By Catharine Clark
In Nesting Newbies Magazine (Issue 4), Catharine Clark, owner of the Catharine Clark Gallery, shares her advice and encouragement for newbie art collectors.
Here she discusses the role of the gallerist:
If you want to begin collecting in a gallery setting, consider the gallery’s staff as an invaluable resource that is employed to assist you and help educate you about the process or the concepts an artist used in his or her work. It is likely this person will ultimately become a friend. Buying artwork over time generally means you become part of a community of people with shared interests, values, and world views. Collectors often develop into more than just another person purchasing a painting—they become part of a network of people who value patronage of the arts, want to support artists and galleries, and become involved with the wider community of museums and nonprofits that in turn provide artists with opportunities to exhibit work and visitors the chance to learn from it. While a gallery’s staff can appear inaccessible or too busy to assist you, the truth is, they are generally working for the artists their gallery represents—and this is no small job. Hopefully, they are working to support the artists whose work you will ultimately be collecting. The gallery’s investment in an artist’s career can be the reason an artist continues to make work over the long term.
Galleries manage artists’ careers in much the same way that agents manage actors’ careers. For example, in addition to selling artists’ works, the gallery tracks all the comings and goings of their pieces in exhibitions at museums, nonprofits, and other galleries, and gallerists often manage the contracts and loan agreements between the artists and the borrowing institutions. The gallery advises their artists and helps create career opportunities in the form of inclusion in exhibits within and outside of the gallery’s purview—which may mean facilitating studio visits and meetings with curators and writers and assisting with press releases and marketing in order to provide greater visibility for the artists’ pieces. In order for galleries to survive and for artists to become self-sustaining, in addition to contacting the people who enter the gallery space, staff must be on the phone reaching out to collectors around the globe. Whatever the myriad of responsibilities that galleries manage on behalf of their artists, they are generally delighted to break from what they are doing and interact with anyone who wants to discuss the works in the gallery’s program, whether or not the individual is someone who intends to purchase. Interruption is encouraged, and conversation is embraced!
That said, there are some pitfalls that the public occasionally falls into, rendering interactions frustrating or insulting for the gallery staff. Asking a gallerist repeatedly about whether a work is a good investment is generally frowned upon. Asking about what the artwork means or how it is made or functions is invited. Of course, for more expensive work, a gallerist should be able to provide a history of sales and should be able to identify museums that have acquired the artist’s work in order to support the prices the gallery is asking for the piece. To insult the artist or the work or to comment negatively while not being open to the information a gallerist is providing about an artwork is disrespectful. Whether you like the work or not, chances are the gallery director does, or it would not be exhibited in his or her space; and to comment negatively is to insult the person who selected the work. However, a thoughtful, yet critical discussion, is generally welcomed.
To ask for a significant discount is usually discouraged. Artists and gallerists are professionals and have priced their works based on economic principals, like supply and demand, as well as considerations, such as sales history, material costs, time, size, career level, etc. The best way to not be offered the opportunity to purchase a desirable piece by an artist whose work you want to own is to ask for an excessive discount. The next time a good work by that artist becomes available, the gallerist will approach another collector.
One Artist: Huge Price Range
People new to collecting are often surprised to learn that there’s artwork in what appears to be upscale galleries that is accessibly priced. For example, at the gallery that I own and direct, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, artwork is available for sale from $60 to $350,000. This means that there is truly something for every budget! The artist whose work is priced at $350,000 also has works available for $750. The more expensive works are unique; and the less-costly ones are multiples (like etchings or lithographs). And because this artist has work priced as high as $350,000, he has a career that reflects this market level: His work is represented in more than 50 major international museum collections; he sells his work consistently; he has been working for more than 40 years; he has critical reviews, monographs, and auction records that support the pricing of his work. The artist whose work is priced at $60 is also—perhaps a surprise to some—a serious artist, and his video work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, in a solo presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in major museum collections, and he has had many significant critical reviews of his work in established art publications, like Artforum. So, in spite of the accessible price tag, if you like a work, there is really nothing to fear about the artist not having a professional career or a committed studio practice.
Read Catharine’s suggested reading for more on collecting art.
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