Twelve years with the same gallery, and I never asked about the split on the small works
I've shown with the same gallery in Berlin for twelve years. When we started, I signed their standard agreement without really reading the resale and secondary-market clauses. Stupid, I know. You think you're being gracious, above the business, and you're really just being careless with your own livelihood.
Last spring a collector who bought two big canvases from me in 2016 sold one at auction for nearly four times what he paid. Fine, that's his right, that's the market, whatever. But then I learned my contract gives the gallery a cut of that resale, a percentage that runs indefinitely. Not to me. To them. For a painting I made and they sold once, a decade ago.
I did the math on it. That one resale paid them more than my last three new commissions combined. And I sat there feeling petty for even noticing, because they were good to me when I was nobody. But nobody works for free, and I have a family.
I raised it with them, gently, at our last meeting. The director went a little quiet and then said we could "look at restructuring" for new works. New works. The two paintings already out there, nothing to be done.
I don't know what I'm asking here. Maybe just that someone who's been at this longer than me tell me whether this is normal, whether I'm the fool for not having read the fine print at 34, or whether everybody learns this exact lesson the same way and at the same cost.
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Twelve years and you never asked. I get it more than I want to admit. There's this thing where you're so grateful someone took a chance on you that you turn the business part into a favor you're doing them, and then one day it's twelve years later and the contract you barely read is running your life.
I read mine line by line for the first time last year, after I had a piece go through a second-hand sale and felt weird about it. Turns out the language about "all works" was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Legal people write these things so you feel like you're being difficult just for asking a normal question.
The part that gets me is you're not even mad about the money, you're mad you never gave yourself permission to look. That's the thing that actually costs you.
I hope you get something fair out of the renegotiation. And honestly, thank you for posting this. More artists need to hear that signing without asking isn't gracious, it's just fear wearing a nice shirt.
That gratitude thing is real. Small world then, I work in paper conservation, I've seen what "all works" language does to artists who signed young and never thought about it again. A framed piece on paper, sold privately, and suddenly there's a third party in the middle of something that should have been between you and the buyer.
I don't know that reading it line by line fixes much either. It tells you where you stand, but you're still twelve years in with a relationship to manage. Nobody wants to be the difficult one on the renewal after they've had your work on their wall for a decade.
Paper conservation, that puts you right in the middle of it. You must see the quiet version of this constantly, the private sales nobody ever hears about, no auction record, no trace. At least my situation surfaced somewhere I could see it. Most of it just stays in the dark.
And you're right that reading it line by line doesn't necessarily fix anything. It tells you where you stand, and then you have to decide whether standing there is worth it. Twelve years is a long time to start that conversation, but a longer time to keep not having it.
I keep coming back to the gratitude thing, because it's the part I don't trust about myself. There's a difference between being grateful and being grateful enough to stay quiet. I'm still trying to find where that line actually sits.
That's exactly it. The gratitude part. You sign early on feeling like they're doing you the favor, and by the time you understand you're carrying your own weight in that relationship, the document already has you.
"All works" is a nasty little phrase. It sounds neutral, like it's just covering everything fairly, and it's actually a net thrown over your whole catalogue forever. Good that you read it line by line. I did finally go through mine properly this winter and found the resale clause runs on the estate too. My kids aren't artists, they'll have no reason to know any of this.
Did you renegotiate, or are you still sitting on what you found?