You're Just Another Priceless Work of Art
Mood
Angry
My husband works at an Art Gallery part time, part of the agreement with the hours he sits is that he gets to hang his work there and have it be seen at openings and sell at 100% comission. Pretty sweet deal. It's a new gallery and the first opening came and went without a hitch. The artist that hung in the first room left (he actually sold several of his pieces and was now moving to a different gallery to get different exposure). So the guy that was in the back room expanded to the front room.
He just kept bringing in more and more work and without asking anybody just started hanging stuff EVERYWHERE. The back room was pretty bad already, he obviously had never hung before and his stuff was horribly spaced, he hung stuff in front of windows to block the sunlight, and hung pieces that were too big for walls so they stuck out on either side. His labels were all wrong and badly placed as well. Now there was stuff all over the front room, just leaning against the walls in the archways between rooms (um, fire hazard?) sitting on easels (sometimes completely crookedly, one was on a broken easel that couldn't stay level) in the middle of the room and hanging from the ceiling in the middle of what little walking space is left. The place looked nice and professional before and now it looks cheap and poorly run.
He then TOOK DOWN my husbands work to hang more stuff there, and hung all around a glass art sculpture that was off in a corner by itself, totally ruining the beauty of it's shadows and making it impossible to appreciate the work out of context of the surrounding paintings. The other painter from the front room took his work and left and the glass sculpture artist took most of his stuff and left.
And now, in this little art gallery there are 56 pieces of art work! More then there had been when there were five artists hanging. To get an idea of the kind of space you should have my husband hangs art shows for the local college, he has hung 20+ shows and is really good at what he does, he recently did an art show for the college that had about 50 pieces total hung in a space about four times as large as the art gallery's and it looked GOOD.
The thing with this artist is, not only does he hang every single thing he's ever painted without even asking anyone, but most of it is CRAP. The canvas is showing through where he sloppily didn't bother to cover, he works really diligently on patterns and layers until a certain point on the canvas and then just gives up and sloppily fills in the rest, and you can clearly see where he paints over mistakes. Some of his stuff is really good and if he had stuck with his good pieces it would be great, but instead all of it is there, and most of it is more the miss then the hit if you know what I mean.
He was learning what his style was going to be, he was experimenting and really unfocused, like he didn't know what he wanted to say with his work. You shouldn't be showing that until the end of your career if you are interested in doing one of those retrospective art openings. In his older stuff he painted hearts like a elementary school kid would paint, and stars similarly, and one piece that just looked like, "I have a bunch of left over paint and there isn't enough left to be worth keeping let's just throw it all on here" complete with paint that clearly wasn't mixed or aired properly. It looks like a canvas he literaly used to wipe his brushes on when he was done with other pieces.
An art showing is supposed to be about themed recent work with a message or a meaning or that convey an emotion, most other artists keep it concisive and clear, less is more, you only have a limited amount of time to say what you are trying to say and you can't use words to do it. (And, by the way, artists that do tick me off. I do not understand the purpose of painting words on your pieces. I got it the first time without having you spell it out for me, thanks. Or, if the word wasn't there and I wouldn't have gotten it without it then perhaps you should have gone for something different that conveys things better. My personal opinion. That kind of stuff in an art gallery looks kiddie.)
So, in the end, all this guy is doing is throwing everything he's ever painted out there, run out a bunch of other artists and was really just whoring himself out to get as much sold as possible, that's all he cared about, not about the art but about using the gallery like some sort of flea market. His prices were outrageous, several thousand for a piece, and he had gaudy ads in the window (think supermarket ads) and balloons everywhere trying to get people to come when it was time for the opening. He even had "certificates of authenticity" made for his pieces to ensure that this was really his authentic work painted by him. To understand the hubris of something like this, normally that's only done by artists that sell in the hundereds of thousands.
He sold two pieces at silent auction for $150 a piece. That's it. And, now it's nearly a week after the art opening, his stuff is still everywhere and my husband's stuff is still stowed in a closet. What about his employment agreement? My husband's talked to the gallery owner but she is just bewildered and a little nervous about the guy and doesn't want to confront him since he did everything for the last art opening (advertising, music, food) and she feels she owes him now. It's just so frustrating.
She's in talks to get more artists to come hang their work, but I have no idea how she is going to do that until she gets more space for that to happen in. And, I have no idea how she's going to be successful after she so royally fucked over all of her current artists. Word gets around you know. I keep telling my husband to quit, that there are other galleries looking for artists but he won't hear of it, yet. He's entirely too good intentioned sometimes.
Well, maybe not entirely, I brought him lunch yesterday at the gallery (he doesn't get a lunch break) and two guys came in that claimed they were "friends of the artist". They laughed at some of the pieces, made the ones suspended from the ceiling swing back and forth to "see if it would spin" and kept messing with the easels and the pieces in them including shoving the pieces back and forth on them without loosening the clamp in an attempt "to straighten them". Normally my husband would stomp all over that kind of behavior and have kicked them out but he just sat back and smiled.
Posted by Bitsy at 02:15 PM Comments
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