BUSINESS SEMINAR : ARTISTS LEARN TO DEAL WITH OTHER SIDE OF COIN

In 1974, an art dealer visited artist John White at White’s Venice studio, bought three drawings and asked White to give him nearly three dozen more on consignment, saying he’d try to sell them through galleries in Chicago and Paris. Thinking the man reputable, White agreed. The dealer sold 20 of the works and never returned the remaining 16.

Occasionally, White hears that the man has sold some of the increasingly valuable pieces and uses others as collateral for bank loans. What can White do?

“Nothing,” he told about 100 art students and others who were at the Irvine Fine Arts Center attending a recent seminar on the Business of Art.

“Lawyers will not go across state lines or to other countries. . . . the artist is vulnerable,” said White, at 50 the oldest and most established artist among the four on the panel. A performance and installation artist who also does two-dimensional work, he has shown his works frequently around the country since the early 1970s.

His bitter anecdotes expressed the frustration and wariness he shared with the other artists about negotiating with dealers and gallery owners.

SuvanGeer, a conceptual artist from Irvine who also writes art reviews for newspapers and magazines, said: “It’s nice to think that you can go to a commercial space and say, ‘Show my work,’ but you can’t do that.”

“Do anything to get your work seen,” she urged. “Put it on postcards and mail them out.”

Still, she conceded, “I find that when I get shown, it’s either through somebody I know or somebody who knows somebody I know.”

But the two-hour session was also filled with nuggets of practical advice as to how artists can make the struggle for success a little less painful.

Noting that, as White put it, “you need a gallery to give you that sense of legitimacy,” the artists spent much of the night talking about how to get accepted by a gallery, what to expect from it and the need to resist pressures that commercial success might exert on artistic growth.

Kim Abeles, a conceptual artist based in Los Angeles with many gallery and museum shows to her credit, told aspiring artists in the audience to forget the quaint practice of visiting galleries with paintings in tow. Send slides and a business letter, she advised.

If a gallery shows interest, White said, draw up a contract specifying the respective obligations of the gallery owner and the artist. These days, White said, galleries want to keep up to 60% of the profits from a sale, although he said he refuses to give more than 40%. A contract should specify the artist’s responsibilities--helping to set up the show and attending the opening--and the gallery owner’s.

“A gallery should do a lot for you,” he said. “The gallery person has to sell the show.”

“They should be bringing collectors to your studio,” Abeles said.

Slides alone do not sell art to the people who run the art world, she said: “It’s not about slides. It’s about visits.”

She added that galleries should handle the clerical duties of contacting collectors, newspapers and handling all the aspects of selling the art. “But they really don’t,” she said. “I spend $2,000 in a year doing documentary work and postage. . . . It does get really burdensome.”

The artists spent a lot of time talking about the pressure that galleries put on artists to develop a body of work in a single, recognizable, saleable style. “If you don’t have a body of work, it’s hard to get taken seriously,” Geer said. “They want to see a thread of consistency.”

The artists told tales of friends who, after one style sold well, were urged to resist the impulse to develop toward another.

“I have had to refuse to do that,” Abeles said. “To me art is experimentation, and there is all this pressure now not to experiment too hard. They want it so people can walk into a show and say, ‘That’s a John White’ or ‘That’s a Kim Abeles.’ . . . Yyou are not supposed to be predictable. . . . Art’s really become a big business now. Nobody’s concerned about aesthetics now. Nobody’s concerned about the placement in art history--unless it can help with the investment.”

Answering questions, the artists compared the opportunities for new artists in New York to those in Los Angeles. White told the audience: “Go to New York, and you have 200 to 300 galleries to show in as an emerging artist. Nothing like that is happening in L.A.”

Someone asked how an artist beginning a career should set prices.

“Before I started, I was working in a brewery making $3.50 an hour, so that’s how I charged for my art,” White said.

Darrell Montague, a Newport Beach artist of sculptural and two-dimensional pieces, said he calculates prices according to the amount of time he works and the cost of his materials.

The quietest of the four artists, Montague said he had found a very satisfactory life style by maintaining full-time jobs as a technical artist while leading his creative life on the side. He said the steady employment enables him to develop at his own pace.

The last question came from a young woman who identified herself as a lawyer and asked whether White knew of law firms in Orange County that specialized in helping artists. “It doesn’t work,” he said, explaining that it was a specialty that didn’t earn lawyers much money.

“But there’s a lot of need for it,” he added, glumly, looking as if the memory of those 15 missing drawings had returned--and as if he was thinking of hiring the woman on the spot.