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Gallery show five years back. They wanted exclusive rights to sell my work for the run of the show. I was younger and dumber so I said fine. They took the pieces at 60% of what they were going to price them at. So if they sold a piece for $10,000 I got $6,000 before expenses. That part I understood. What I didn't realize until later was they were pricing my work at 2.5x what I'd ever sold anything for before. So I'm thinking I'm getting 60% of a fair price. They were pricing it at whatever they thought they could get and I got 60% of that. One piece sold. A welded steel figure I spent three months on. They priced it at $14,000. I got $8,400 minus the crate and shipping which they billed back to me. I netted about $7,200 on a three-month piece. At the time I thought that was great. Now I think about the guy who paid $14,000 and wonder what he'd think if he knew I got half that. Still not sure what the right deal is. But I won't do 60/40 again without a say in the retail price.

Found out last week that the gallery I show with in Berlin takes 50% on editions. Not prints sold through them, editions. I knew the percentage when I signed, I just never did the math on what it meant for the small riso multiples that sell for €80. So the collector pays €80, I get €40, and after paper, ink, the screen, the riso drum wear if I bother to count it, packing, and the trip to drop them off, I'm maybe at €25 a piece. Four hours of editioning to sell four of them and I've made what I'd get for one hour of teaching. The stupid part is I keep pricing as if the gallery cut doesn't exist. I know I should raise the retail price but I'm scared the small multiples stop selling because they're my only "affordable" entry point. So instead I just quietly resent it every time I drop off a batch. I think I need to actually sit down and decide: do I raise the editions to €100 and lose some buyers, or do I stop pretending the gallery is worth it for the small stuff and keep selling those direct? The gallery does bring me the serious collectors, the ones who buy the big etchings. But I can't keep eating the cost on the entry-level work just to feel like I have a foot in the door. Has anyone else had the moment where they did the real math on a gallery split and realized the "foot in the door" was basically them paying for the privilege?

A museum shop in Vienna picked up a small edition of my screenprints for their retail. I was thrilled, museum shop, right, that feels like validation. They paid €150 per print, wholesale. I sold them 20. I did the math yesterday because I was avoiding something else. Each print takes me about four hours from exposure to final trim, not counting the drawing time before that, not counting the screens I burned and then rejected, not counting the test proofs. So €150 for roughly six hours of work per print if I'm being generous about what counts as labour. That's €25 an hour if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. I'm not saying the museum shop ripped me off. That's just the going rate, they were fine to deal with. But I sat there thinking: I have an MFA, I've been doing this fifteen years, and I'm making €25 an hour selling to an institution that will mark it up to €400 and call it affordable art. And I said yes because I was flattered they asked. I don't know what the right number is. I just know that the gap between what feels good for the ego and what's actually sustainable keeps getting wider and I keep choosing the ego.