put a small canvas on the checkout counter of my friend's coffee shop and sold 3 in a week
so a friend that owns a coffee place here asked if i'd hang a couple small pieces on the wall by the till. not a show, no hanging fee, no commission beyond whatever i bought in flat whites. i said sure, mostly to get them out of my apartment.
one 20x20cm acrylic, one slightly bigger. little handwritten tag next to each, price and my IG handle. that's it.
sold three in nine days. not the two on the wall, three, because people asked if i had more in the back and my friend texted me and i drove over with two more.
here's the part that bugs me. last year i did an actual group show, framed stuff, printed cards, the whole thing, sold one. this is a wall by a pastry case next to a sign about oat milk.
i don't fully know what it means and i'm trying not to build a whole theory about it. maybe framed art in a white room reads as expensive and scary and a small unframed panel next to your coffee reads as a thing a person could own. maybe it's just that people are already in a buying mood when they're buying a croissant. maybe i got lucky.
ngl though i'm now walking around town looking at every counter and shelf like a weirdo thinking about where else i could leave a painting. the guy at the hardware store is going to think i'm unwell.
anyone else done the non-gallery thing and had it go weirdly better than the gallery thing
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I think the thing that bugs you is really about the friction, not the venue. In a gallery a buyer has to decide they are the kind of person who buys art. At the till they are just deciding they like the little square in front of them, and they have already spent money in that room, so spending more feels normal. No ceremony, no threshold. My own experience is that the wall by the counter sells better than a booth at a fair because nobody is performing anything.
That said, I would not read it as a verdict on the work. Different rooms, different questions. The group show asked people to understand, the coffee shop asked them to want. You probably want both, and only one of them pays the studio rent.
Honey, you're onto something with that friction talk, but I'd add one thing. At the till, that little square is sitting in somebody's ordinary life. They're looking at it next to the sugar packets and the baby's sippy cup and it says, that could go on my wall, over my couch, where I already live. In a gallery everything is telling them it belongs somewhere else. Different room, like you said. My grandmother sold quilts off the porch rail for years, never called it a show, and they went home with people who loved them. Nothing wrong with a booth or a white wall, but the porch rail knew something the gallery don't.
the quilt thing got me ngl. porch rail, no press release, no artist statement, just "i made this, you like it, it's yours." honestly that's the whole game and we built a whole industry around making sure it never feels that simple.
and yeah, "where i already live" is the part i keep circling. gallery work has to justify the wall it's on. a 20cm thing next to the sugar packets doesn't have to justify anything, it just has to be good enough that someone wants it near their coffee. that's a lower bar and somehow a harder one.
friction is the right word for it and i hate how much sense it makes. the gallery made buying a piece of art a whole identity thing, the till just made it a thing you liked while your card was already out. that's the whole mechanism.
the fair comparison lands too, i did one of those once and spent two days watching people do the "i'm looking but not committing" shuffle. nobody at a coffee counter is performing taste.
and yeah i'm not taking it as a verdict on the work, more like... the work got asked a different question in each room and only one of them was in a language i speak. the group show wanted a statement. the counter just wanted a square that looked good next to a croissant.