Why ought to the creator of the art work solely get 50%? (edit Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)
August is when the capitalist elements of the artwork world fall asleep.
This summer season’s pause by the Artwork Sellers Affiliation of America’s Artwork Present (ADAA) makes that quiet really feel even heavier. The honest has lengthy been a business anchor for blue-chip galleries, but in addition a serious fundraising engine for the Henry Avenue Settlement, a 130-year-old group nonprofit. When an occasion like that stalls, it’s not simply sellers who really feel it — artists, nonprofits, and the communities they serve all soak up the shock.
Sellers vanish to the Hamptons, collectors retreat upstate, and lots of galleries shut their doorways or function on “by appointment” mode. For many years, The Artwork Present has been one in all New York’s marquee artwork occasions, elevating over $38 million for Henry Avenue Settlement whereas giving collectors a concentrated, high-caliber view of ADAA member galleries. Its absence this 12 months doesn’t simply go away a niche within the fall calendar — it alerts deeper tremors within the honest economic system and suggests the enterprise mannequin it rests on is below pressure.
In the meantime, artists — those on the middle of this complete machine — don’t get to vanish. There’s no out-of-office reply to your studio follow. The work continues, even when the system that income from it has taken a trip. bell hooks as soon as wrote that “cultural work is a site of resistance,” a reminder that what artists do is rarely passive, by no means peripheral. But the artwork market is constructed on convincing us that we’re interchangeable, as if the work might exist with out the palms that made it.
In most business gallery agreements, gross sales are break up evenly: 50% to the artist, 50% to the gallery. This fee construction is handled as a regular throughout the trade, whatever the gallery’s dimension, assets, or the particular labor they contribute. The unique rationale was that galleries would shoulder the numerous prices — lease, staffing, manufacturing, delivery, insurance coverage — whereas additionally constructing markets, cultivating collectors, and securing institutional alternatives for the artist. In concept, this break up displays an equal partnership. In follow, the stability of labor and funding varies significantly, opening up questions on when, and for whom, 50-50 is actually honest.
The 2024 version of the Artwork Sellers Affiliation of America’s Artwork Present in Manhattan (picture Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)
To be clear: not all galleries are created equal. A mega-gallery with a worldwide PR machine and museum board entry operates in a distinct universe from a mid-tier area making an attempt to maintain the lights on, or an artist-run gallery sustained by volunteer labor and goodwill. Some are nonprofits balancing mission-driven programming with the realities of fundraising. Every faces its pressures — rising rents, skyrocketing artwork honest charges, shrinking collector bases — and a few really do earn their 50% by cultivating markets, advocating for artists, and constructing institutional connections. Others rely virtually solely on the networks and labor that artists themselves construct. The break up itself isn’t the issue — it’s how inconsistently it displays the truth of those relationships.
Even main gamers are struggling to maintain the lights on. This summer season noticed the closure of Kasmin and Clearing — each thought of vital forces within the New York and worldwide scenes. They’re hardly alone; closures have been accelerating for years. If established galleries with international reputations can’t maintain their fashions, what does that say in regards to the sustainability of the fastened 50% break up they — and so many others — nonetheless depend on?
August, then, seems like the proper second to speak amongst ourselves — to ask the questions we frequently swallow. Why is 50/50 nonetheless handled as a gold normal, even when the labor behind it’s so uneven? Why will we settle for this math with out questioning the gallery’s precise contribution?
The Castelli Phantasm
The 50/50 mannequin that many artists nonetheless encounter at this time traces again to the golden age of the dealer-kingmaker, none extra iconic than Leo Castelli. He found, funded, and fiercely championed a technology of White male artists — Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein — who turned synonymous with postwar American artwork. He coated manufacturing prices, organized skilled images, launched work to influential collectors, and constructed relationships with main museums. In some ways, Castelli outlined the fantasy of what a gallery might be: a patron, a accomplice, a portal.
However Castelli’s mannequin was additionally constructed on immense privilege — financial, cultural, and geopolitical. He benefited from Chilly Struggle cultural diplomacy that positioned New York as the brand new middle of the artwork world, and his roster was drawn primarily from artists already legible to establishments and critics. He didn’t should construct belief with museums that had traditionally excluded his group. He didn’t want to elucidate abstraction or justify its price. He operated inside a system designed to middle his artists, and he leveraged that place to codify a mannequin of “support” that got here with each energy and management.
The Castelli gallery was a gateway to canonization, but it surely was additionally a gatekeeper. And the 50% he took was not only for providers rendered — it was for entry, visibility, and legacy.
What JAM Knew
Simply Above Midtown (JAM), based in 1974 by Linda Goode Bryant, wasn’t making an attempt to duplicate Castelli’s empire. It wasn’t even making an attempt to appropriate it. JAM was one thing else solely — a refusal of the techniques that made Castelli’s mannequin each potential and exclusionary.
Goode Bryant constructed JAM to serve artists who have been by no means meant to be a part of the business artwork dialog: Black artists, artists of coloration, girls, and experimental makers working exterior the formalist guidelines of the market. Howardena Pindell, Senga Nengudi, David Hammons, Lorraine O’Grady — these have been artists for whom market entry was not a given, and whose practices usually resisted commodification altogether. JAM started as a business gallery, however its core values weren’t revenue or status — they have been group, experimentation, and survival.
When the business mannequin proved too constraining, Bryant made a decisive shift: in 1976, she transformed JAM right into a nonprofit. The transfer wasn’t about turning into extra institutional; it was about securing the grants and philanthropic help wanted to maintain the doorways open with out bowing to market dictates. In Bryant’s palms, the nonprofit construction turned a software for independence — a technique to maintain an area that prioritized artists’ wants over gross sales, and to maintain programming untethered from the logic of 50-50 fee splits.
Linda Goode Bryant on the opening reception for Simply Above Midtown: Altering Areas on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork on October 03, 2022, in New York Metropolis (picture by Eugene Gologursky/Getty Photos for the Museum of Fashionable Artwork)
In distinction to Castelli’s polished machine, JAM operated as a porous, collaborative area that defied market logic. And when Simply Above Midtown: Altering Areas opened at MoMA in 2022–23 — curated by Thomas J. Lax — it didn’t simply revisit JAM’s legacy, it recontextualized the sorts of labor that had lengthy gone unrecognized: curating, caregiving, archiving, improvising. The present reframed what it means to carry area for artists, not as commodities however as cultural brokers.
As bell hooks wrote, “the margin is a site of radical possibility.” JAM didn’t simply exist inside that margin — it animated it. And it reminds us that there are different methods to construction relationships between artists and galleries — ways in which reject the belief that fifty% is a pure regulation.
What Does 50% Purchase?
Suppose Castelli’s mannequin was constructed on elite entry and JAM’s on radical group. In that case, most up to date galleries fall someplace in between — doing what they will with the assets they’ve, whereas nonetheless clinging to the identical monetary logic.
This isn’t about drawing exhausting strains between “good” and “bad” galleries. It’s about asking what that fifty% truly buys. And a part of the explanation we don’t ask is as a result of we’ve been taught to not — as a result of speaking brazenly about cash, contracts, and gross sales seems like a breach of etiquette. We’re instructed it’s unprofessional, or that it might price us alternatives. Silence is a part of the design.
Some galleries completely earn their reduce. They domesticate collectors from scratch, place work in vital collections, battle for institutional alternatives, and advocate behind closed doorways in ways in which profit artists for years. Others take a hands-off method, counting on the artist’s labor to deal with documentation, generate press, produce the work, and even drive gross sales.
So possibly the higher query is: How have you learnt when a gallery is actually exhibiting up for you?
Listed here are a number of questions I’ve began utilizing — not as gotchas, however as a type of diagnostic framework for worth:
Who pays for manufacturing, packing, and delivery?
Are they actively introducing your work to new collectors, curators, and press — or leaning in your current community?
Do they supply clear, common communication about gross sales, pricing, and collector relationships?
Are they serving to contextualize your work (press releases, PDFs, conversations with establishments), or asking you to ship over a number of bullet factors?
When your work sells, are you able to level to something they did that made that sale potential — or was it already in movement earlier than they received concerned?
Not each gallery has to supply each useful resource. However when artists are doing the heavy lifting — producing, selling, connecting, delivery, and following up — it’s honest to ask whether or not the fee mannequin remains to be serving us, or whether or not we’re simply upholding a construction as a result of we’re scared to query it.
Set up view of Simply Above Midtown: Altering Areas on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork (picture by Emile Askey, courtesy MoMA)
The Limits of Galleries
Right here’s the extra difficult fact: many galleries at this time aren’t outfitted to supply the extent of advocacy, infrastructure, or technique that Castelli supplied — or that JAM offered in its personal radical means. A gallery’s skill to promote a number of work doesn’t imply it may possibly construct a market, craft a story, or place work in establishments. Some are simply using the momentum artists create on their very own.
That doesn’t imply all galleries are exploitative — there are exceptions, particularly amongst small, community-driven areas which can be sincere about their limitations. And in some circumstances, scaling again what a gallery guarantees might result in extra equitable preparations, like sliding-scale commissions, co-op fashions, or contracts that revisit phrases after a set interval. The purpose isn’t to punish galleries for not having assets, it’s to construct agreements that replicate actuality.
A Totally different Sort of Summer season Faculty
The ADAA cancellation feels symbolic: a pause not only for one honest, however for a gallery system that’s struggling to carry its form. Gala’s have lengthy been used to justify commissions — “we’re investing in your exposure” — but when these buildings are crumbling, what precisely are artists paying for?
Expertise has shifted the stability of energy. We will promote ourselves, archive our work, join with collectors, and construct audiences with out the gallery intermediary. That’s empowering, but it surely additionally exposes how a lot of the 50% break up is predicated on delusion fairly than precise labor.
Artists are the middle of this ecosystem, but the market thrives on convincing us we’re interchangeable, as if the work might exist with out the labor and imaginative and prescient that introduced it into being. That’s why this dialog issues. It’s not about dismantling galleries, it’s about clarifying the phrases, so the relationships we enter into are sustainable for either side.
The cracks are exhibiting — not simply in {our relationships} with galleries, however within the galleries themselves, and within the cultural infrastructure they’re tethered to. The ADAA’s pause, the closures of Kasmin and Clearing, the shrinking map of alternatives — all of those are reminders that none of us are insulated. Artists, sellers, nonprofits, and communities are certain collectively on this ecosystem. The distinction is that artists have at all times been instructed they’re replaceable, whereas everybody else will get to be indispensable.
José Esteban Muñoz wrote that queerness is “a horizon we’re always reaching for.” The identical might be stated for fairness within the artwork world: it might not be totally right here but, however imagining it is step one towards constructing it. What if we thought in regards to the gallery break up not as a set quantity, however as a dwelling settlement that displays what either side are bringing to the desk? What if 50/50 wasn’t a convention to uphold, however a query to reply, collectively?
August is likely to be quiet, however that silence is a gap. Let’s use it to speak, to check notes, to ask for extra. Let’s make certain the maths is mathing for everybody, in order that after we do go 50-50, it’s as a result of we’re exhibiting up 100-100.
