This is genius. Thank you, Ohio State University Urban Arts Space for this cheap brillance.

Recently, a close friend purchased a large cool looking painting done on a sheet of cardboard. The cardboard was from an old box, and was pinned to the wall of the gallery. We both thought the work looked cool and the colors were right for where he wanted it in his home. The artist had intended the cardboard to reference the ephemeral nature of the content now rendered permanent by the mere act of depicting it. Yet they had assigned a decent price tag to the work, that made you want to make it last if you bought it.

This creates a conundrum for me as a curator and should also for the artist and  the buyer.

How do you preserve something that is not meant to last?
[Make it last long enough to finish the show run.] 

Should I warn a buyer and lose a sale?
[Depends on the buyer and how close rent is due to be paid.]

Why do you make something to sell for a home interior that is going to fall apart quickly?
[Chances are you did not think about that part of the life cycle.] 

Why do you want to buy something that is going to be a headache?
[Enchanted by the cool factor, you think about where it's going to be and not how it's going to remain.] 

These are not things we want to think about or generally get caught considering, but would benefit from the discussion.

After my friend got home, his new large work of art painted on cardboard, he called me for help. First of all, he has plaster walls which pins do not go into easily. Second he wanted to protect the work from spills since only god knows what goes on in his apartment. Also did I mention the work was cut in a strange shape too.

He could clip it and use fishing line to hang it as the cheapest option. Then I got to thinking about how much I hate clips and they have the potential to damage the work prematurely. So the next thought was we need to mount it on a squared surface. He ended up having to buy a sheet of luan (thin smooth crappy plywood), a couple boards of 1/2″ x 2″ x 8″ pine, some nuts, bolts and plexi glass.

We cut the luan to a rectangle that fits the cardboard work. Then sanded it, primed it, sanded out the paint streaks and painted it again. In the event you don’t have access to luan, any piece that fits of old wood paneling can be used too. Just prime and paint the back. No one will no the difference after its on the wall. The luan backing still needed a frame.

There were two options, he could go with a traditional frame or a frameless look. He went for the frameless look since it required less effort and tools (and my table saw needed a new blade). This involved cutting a four boards to fit the exact size of the luan rectangle (I recommend 45 degree angled cuts straight cuts are fine and just need more sanding.) and wood gluing them to the back of the luan. Then we sanded the edges smooth and used some spackle to feel the gaps, sanded that and painted it again. Then I put two eyelets inside the upper 1/3 of the rear facing frame (so that it hangs flush to the wall), and put some hanging wire on it. After that we cut some scraps of wood and made pegs to glue to the luan. Then we glued the cardboard to the luan. I another option wold have been to make some fancy lucite holders for it that could be screwed of glued to the wood (but we are both cheap).

Then we were feeling fancy and went to bLowes and had them cut a piece of plexiglass to go over top. this is where stuff get’s tricky. I sandwiched the corners of the plexiglass with two scrap pieces of wood and used me c-clamps to hold it, Then I slowly drilled a hole in the corners. This kept the plexi from shattering. After that we used three nuts, and a nut cap per bolt to mount the glass above the work. Tightened everything just enough to hold it all in place and woolah done.

Moral of the story is if the artist wants to sale work on cardboard for a load of cash, the curator or the artist should also supply a means to properly display the work for a long time. My friend will never buy another work painted on cardboard. As a result of this adventure and he has a reservations about that artist now.

Do not be fooled by the allure of floating frames. Yes, they match everything and you do not have to deal with custom mats or finding a frame that is just the right size, but there is a darker side to them.  They break easily and the hardware (if you want to call it that) is total crap.  A bonus to using floating frames with a hanging rail system is the hardware being visible in the frame, so it can look like wires, bars, or straps are growing out of heads or whatever is sandwiched in the glass.  I had to hang two shows using nothing but floating frames that were 16 x 20 and held together with cheap aftermarket chrome car door trim.  Needless to say three fell off the wall and broke and one broke from only its weight while being lifted. The glass was impossibly thin and the actual image was attached to a thin clear sheet of plastic.  NEVER AGAIN…

I know you can find fancy wood trimmed floating frames, but they suck too. Once you hang the frame with a screw, nail, frame hanger or whatever you are going to be able to see it. Not to mention the wall color is the the mat for the works, impacting which colors are highlighted in the content.

Floating frames are only suitable for use in homes where the entire contents were purchased from Ikea by people who don’t care or just can’t figure it out…never in a gallery. (editors note: I use to have Ikea credit card; make your own assumptions.)

My close friend Ro can stretch a dime like no other. She spends $25-40 per reception and it looks like $300 when she is done.  Her presentation of wine is one of my personal favorites tricks.

She buys whatever box wine that’s on sale or jug that may cost less per ounce and collects them for receptions. We both agree, it’s tacky to just set a box of wine on a table, not to mention this encourages wine-abuse by the patrons.  Instead she has a collection of decanters.

Away from prying eyes she fills several decanters with wine and brings out only one or two on a glass tray. The nicer the decanter, the nicer people perceive the wine… this never fails.  Also she only fills the glasses as people request them, or at most has three pre-filled at any given time, thus prolonging the life of the wine five or six times over.

Pro Tips:
You can get a glass wine decanter at the Dollar Tree for $1, or you can rummage around thrift stores and yard sales and collect a couple cool antique ones for under $10.

Glass wine goblets are cool, but don’t invest in them unless you feel like cleaning them all and potentially dealing with the Health Dept. If you do buy them, they are the cheapest at IKEA.

If you are pals with someone who has access to a beer and distributor, coax them into buying the damaged boxes for you. The damaged ones can’t be sold and typically cost 20% of retail.

NEVER put a box of wine anywhere the public can see it. Receptions are not lame sorority parties, not to mention it cheapens the art.

The nicer the decanter, the nicer people think the wine is inside.

One of my biggest pet peeves is going into a gallery where either the exhibitor or the curator has decided to “show them how it’s done” in regard to pricing art. Thanks asshole, “I didn’t know ‘how it’s done’ before you showed me.” Even though the average annual living wage around these parts is about $26K, I’m glad the cheapest thing in your gallery is $3,000, to let everyone know how much ‘real-art’ cost.  These are the mindsets that make galleries last about as long as whiskey in my flask at a chamber of commerce meet-and-greet.

Story Time:
Several years ago, there was a very large, very pretty gallery that opened up across the street from my old apartment.  The couple that opened it, spent top dollar on renovating this old riverfront warehouse. Their business model seemed sound and familiar – live downstairs, rent half and use the rest for gallery. However I don’t think they anticipated the heating cost for a non-insulated 8,000 sq ft. building in Appalachian-rust-belt winters and they had some serious attitudes towards the natives.  The first three exhibits were of well known local artists, except the normal pricing was tripled. This couple being from somewhere in the east-coast megalopolis, had come to town to teach us all a lesson about value (they actually told me that too). Needless to say, they sold nothing. Furthermore they engendered short-term disdain by the locals towards their own community’s artists.  The couple’s savings dwindled, the gallery collapsed, and they eventually turned the building into condos that some incredible douches purchased at a fire-sale discount.

Outside of a major city, everyone knows it takes diversified income strategies to sustain a gallery, selling art works alone rarely pays all the bills.  Depending on infrequent sells of a few really expensive works is a bad plan too, unless you don’t need the money. If you can’t or wouldn’t pay the prices you are setting for the works, who else would.

This aside, here is a good way to determine your gallery’s pricing schedule for art.

Nitty Gritty:
Figure out the living wage in your area. The Census website is good for this and settling arguments with friends. (warning: This is going to feel like an IRS form) Subtract about 35% for taxes and maybe a few bills and divide that figure by 24, now take that figure and subtract 55% from it. Now feel depressed for a second or two. Not only do you now realize how poor everyone is… including yourself, but you also know how much money people have in their pockets to spend on stuff.

While you are on the census website, get an age and income breakdown for your area and see the ages/income of the people living close to your gallery. This will kill your urge to market to demographics that don’t exist. A lesson no one ever learned in my home town; which is why it has endless closing businesses and tax-boondoggles for 36-65 yr olds, even though median age of the town is 20.4 yr olds.

The proportions of the pricing of your artwork should mirror the proportions of the income brackets in your community.

If 30% of your community makes $45,000 a year
than $45,000*0.65= $29,250
(multiplying 0.65 is getting the figure to be minus 45% of it’s starting total),

$29,250/24=$1,218.75.
(24 represents the average number of pay periods in a year)

This is how how much money 30% of your community has floating around every pay check to spend on bills and frivolity (like children and art). Chances are out of the $1,218.75, they are probably only willing to part with 45% ($548.44) of it for a quality work of art, and that’s for something they really like. Math and money mixed together make a prescription for antidepressants. Use you best judgement to tweak this formula.

FYI: I made this all up for me, but it works.

Also consider things like who has families on your area and the cost of living. People with families living at home do not buy art, and if they do it’s not the expensive stuff. Children and convalescents eat money (sorry of this makes people angry). Also high rent and over-priced homes burn up cash too. This is where you tweak the 45%-fun-stuff/65%-living-life-bills split on the final paycheck, it may be much closer to 15%/85%. This ratio also get more skewed with lower income brackets.

After you spend a night of doing this and plying through three bottles or a box of wine, you should have a nice pie chart and table of costs to assign to art. Excel formula maker or a smart friend can help you with this too.

As always, pricing for art should never be arbitrary. Artists have working wages just like everyone else. As a curator it’s your duty to find marketable art that fits the income table for your area and allows the artists to get paid wages they deserve or are at least comparable to the average living wage in your community.

Sorry to make your head swim with numbers.

Over the past couple months, I’ve installed a couple groups shows that were filled with way too much stuff.  Since I did not make the show contract directly, I had little recourse and just had to make do with the space at hand. It’s pretty common for galleries to host group shows sponsored and assembled by non-arts groups. It’s also pretty common for curators to run screaming into the night when they are given 260 mixed items, half of which have no hanging wires or are probably held together with toothpicks and hot glue …and the hosting organization expects it all to fit nicely in your gallery that now feels akin to the backseat of Volkswagen Golf.

Everyone always jokes that it’s better to have too much then too little so you can ween the worst stuff, but what happens when you aren’t allowed to ween anything? Ultimately you get creative and make some poor judgment calls.

You must give the the sponsoring-group, gallery sq. footage requirements.

Do not let them trick you or side-argue that they are just going to make a frame size and quantity requirement to fix it. This is total bullshit.  No one can follow that stuff and it just makes people more angry.
Simple instructions like:
-black frames only
-hanging wire required
-white mats only
-no larger than 11 x 14
-2 pictures per person

These rules will inevitably yield 26 plastic-foam Wal-Mart frames, 6 spray-painted dumpster frames that are sadly more sturdy, 14 multi-colored pastel frames time warped from 1985 and a mess of hideous mats and unframed crap …and maybe some crayola on canvas-board w/o explanation.

Then when you decide to thin the flock of the weakest fowl …inevitably…some sap, that has problems you can’t even comprehend, shows up to the opening and has a nervous breakdown that their work isn’t on display, after the director of the sponsoring organization promised them it would be center stage, flanked by ground Xanax and champagne.

This can all be prevented with the littlest requirement. Calculate your wall space and potential floor space (subtracting the area needed for walking around things) and give that to the organizing group. Tell them- however, many ‘artists’ they plan to feature has be divided by this sq. footage figure. The more artists they have the less space per person’s work. Let them deal with the other specifics. You can give them typical requirements (like the things listed below), but be aware no grown adult is capable of following simple directions (particularly educators).

Pro Tip: I know the square footage of my gallery and have a pre-made comparison sheet that has sizes and measurements on it already.

For example if your gallery has 1000 sq. ft of display space

12 artists = 83 sq ft. per artist = everything has to fit the footprint of a mid-size car per artist
14 artists = 71 sq ft. per artist = everything has to fit on a king-size bed per artist
20 artists = 50 sq ft. per artist – everything has to fit on a twin bed and a half per artist
30 artists = 33 sq ft. per artist -everything has to fit on a sheet of plywood per artist
40 artists = 25 sq ft. per artist -everything has to fit on a four cushion couch per artist

Put this in Word and make a table; maybe draw some pictures on the sides for illustration.

A year ago, I had a frenetic grade-school art teacher bring me a 12 ft .wide by 15 ft. tall quilt to hang for the county schools annual art exhibit. Nevermind that I had 200+ other items to put somewhere in 2500 sq ft of space and her one item was taking up 180 sq ft. of a wall.  She wanted me to buy a 13 ft. length of 1 in. thick black iron pipe to hang it. I told her “Let me take care of it, just bring the quilt over as soon as possible.”, curator speaker for ‘No way in hell am I doing that, just leave me alone.’

Black iron pipe has no functional use in a gallery unless it’s carrying natural gas or part of a solid framework.  It’s extremely heavy, has rust, and is coated in oil. If that’s not bad enough, it’s expensive.  Wood is a little better, but it has splinters, may require, sanding and painting; also wood is surprisingly pricey. Lots of fiber artists love using closet-dowels and various other round sticks perfect for poking turds, but when they get too long they tend to bow. Enter stage left, electrical-metallic-tube (EMT) conduit.  It’s dirt cheap, galvanized, light, and smooth. Other pipes cost more and are either heavy, have reactive surfaces, or bow (or all of the above).

EMT Conduit can be found at Home Depot, Lowes, any electrical supplier and lots of pipe stores. Best of all it comes in 10 ft lengths and starts at $2.18. Another advantage is that all of it’s connectors require only a screwdriver (they have magic screws that use flat head, philips and square), no pipe wrench, solder, flux or torch needed.

Needless to say I was able to hang the 40 pound quilt for $6 in hardware using EMT conduit. Also I was able to recycle the conduit for use with an outdoor banner several months later. Since it’s a tube you can stretch rope through it super easy.

Pro Tip:

Couplings and other connectors to EMT pipes are kind of pricey, so I collect them from buildings being torn down or places being renovated (no joke). FYI- If you get hurt or arrested while collecting them, it’s your own fault.

Also hacksaws work great to cut the tubes, but a cutoff tool like a rotozip work better.

So you have an artist who insist on mounting about 10 millions tiny things on the gallery walls, and they just can’t process that your wall is something slightly harder than concrete.  Great… Just great… One options is to use about $600 in Command strips which may or may not work, also they never come off clean after a month (not w/o a hairdryer). Or you could make a temporary surface.

Meet my friend, Dow Styrofoam  2″ x 48″ x 96″ Insulated Sheathing. Buy it at Lowes, not Home Depot. You want the blue stuff, the green sheets at Home Depot have too much texture. The foam cuts just like drywall. Just score it with a utility knife and break it. The breaks will be awesomely clean. Make sure to peel the plastic film off it and then you can start priming. The downside to styrofoam is all the layers of paint it’s going to take. I think the last time I painted a panel it took about five layers before it looked even and the blue was completely covered.

Chances are if your walls not drywall and you have a brain, you have a hanging system of some nature. The best part about these panels is their feather-weight and ability to be easily hung.

I recommend chopping a wire hanger as shown. Use lineman pliers, they give you more leverage when chopping the hanger. Also angle when you cut the hanger so you get a sharp eye-stabbing point. Then fold the cut parts into a U shape as shown.

Styrofoam panels in actions.

1. Conference tables -I don’t care what you cover them with, they are still conference tables.

2. Thriftstore end-tables and side-board. Your gallery is not your Aunt Edna’s parlor room.

3. Cardboard boxes -not even with paper taped around them (I’ve seen this three times, no joke).

4. Those white-people-IKEA-square tables (LACK – the name says it all).

5. Scratched up old plastic store displays.

6. Old jewelry store cases with the glass on the top and side and some weird 1970s fake wood sides.

7. Anything that has shiny brass chrome-like details on it.

8. wooden crates

9. milk crates with fabric draped on them.

10. Things made from chip-board plywood (the stuff used by cheap contractors and landlords for subfloors).

If you are creating and maintaining an gallery in an old building, which may have only gotten electricity in the 1930s (like mine), then your electrical receptacles are like rare yellow diamonds of lunar moon dust.

Track light outlet adapters are my inanimate best friends when it comes to working around this problem.

This is a link to 1000bulbs.com where these things are okay-priced. http://bit.ly/e0rux4