I read Edward Winkeman’s blog from time to time, sometimes going by his openings and having briefly spoken to him last year at one of them.  I don’t generally comment on Winkeman’s posts but this one on The Logic Behind the 50/50 Split seemed so well written and thought out, if you will, that I had to post about it.

I don’t show my own work or want to really, because Art for me, is not about commercial acceptance - it’s about self development (which takes a whole lot of pressure off) and I feel it really should be that way for Artists, in general.  Having said that - most Artists, I’m sure, feel galleries take advantage of them and gouge, taking more than a fair share of the profits.

But Winkleman has done a convincing job of explaining the other side - what a Gallery has to invest before they ever see a profit from an Artist’s work; based on the argument Edward Winkleman laid out, I’d have to agree with him that a 50/50 split of profits between Artist / Gallery is fair.

With emerging artists - the work in creating a market for an Artist’s work totally justifies a 50/50 split:

“..Essentially, a gallery is investing in an artist, betting they can develop a market for the work and (one day hopefully) see a return. Like any investment, however, this includes a significant amount of risk. There are far more artists who didn’t become overnight sensations out there than otherwise. Regardless of how well-connected or determined a gallerist is, there are some artists with more challenging work for whom it takes years to sell anything. If it takes five years to develop a market, for example (which is not that uncommon), that will represent at least two solo exhibitions on average, meaning the galleries I surveyed might at this point have invested as much as $50,000 in this artist (including taking the work to art fairs and promoting it in between exhibitions) before they see the first significant sales. Unless those sales total $100,000, the gallery will still be waiting, five years later, to break even on their investment. Multiply this by the number of artists in a gallery, and you begin to sense how risky a business it can be.”

The whole equation comes down to risk management.

What happens when an artist is established and has a market?  Well… the 50/50 split becomes the 60/40 or 70-/30 split - the Artist’s work has a stable market and risk is less that expenses can be recouped..therefore, the Galleries take should go down; and if it doesn’t the Artist is strong enough to leave and find a better deal with another Gallery or out on their own.

What’s interesting now … is the practical implications of the Internet for Artists who either have an established reputation (and a market to sell to) or Artists that key into a popular trend and can exploit the demand for their work.    It’s possible to foresee eliminating the Gallery altogether, along with the Dealer, and some Artists have begun to do that.

Think of it this way…in Real Estate, sites like www.Zillow.com  have developed the technology to tell buyers what the value of a sellers property is for any given location, along with the forms and processes needed to negotiate a deal.   Who gets cut out of that deal….the Broker.

With Architectural House Plans, many sites including some of my current and former SEO clients (ie: www.mascord.com, www.thehousedesigners.com, etc) make money by selling architectural house plans directly to builders who then create a house and usually flip it - cutting out the Architect (though the sites that offer this service are run by Architects..figure that one out! - life makes strange bedfellows).

In both cases, the Middleman is eliminated the market is better defined and the buyer is more enabled.  I think the same thing could happen for Artists - if the buyers were more equipped…no one would need the dealer or Galleries at all (but they provide other functions as well…and I, for one, like going to Gallery Openings and drinking Red Wine…so I don’t want dealers to disappear, if only for that!).

The comments on the Winkleman post are as interesting as the post itself - and I noticed that Edward Winkleman is a true influential in the Art World, based on the amount of comments he gets in his posts - it’s phenomenal how much he touches the people who read his blog.

Based on the comments I’ve read on this post, like those of julie , I think it’s clear the goals of Artists and the Goals of Gallery Dealers are not the same.  I found the same issue at Google Unbound conference earlier this year with the goals of the Publisher diverging from the goals of the authors being published….I think we should expect that each needs one another but has different points of view and different reasons for the relationship.

Via Tyler Green I heard about Newsweek’s Peter Plagen’s thoughts about the most influential work of art of the last 100 years - Peter thinks its Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

This is a lot to do about nothing since we can not know what was truly the most influential painting in the last century.  I’d suggest that if Peter Plagen really wants to know the answer to his own question, he could ask every well known living artist what single painting influenced them the most.  Add to that, all the dead artists over the last 100 years who you can historically read about and find out which painting(s) were most important.

Then you would rate the influence of each artist based on what was known about them, both the influence of the artist on contemporaries and the current influence of the artist after their death.

Then.. with all that information, create a numerical score by multiplying the score of the painting by the score of the artist(s) who admired it, adding up scores for the same painting from different artists.  Also do the same thing with influential dealers and art critics and find out what paintings they felt were most influential, if you can.

Finally, you’d have a score for each painting and then you could sort them from higher score down to lowest and have a much better idea of what paintings were the most influential over the last 100 years.

“…And of course Les Dems is too. Jack Flam also wrote about Les Dems as springing from Blue Nude, pointing out that while Picasso certainly took something from African sculpture (as Picasso oft claimed), he was only able to do it after Matisse showed him how.

Flam also notes that Picasso remained obsessed with Blue Nude for many decades. Flam points to 1934’s Nude in a Garden. And there are Blue Nude-type figures in Picasso all the way through his Women of Algiers series: In this 1955 example Picasso makes his reference to Matisse as clear as possible.

Sure, Les Dems is more famous. But Picasso needed Blue Nude to make it, and for decades thereafter.

Or, you can just ask Picasso and Matisse (as quoted above), get their favorite paintings - declare those paintings the most influential (since you might assume Picasso and Matisse were the two most influential painters in the last 100 years) and be done with it!

I started reading Delacroix’s Journal before going to France again and now I’m almost done and I need to get down some thoughts before I forget. 

What I’ve come away with is this:  Delacroix had reached a point in his life where he instinctively felt it was coming to an end, and he felt it was time to move on; he was bored and in lousy health and felt he did not have much to live for.

When he was elected to Academy in 1857, Delacroix was pretty sick with a cold and it took a long time to recover; when he did recover he was stuck with a commission to finish set of murals at St. Sulpice that no one really wanted anymore.  

In fact, when I went to see the Murals, I could not appreciate them in the setting they were in or even see them that well.  The execution looked forced, abrupt and dry because his heart was not in it.  Also he had to move to a new place, now the Musee national Eugene Delacroix located at 6, rue de Furstenberg near the Saint-Germain-Des-Pres station and the church of St. Sulpice.

The smart thing to do would have been to back out of the St. Sulpice commission - let it be finished by another artist - and not even have to move to where he ended up dying.

What’s surprising to me is that he’d write some of his feelings down in a way that is frank and honest:

“This afternoon I went for a walk along the road to Epinal.  I made some enchanting discoveries; rocks and woods and best of all, water - water of which I never grow tired; I feel a continual longing to plunge into it, to be a a bird, a tree whose roots are steeped in it, to be anything, except an unhappy, sick, bored old man”.

Journal, 14 July 1858.

And just as Impressionism was beginning to happen, and was literally, right in front of him, he missed it (it often takes considerable insight to see what’s right in front of you - and that’s true of anyone living in any time - sometimes the “next thing” is right in front of you …but you can’t see it because your too close to it):

“…The other morning as I was standing on my balcony in the sunshine, I noticed the prismatic effect of the thousands of tiny hairs in the cloth of my gray jacket.  They were sparkling with all the colours of the rainbow, like little pieces of crystal or diamond.  Each separate hair being glossy, it reflected the most brilliant colours, which changed whenever I moved.  We only notice this effect in sunshine…”

Journal - Paris, November 4, 1857

What would have been interesting - had Delacroix, instead of moving ahead with a boring commission for the St. Sulpice murals,  changed his style somewhat, and started painting those atmospheric effects more often - or even the things he saw in his own garden.

I think, as we get older, our minds becomes more fixed, more closed and less able to appreciate new opportunities as they come up.

Most of Delacroix’s late work is hard to get really enthusiastic about because the artist, himself, was board with what he was doing - he knew he needed to change course - but he did not know how to change.

And that kind of insight and courage is something almost no one has - I think - to see that what your doing in your life does needs to change - and know what the change needs to be …and then going ahead and doing it… it’s tough (and there was no therapy in 1857 .. no one to talk to - no one to really work though issues with ..other than your friends - who hardly can provide an objective opinion).

Plus, more and more of those “friends” were dying off, there were not many people left he’d even want to talk to or share with - creating further isolation.

But it makes me wonder how open anyone is to change ….when you see it right in fount of you .. do you recognize it and know what to do with the opportunities you have?  Do you even see the opportunities?