![]() ![]() Your customer isn’t the person who bought your art. Your actual customer is the gallery, or the marketplace, or the publisher who just paid you for your service. Let ’s call it what it is: the money you received is technically just a contractor payment. Whereas all you got was money (after a very large percentage was already skimmed off the top). They now have the key ingredients required to build a successful business - money and customers. So they got some of the money, and they got the entire customer - both of which would not have been possible if not for your artwork. Or, you should receive fair compensation for it! In a fair system, you would have the same right to receive customer information. If you don’t have customers, you don’t actually have a business.Īcquiring customers is by far the most difficult and expensive part of growing a business. The customer is far more valuable over the long-term than the profit from one sale. What you are missing is that they not only took a high percentage of your sale, but they also took the customer. It feels good, right? We don't blame you, but here's the thing: It is so easy for artists to fall for the scam and get excited when they receive a payment from one of these middle-men for a sale that was made. The artist is left struggling, which leads them to become even more dependent on this layer of businesses, and the cycle repeats itself. Every bit of juice has been squeezed out of the grapefruit. Unfortunately, after all this value has been extracted, there is little left that the artist can use to build a successful business of their own. The end result is that their businesses become wealthy, powerful and successful. They extract value from the artist’s work by taking high percentages of sales, owning the customers, and using the artist’s name and talent as the primary way to grow their own businesses. This is evidenced by the fact that many of these companies sell tens of millions, and some hundreds of millions of dollars of art per year.įor one, they created a layer of businesses on top of the artist, all designed to capitalize on the artists work as much as possible. Over the years, it has been the non-artist-owned art galleries, the art publishers, and more recently the print-on-demand online art marketplaces ( like Etsy), who have been raking in the cash and playing the situation to their advantage. It's a capitalist reality of almost every industry, but, the truth is, when it comes to art it seems to be more lopsided than any other. When you have a multi-billion dollar industry, with a product that is this lucrative, inevitably people are going to come in and take advantage of the situation. ![]()
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