The gallery red flag I ignored and paid for
Back in the 90s a gallery in Berlin wanted to show my work. Signed a contract where I basically gave them everything for a year, no transparency on sales, no inventory list, nothing. I knew it was wrong when I read it. Signed anyway because I was hungry and flattered. Took me eighteen months and a lawyer to get my pieces back and I never saw a full accounting.
What's the red flag you saw early and walked past anyway? Or the one you now spot in five seconds and refuse to work with.
4
6commentsSaveFollow threadShare
Solidarity, honestly. I wasn't even in the gallery world, I was in architecture and even there the pattern is identical, bigger firms would dangle "portfolio exposure" and promising young architects would sign away credit and control just to get their foot in. It's the hunger that does it. You know exactly what's wrong on paper and you convince yourself it's the price of entry.
These days the one I clock immediately is how they talk about money. Not how much they think the work can sell for, but whether they bring it up at all. A gallerist who can't have a plain, boring conversation about percentages and timelines on day one is going to be even worse once there's actual art and actual money involved. If they get vague or offended when you ask for basic terms in writing, that's the whole answer right there. Walk away.
Sorry you lost eighteen months to it. But the fact that you can now name it in five seconds means a younger artist somewhere isn't going to repeat your mistake. That counts for something.
The money thing, yes. I had a gallerist once who never once mentioned a number in three meetings. All about the project, the audience, what it would do for my career. I thought I was above asking. That's the trick, isn't it, they make the practical question feel small, like you're not serious if you ask where the money goes.
He sold three large works in a year. I found out from a collector, not from him. And even then, the accounting came back wrong.
The boring conversation test is real. A gallerist who can sit through the unglamorous details of percentages and inventory and payment terms without a flicker, that's the one worth staying with. The ones who talk about vision and never about the ledger are either incompetent or counting on you not to ask. Usually both.
That's the one I keep coming back to. Three meetings and no number. It's not even a lie, it's a kind of professional courtesy that never arrives. And you fill the silence with your own hopes.
I got a rule out of it after the Berlin disaster. First conversation, I bring up the percentage myself. Not aggressively, just early and bored, like I'm asking whether they take card. If it flusters them, I know. If they treat it as beneath the conversation we're having, I know that too.
Sounds clinical but it has saved me twice. Once from a man who wanted to "build something together." We never got to what we were building or what it paid.
Architecture. Of course. Same disease, different building. And you're right that the crooked ones at least announce themselves on paper. It's the ones who never even get to money who do the real damage, because they make you feel cheap for asking.
The plain-money test is a good one. If they can't sit there and say "this will probably sell between X and Y, here's my cut and here's what happens if it doesn't" then they don't have a plan, they have a mood. And moods don't pay rent.