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The Skinny on Online Galleries

By Ilana Stanger, Guest Writer 

You want to sell your work online. Why not, a sale is a sale, right? But the world of online galleries can be complicated to steer. We talked with the owners of some of the web's most respected sites — Paintings Direct.com, Next Monet.com, Solid Expressions.com, and the Guild.com — and asked them what they would tell artists to look for before signing up for online representation. What follows is their advice, which, despite the fabled diversity of views on the internet, was surprisingly uniform.

Define Your Goals

Before you even approach a gallery you should decide what your goals are. Christine Bourron, president and founder of Paintings Direct, stressed that artists "need to be clear about their goals and why they want to go online." Noting that there can be "peer pressure" to have a website, she suggests several worthwhile reasons to go online. First, there is the opportunity to sell more art. Second, to have your work "out there" — to have your work seen and to receive feedback. Finally, there's a desire to be recognized, and sometimes a website can help do that. But, Christine warns, there is more than one way to go online, and you need to consider the options. 

Boris Bally, a Rhode Island artist whose work can be seen on his own site, on guild.com, and in several brick n' mortar galleries, is very, very grateful for the Internet's affects on his career. "The Internet," Bally confided, "is the best thing that has ever happened to me." Bally has two reasons to praise the net. First, though he works mostly alone, the web "gives the perception that I'm a much bigger company than I really am." Second, the internet has opened up his audience. Bally has gained "larger, different, more distant" buyers and fans, including an interview with a Korean magazine that found his work on the web.

While Bally might be a poster child for selling your work online, he warns that his experience may not be universal, especially because his art is particularly well-suited for the web. Bally's work — which includes a line of furniture made from recycled street signs--is striking and effective even on a computer screen. "It's difficult to see something subtle on line," Bally noted, "my stuff is so bold and graphic — it's not hard to imagine what it is."

However, if you specialize in pastel seascapes there's also no need to fear: in general, there is no one type of art that sells well online. I asked each of the galleries what kind of work sold best, only to find a surprising answer: everything. While people may still be shy about buying art online — art is, of course, a particularly visual experience — once the decision is made to buy, it doesn't seem to matter much what genre is for sale. Bourron admitted that from the beginning she felt curious to discover what would sell, only to find that not only do they regularly sell art in every category, they often find themselves selling the same person very different types of art. At Next Monet they agreed: "Abstract does well, but so do landscapes."

That said, if your work is extremely fine and subtle, or on the other end, if it is mixed media or otherwise very tactile, you might have trouble translating online. Still, the current consensus is that if it is art it may very well sell, and you never know until you try.

Research the Gallery

Cost is a big part of the online gallery business. First, there are the costs of your own works. Don't know how much you want to sell your pieces for? Decide. Quickly. As Boris Bally warns: "You need to have your business plan very in place. Know what your pieces cost. Have an inventory on hand." Remember: you just might sell a piece, so be prepared to process that order.

Then there are the more complicated costs: those of the gallery. The top online galleries do not charge artists to show their work. The lesser galleries do. While not paying almost always trumps paying, that might not be an option--many of these galleries are very difficult to show with, reviewing each artist submission with a team of art historians and curators. Is it worth it to pay to show your work? As Boris Renski, CEO and founder of Solid Expressions.com put it, "Analyze costs. A lot of sites are not oriented on sales but make money off charging artists. Specifically, they ask you to pay annual or even one-time membership fee of $300 or $500. They get money upfront, and there are no sales."

Now, it can be worth your while to pay a fee. Art Mecca is unjuried, so, for $125, you can sell your work on their site. While that lacks the prestige of juried sites, many buyers won't know the difference and it may still be cheaper than setting up your own site. Also, no online gallery is completely free; they take a commission on the work they sell, just like brick n' mortar galleries. Absolutely inquire about the commission rate, since they are not all the same: Solid Expressions takes 20%, whereas Guild takes 50%.

How should you decide whether an online galleries services are worth its fees, or commissions? Find out how good the site is at selling itself. Renski suggests that one of your first questions to a potential online gallery should be "How many paintings do you sell per week? How many artists do you represent?" In addition, find out what their advertising budget and plan are like. The galleries I spoke with proudly pointed to advertisements in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and on local morning TV shows. This is the sort of publicity that artists cannot garner for themselves. For instance, Bally's work has been featured in one-page Guild.com advertisements in The New York Times, above the words "Not available in a store near you." That advertising is worth thousands of dollars, and he received it for free. While only a handful of artists at even the top online galleries can expect such treatment, each time a gallery advertises itself it is advertising you, too.

Protect Your Copyright

One final thing to think about before posting your work online is whether this will compromise your image ownership. Bourron had an interesting perspective on this issue. Noting that this is "a question I hear very often," Bourron said that she "personally believe[s] artists are better protected once they go online, because they can prove they are the creator." Images can be copied from catalogs and scanned on the web, and stolen, but if you post your work with an online gallery it'll date the posting and enable any copied images to be traced more easily to the original source — which is yours. In addition, many sites ensure that images cannot be copied with a simple right-click motion. For more information on copyright and the web, see our legal advisor section.

Ready to submit your work to online galleries? One last piece of advice: don't get discouraged if you're not accepted--remember, these are very high-level websites. While you wait to hear, consider building your own site. Bally got started when he admired the website of a close friend and fellow artist. It turned out this friend's wife had built the site, and was looking to increase her portfolio. Bally traded his art for her services, and the rest is website history. Once again, the trick to the artist's life is to keep knocking on doors — and portals — until one lets you into the space you've been craving. Whether this is an online gallery or your own site, start sending out slides and soliciting web templates until you find the match that's right for you — and your art.

This article was originally created for TheArtBiz.com. It appears on NYFA Interactive courtesy of the Abigail Rebecca Cohen Library.