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Recent email brought in two eye-opening pieces of information about Los Angeles-area venues. Both relate to Marketing Mondays issues we've discussed in the past. Naturally I've turned them into a post.
Hold the loan!
Or at least read the results of Jane Chafin's survey first
Image from Offramp Gallery blog
1. The MFA Revisited
MFA: Is It Necessary?, a recent post by Jane Chafin on her Offramp Gallery Blog is must reading. It's the result of an informal survey of some 300 artists and Chafin's own research. The chart above gives you the quick story, but read the whole thing.
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Chafin is the director of a gallery that is in a private home (her own) in Pasadena. The gallery's slogan: "Contemporary art in an historic house." You can see the gallery here and learn more about it here.
Here's Chafin's take on the MFA: "A degree is not something I look for when selecting artists for Offramp Gallery. The bottom line is always the work. I look for work that's honest, creative, original, skillfully executed and intensely visual. It's supposed to be VISUAL art after all."
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I don't know Jane Chafin, but I like how she thinks (I've written about the MFA here) and I admire her entrepreneurial spirit.
2. Pay to Show Revisited
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I am not a fan of pay-to-show galleries. There’s no incentive for the owners to actually sell your work, because in paying upfront to exhibit (a fee that can run in the thousands) you—and any number of other artists showing that month—have already paid the gallery’s rent and bills.
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Now someone has sent me a link to a different kind of pay to show: the commercial gallery that won’t look at your submission without an enclosed check. Should you check the Artist Submissions page of Ace Gallery in Los Angeles —and you can do so here—you will find this sentence in the fourth paragraph: “A fee of $60 is required for all submissions.”
This is not to enter a juried show (though $60 would be pretty steep), but simply to get your materials past the conceptual velvet rope. Did I mention this is a commercial gallery?
Image from the Internet
Trying to see this $60 fee from the gallery’s point of view, I can imagine the director saying, “We’re inundated with solicitations. This will limit the number of people submitting.” Or, "I have to pay an extra day’s salary to an assistant to go through these packages, so I’m passing on the cost to the artists.” But this a commercial gallery that takes a presumed 50 percent of the sale price of art--a commission that includes things like gallery development, of which finding artists would be one.
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The Ace Gallery is a privately held business; the owner and director can run it the way they choose. But nickel and diming artists, many of whom spend a lifetime working for and living on chump change, seems grossly inappropriate. And when you see the gallery's roster of established artists, you know they didn't come to the gallery through unsolicited submissions. So wouldn't it just be more honest to say, "The gallery is not considering unsolicited submissions at this time."
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Sixty dollars can buy food, or paint, or pay for a couple of entry fees where the artist has an actual chance of being included. Is Ace doing so badly that it needs to be funded by artists?
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Sixty dollars can buy food, or paint, or pay for a couple of entry fees where the artist has an actual chance of being included. Is Ace doing so badly that it needs to be funded by artists?
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Has anyone else come across such a request from another venue? Or does Ace Gallery hold a singular card in the art world?