Chapter Five

What I Learned in my Decade as an Art Dealer

In 2011, I sold my business, Al Safa Halal, and started a new business, an art dealership called Photorealism. Photorealism, you might know, is a genre of art in which a painting is so meticulously painted that from ten or twenty feet away, one would assume they are looking at a photograph. Only when one gets just a few inches away do they realize that it is actually an oil painting, not a photograph.

I made agreements with several photorealist artists, in particular Mark Schiff and Doug Bloodworth to start. I travelled from city to city around the country to meet with art retailers. For the most part, the retailers, or “gallerists” as they like to refer to themselves, liked our pieces a lot and were willing to carry them. Within a year, we were in about one hundred galleries throughout the US and Canada and also a couple in Europe. Most of the galleries were in heavily travelled tourist destinations but not all. By the end of 2012, we were selling dozens of pieces per month and making nice money. We took on more artists, in particular Jim Jackson and Ralph Stearns, former co-workers of Bloodworth, and also Cesar Santander, Randy Ford, Marcel Franquelin, Amanda Cook, Gerard Boersma and Johannes Wessmark. We also took on Rich Conley, who was not a photorealist but rather a caricaturist, but whose works we also did well with.

All told, I have probably visited over 300 art galleries around the USA, and in doing so, I learned a few things, summarized as follows:

1. Most art galleries I visited 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.

2. Some art galleries I visited 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 34/150, 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 asked by an “art gallery.”

3. The genius of a Mark Schiff or a Doug Bloodworth is that they paint these amazing paintings on a blank canvas. What I found out is that this is not always the case. I visited several artists’ studios where the artist had a photo projected onto a canvas, and then the artist just painted the projection onto the canvas. But worse than that, I came across several artists who actually print the photo onto a canvas and then paint the photo. In fact, one of the most famous photorealists of our era, whose works sell for huge money, uses this technique. This is unknown to the buyers, but is known to his dealer, the retailer; in fact, it was from him that I first learned this information – he leaked it by mistake.

4. Most art galleries I visited 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 to me 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.

5. 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 piece of art being an “original” oil painting. Even the signature is done by someone else. The buyer has no idea.

6. Some art galleries I visited 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 that the salespeople 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.

7. Some galleries I visited sell only 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.

Thank you for reading my book. I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.