02/14/2008 11:14:40

Hi Robin,

Boy have you motivated me to jump on the soapbox about this very madding topic.

If a gallery does not pay for the framing, they must pay you for it when it sells with the art…period. Too many artists give away the framing to get the sale which makes no sense to me. You are spending your hard earned money on quality framing to display the work as attractively as possible, thus helping the gallery get the sale. If they sell the work with the frame, you should get the full price you paid for the frame plus half the profit. You can of course discount the frame if it was done at true wholesale prices and is listed at retail at the point of sale. The sales consultant can offer discount to the frame to advance the sale but never the price of the piece. You must authorize the discount as the person who paid for the frame. I ask my galleries where they frame the art wholesale and start a relationship with their framer. If I pay for the wholesale price of the framing, I get the wholesale price and half the retail price for the frame; it’s only fair. It’s found money for the gallery too.

On the other hand if the gallery demands that the art must be reframed to suit their décor, they get to pay for it. Obviously under these circumstances they would get full price for the frame. If they demand that you bare the cost of reframing and they expect to reap the whole profit, a renegotiation is in order.

It is interesting to me how often the galleries who demand the most also sell the least work. If they are selling a lot of your work, both you and the gallery have a vested interest to keep everybody content.

Many times I’ve had the gallery reframe a piece to the collector’s taste and ended up with a spare frame to use on another painting. A lot of times one of my new paintings will fit the old frame. I have the gallery hold my old frames just for this reason.

Another thing artists also have a nasty habit of doing is paying retail for framing. We go to a retail framer that gives you a paltry 10% off (because you are an artist) an already inflated retail priced frame. Now you have less than zero room to negotiate the cost of the frame so what do we do, we discount the art: crazy. Because of this arrangement, we often shoot ourselves in the foot again by choosing a less than ideal frame because it’s cheap. Would you put a cheap frame around a valuable painting? Of course not, but we do it all the time to our work.

The best advice I can offer would be to find one of the many wholesale framers either on-line or in your area. If you are reselling the frame you probably need to get your own resale permit and sales tax license or ID. This makes you a legitimate wholesale customer.

Sorry for the rant, I hope this helps.

Warm Wishes, David