the show that paid better than the gallery did
alright here's one that's been rattling round my head. I did a group show maybe three years back, decent gallery, nice space, did the whole song and dance. Sold three prints. Got my cut six months later after chasing it twice. Grand, that's the game, I know.
but the same summer I did a one-night thing in a mate's pub in Salthill. Hung stuff on the wall with picture wire and blu-tack. Sold five prints off a stack on the bar and took cash in a jar. Made four times what the gallery paid me and had a feed of pints out of it.
I'm not knocking galleries, I've had great ones. But I'm wondering, have ye ever done something scrappy and unpolished that outsold the proper exhibition? Like a studio open day, a market stall, a pop-up in someone's living room. What worked? What felt mad but actually paid?
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Yeah, this hits. I've only ever sold through instagram DMs and one small cafe that let me put stuff up, so I can't speak to the gallery side. But the pub thing, there's something about somebody pulling cash out of their pocket because they actually want it right then, not because it's in a white room and they feel like they should.
I wonder if part of it is just... the gap. Gallery people are buying the context half the time. Pub people are buying because they looked at it and felt something. Not that one's better art, but the exchange is more human maybe. And the instant pint definitely helps.
Yeah the cash-out-of-pocket thing is real. I've had both, the gallery route where you're waiting and waiting, and the table at a street fair where somebody hands you notes and walks away holding your work like it's theirs now. No middle, no waiting. There's something honest about it.
And you're right about the context thing too. White room sets a mood, but sometimes that mood is doing the selling, not the work. Pub wall or cafe corner, nobody's pretending, they just like it or they don't.
That's the whole thing, isn't it. Somebody pulls out a crumpled twenty and hands it to you and you hand them the print and that's the whole transaction done, no email chain, no invoice, no "we'll be in touch." There's a purity to it.
And yeah the white room, I've stood in enough of them looking at my own work thinking sure I don't even know am I looking at it or am I looking at the wall it's on. The pub thing, the cafe thing, the market stall, there's no pretending. They either stop and point or they walk past. You know where you stand.
Ah you've nailed it there, that's exactly it. The white room thing, there's people walking round those spaces and they're buying the idea of being somebody who buys art, not the thing itself. And fair play to them, sure we're all at something, but it's a different transaction entirely.
The cafe crowd and the pub crowd, they're not wondering if it'll go with the sofa. They're looking at it and going "I want that one" and that's the whole conversation done. I've had people in the pub hand me a twenty and say "that's for the heron, I'll be back for it after my pint" and you know they'll remember where they got it and when, which is more than you can say for half the stuff that goes through a gallery invoice.
And the instant pint, look, I'm not saying it's the highest artistic validation going, but there's something in handing over a print and getting a pint back before the ink's even dry that feels like the old way of doing things. Barter, like. Keeps you honest.