The final exhibition that I will be doing as part of the fellowship project will take place at Hordaland kunstsenter (HKS) November 3-12. Last Friday I met with Mari and Petra to discuss various practical matters and sign the contract for the exhibiton. This is the second time I have been signing such a contract. The exhibitions I have been involved with have generally been organized in a mostly informal way and as I am often collaborating with other artists it has not always been me dealing with this kind of practical matters.
The contract brought up one issue that I have not been aware of or considered before.
If the art work should be sold the income will be shared between the gallery and the artist. A 30/70 percent split seems usual here in Norway. As I am working on sound installations I have considered this unlikely to happen so I am generaly not specifying a price for the work upfront. So far so good.
It is common for the gallery to insure the work for the duration of the exhibition. When estimating the value of the work I have mainly calculated the value of the technical equipment in order to ensure that I would be able to replace it in case of theft or damage. My works are to a large degree data-driven and as long as I have proper backup of the software used including Max patches and media files I haven’t considered the art work stolen/lost/destroyed as long as the technical equipment can be replaced. Most likely o-one would have a clue about how to run it anyway and I would be surprised if it was passed on to some collector instead of the equipment being scattered and sold in support of the loccal drug dealers.
But according to the the contract with HKS the 30/70 share also holds valid for the insurance return if the art work is lost/damaged/stolen. So in order to ensure that I will be able to replace all of the technical equipment I will have to calculate the value of the equipment and add the “profit” for the gallery on top of that. That is well worth remembering for the future.
