Exaggerated claims can cost an artist everything. Find out how stretching the truth can destroy trust with galleries before your art career even starts.
By Daniel Grant
I once seriously considered taking on a young artist who sent me material claiming that he’d shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and other major museums,” says Louis Newman, former director of New York’s David Findlay Jr Gallery. “When I called to ask more about these impressive credentials, he revealed that he actually never showed in the museums but at them,” meaning on the front steps of the esteemed institutions, where he would set up a display of his work for tourists, visitors, and other passersby. “Needless to say,” Newman adds, “the artist was out the door as far as we were concerned.”
What should we call the kind of statements that young artist made? A fib, puffery, white lie, misinformation, half-truth, fairy tale, or just outright lie? It probably doesn’t matter, as a prospective dealer lost confidence that he could ever trust the artist to be truthful. Perhaps the moral of this story is that you should always assume a worst-case scenario if you are ever caught not telling the absolute truth.
Sins of Omission
Certainly, there are a lot of things you might be reluctant to tell the truth about that don’t seem so terrible. For instance, one’s age. “I’ve had a few CVs [curricula vitae] cross my desk without a birth year or educational dates, although the exhibition history would suggest they’ve been around a few decades, so I imagine they were trying to disguise or at least not focus on their age,” says Manhattan gallery owner Edward Winkleman. A blatant misrepresentation of one’s age, however, might make him suspicious of what else isn’t quite the case.
It may be embarrassing for some artists to admit they’re older and just starting out, have not sold any work, don’t have academic degrees in studio art, or have no real exhibition history. But sins of omission are better than making things up or even feigning ignorance of the truth.
Winkleman notes that bothersome to him and other gallery owners “is an artist doing something that is a deal-breaker and then pleading they didn’t know it was against the gallery’s terms for representation or that what they did wasn’t so bad.” The most common example of this is an artist selling artwork out of his or her own studio without informing the dealer and pricing that art below what the gallery charges.
Read the full article in PleinAir Magazine (Nov/Dec 2024) here …
Editor’s Note: Join us for the 6th Annual Plein Air Live online art conference, featuring Kathleen Hudson, Kevin Macpherson, Kami Mendlik, and many more! The event takes place November 6-8, 2025, with an Essential Techniques Day on November 5. Learn more at PleinAirLive.com.
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