Art opportunities your should avoid at all costs.
This is an opinion article by Stephan van Kuyk, by no means, it represents the ideas of Azucar MAG, and if one of your opportunities has been listed here and you think it’s wrongly mentioned, contact the writer at stephan@vankuyk.art
As an emerging artist, you might find yourself constantly searching for opportunities to grow your career. While there sure is a great number of valuable opportunities around, it’s also quite common to come across with opportunities that are clearly pay-to-play. Also known as vanity exhibitions, they basically ask the artists to pay an upfront cost for the opportunity to exhibit their art in the gallery or exhibition.
It’s important to note that not every paid opportunity is a scam, but some are. Paying to exhibit your work in a vanity gallery is not a good career move and will almost never generate sales since the gallery already made money thru the ‘entry-fee’ it’s highly unlikely that they have any motivation to further promote or sell your work.
With these issues in mind, we prepared a list of opportunities that we believe are not appropriate for artists.
If you believe that you are stuck in your art career an might need guidance, maybe we can help.
Write to management@azucarmag.com
Have you encountered an opportunity that is not on this list? Let me know! stephan@vankuyk.art
Exhibition & Gallery opportunities
Parcus Gallery — Berlin
This gallery claims to be an exciting and growing gallery that is developing their ‘cast of super-star artists’. All nice and good until you read that they are charging artists a whopping € 1,000 for the ‘honor’ of being part of the gallery roster.
I understand that starting a gallery is no easy task and required an initial investment, but by no means that should come from the artists side. Opportunities like these pray on unexperienced artists that believe that paying the submittion fee is a required step towards achieving their big-break in the artworld.
Avoid Parcus at all costs.
Bellow is a copy of their agreement, copied and pasted including gramatical errors.
Parcus Gallery intends to be an important part of the Curriculum of our artists, optimizing and enriching their names as brands on the Art Market.
For our customers and investors, Parcus Gallery stands for Beautiful Art and Safe Investment advice.
Would you like to evaluate the opportunity to be part of our Gallery?
The of relationship with artists in the Gallery consists not to have one or two exhibitions, but provinding you with the services of the Gallery on an “annual” long-term basis, thus giving opportunity for a stable, confident and productive relationship between the artist, the gallery and the clients.
Basic services are:
• Constant exhibition of your artworks at the Gallery and special presentations to buyers and collectors
• Your own page on our website
• Your own page in our Online Store
• Also, eventual exhibition of your works of art in special events and art fairs
The cost for you to be represented by the Gallery is € 1,000 per year to cover basic expenses and is initially paid at the signing of the contract.
The sales commission is always 50%. We will evaluate together with you the values by which your works of art will be offered in the Market through our Gallery using criteria and strategies to correctly adjust the prices.
Other possible costs that you may have are the shipping costs of your works of art to Berlin and customs duties (if any). Aside from that, no hidden costs.
You will always keep a minimum of 3 works of art (up to 7… depending on the sizes) and they will be shown alternating continuously in the gallery, as well as in your page at the Gallery’s website and the Gallery’s online store too. If the opportunity arises, they will be displayed at art fairs, events and exhibitions
If you think this is an interesting proposal for you, I will send you a draft of the contract for you to check all the details.
