Excerpts from
Please Don’t Buy This Artwork!
by David Muller
As the owner of Photorealism, a wholesale art dealership, I have visited the front and back rooms of over 300 “art galleries” around the USA, and in doing so, I learned a few things:
Most art galleries do not own the art that is on their walls. When I went around asking the stores to buy our works for resale, they laughed at me and then explained how it works. They explained that there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of artists trying to get their artworks to be sold by art retailers. Thus, the gallery not only does not buy the art, they actually charge the artist, or in our case the dealer, a wall rental fee to have the art on the wall. Then, if the art sells, the retailer pays the artist or dealer an agreed-upon percentage of the sale price, usually anywhere from 35% to 50%. In other words, we had to give the artwork to the retailer for them to hang on the walls of the gallery, and only if and when the store sells the artwork do they then remit a portion of the sale price to us. The percentage of the sale price that the retailer would remit to us was a negotiation, separately with each retailer. When a piece sold and the retailer remitted our share to us, we would then ship a replacement piece to that retailer. In the meanwhile, we had to pay them a weekly fee for having the art on their wall.
Most art galleries sell original paintings, and they also sell photocopies of paintings. There are many names for these photocopies. They can be called lithographs, serigraphs, giclees, embellished giclees, prints, posters, limited editions or unlimited editions. Most people walking into an art gallery have little idea that most of what they are seeing are photocopies with little or no resale value.
Some art galleries have a business model that is based upon deception. They either make their own “photocopies” or they buy photocopies from a printer. Most times these have numbers in the bottom corner like 35/150, which makes the buyer think that they are limited in some sense and thus have value. All of these share the same characteristic, namely that for the most part, the exact same piece can be bought on eBay for a small fraction of the price that is being by an “art gallery.”
Artists do not singlehandedly produce their art. Over the course of my years in the art business, I was in several buildings that can be described only as art factories. “Artists” on either side of a moving conveyor belt each add a certain stroke to a canvas, with the resulting pieces of art being an “original” oil painting. Even the signature is done by someone else. The buyer has no idea.
Some art galleries exist in order to sell the works of one artist only, and that artist is usually the owner of the gallery or the spouse of the gallery owner. One gallery that we did business with was owned by the son of the artist. The artist created all different sizes, shapes and colors of ceramic hearts, created in a factory but all signed by the owner’s mother. The gallery sold the works of other artists as well, including ours. I came to find out the sales people got paid a commission of 16% of the sales price for any pieces of the mother’s that they sold, and 8% of the sales price of any other artist. Guess which artist they steered their customers to.
Some galleries only sell art made in China. There is a town in China called Dafen where thousands of talented artists paint from morning until night. They are paid on average five to ten dollars per painting. There are many “art galleries” in America that have these paintings signed by an artist whom they then promote as valuable and collectible. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen good honest people duped out of thousands of dollars by the gallery owners, in front of my eyes. If you get nothing else out of this book, please go to YouTube and type in “Dafen counterfeit” before you enter any “art gallery” in the Western world.