Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling — or any other activity related to — contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here: http://bit.ly/132VchD. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is co-sponsored by Daily Serving.
We recently sold a piece at an art fair, a photograph, the sale being the second of this particular edition. Because it was the second edition, we needed to have it produced from scratch, printed/mounted/framed. All the production was paid for by us as a courtesy. After informing the collector it would take a couple of weeks, we were recently bombarded with complaints from said collector that we were taking him for a ride and that he wanted a refund, because of how long it was taking to get the piece made professionally. Collector then went on a witch hunt, in which he called Amex to report us, tweeted that people should “beware” about our gallery, stormed into our gallery to scream at us, as well as abuse us in emails. We eventually decided to return the money, even though there is a clear ALL SALES FINAL disclosure on all our sale documents, just to get rid of the negative distraction.
I guess my question here is, how do we avoid this in the future? We are a small gallery, and these fairs are more than we can afford, but we have to participate to try and sell the work. Any words of advice for our fledgling initiative?
Allow me to rephrase your question: We run a small gallery. Recently, a would-be collector went bananas and things ended badly. How do we avoid dealing with a person like this in the future? And here’s the short answer: if I knew how to keep clear of crazy people, I’d be a rich woman. But since the art world is filled with lunatics* — both loveable and malevolent — and complete avoidance probably isn’t an option unless you move to a hermit’s shack, let’s talk about the things you might do to circumvent a situation like this in your life to come.
John Baldessari, Man with Blue Shape, 1991.
At the risk of seeming unsympathetic, I’m going to remind you that sometimes crazy takes two. Take a moment to assess the situation honestly. Ask yourself: Did this man walk away with all the information he needed? In my experience, one of the main reasons that a person flies off the handle is that he has one set of expectations based on assumptions, and his associate has another set of expectations based on different assumptions. And this is the key part: their expectations may overlap — leading everyone to believe that they are on the same page — but the assumptions underlying those expectations are inconsistent, and sometimes that gets everyone into trouble. So I wonder: how effectively did you convey information to this man about his wait time? Did you casually mention that it would be “a couple of weeks” before he received his print? Or did you mutually agree on a delivery date, put it in writing, and then communicate any changes? If you say “a couple of weeks” as a loose estimate, and he hears “exactly two weeks,” you can see that this is where the problem is going to start.
