that galleries are on the forefront of what’s going on right now. They aren’t bogged down by the lengthy timelines and the bureaucracy of museums and larger institutions so the shows you see are incredibly timely and relevant.
There are 100s upon 100s of galleries in...
How a Gallery Functions Part 2
SELLING ARTWORK:
The gallery is essentially a retail business. On a monthly basis a profitable gallery will sell anywhere from 10 to 20 works of art. Most galleries attend at least one art fair a year, if not all the majors, like Art Basel, Art Basel Miami, The Armory Show, Frieze, FIAC, and the myriad other fairs that are popping up all the time like Art Platform, Pulse, LA Contemporary, Chicago...
Gallerella: Inside the shoes of the art world
Thank you for joining my blog. My name is Amy Davila, and I’ve worked in the art world going on 14 years doing every job imaginable. I’ve worked at such prestigious galleries as David Zwirner, New York, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco, from positions ranging from intern to director. With an MBA background, I continue to consult galleries and artists in all...
