I am a UK-based self-employed Art Technician, who travels around my local region to different galleries and museums to install art exhibitions.
Sometimes I handle famous and expensive artworks or priceless artifacts, but most of the time it's probably artworks you've not heard of. This includes 2D work like paintings, 3D work like sculptures, video projections, screens, sound systems, computers, and room-filling installations. Sometimes we work directly with living artists to help produce their work.
Happy to talk about technical stuff i.e. how artworks are transported, packed, fixed to the wall, what sort of fittings are used, how an exhibition is spaced out, hung, arranged etc; or to talk about working in galleries, or any questions from artists about how to prepare works for exhibition etc
I'm also a practicing artist, and historically both a filmmaker and gallery curator - so happy to answer things relating to that sort of thing too.
Because it's a pretty niche job I may have to keep some details vague for privacy etc.
I'm doing a public talk fairly soon on "what I do", and I need to know what sort of things people are potentially interested in, so I can focus more on those in the talk - so any relevant questions would be really helpful to me, thank you.
Do they really sell anything?
Like a $600 photo or a $12,000 aluminum and clay figure?
I am getting into gum dichromate. Not into it, I mean using it to make art. Well not dichromate, Chiba ferric gum.
I mostly work at publicly funded galleries, where people go and visit a gallery or art space to see an exhibition, as a visitor attraction. They possibly pay an entry fee on the door, or it's just free entry (and costs are covered by public funding). Generally speaking, the work is very rarely for sale.
Commercial "galleries", which are perhaps more like "art shops" are a different thing - and there are sometimes spaces which are sort of halfway between the two.
However, there are sometimes open exhibitions, where a gallery puts on a show of several hundred artworks by local artists etc, for the purpose of selling them. The gallery might take a 30% or something cut of the sale price. Sometimes the occasional show also has works for sale - and quite a lot may sell cheaper prints of the works on display.
Generally speaking, object and sale price is very location dependent. Near where I live, you'd probably struggle to sell an original painting for more than a few hundred £, but you could potentially sell the same thing for a few thousand £ in a wealthier area of the country (i.e. London).
Like anything, price is sort of determined by demand. All you need for a high price is for the work to go to auction, and for two wealthy people to both REALLY want it. Unfortunately, I've been unable to set up such a demand for my own artwork - hence installing other people's work to pay my bills :) I think I've made less than £10,000 over 20ish years from my own artwork - some nice extra money occasionally, but a long way from being able to survive off just doing that.
Things can also depend if you're selling to individual people, businesses, or to go into an art gallery's permanent collection. Unless you have an existing following or level of minor fame/success, your best bet for sales is perhaps to businesses. Think of a trendy office which is happy to spend thousands of £ on designer chairs and tables - they'll also happily spend thousands on an artwork too - they can write it off against tax, and they can potentially sell it later if it increases in value - the trick is to make them aware of you. If you're beginning to increase in "fame", regardless of how low a level, your work can increase in value - therefore you can get individuals who wish to buy things simply as an investment (or as part of money laundering).
Anyway, not really my area of speciality - but yeah, people definitely do buy photos and figures as you've described, just probably not everyday people on the street.
Also, interesting to hear about the gum dichromate/Chiba ferric gum - there's a sort of community darkroom near me which is looking into non-toxic and plant based photographic print methods, who'd probably be really interested in that (unless that's what they're already doing).
Very insightful, thanks! I have a day job engineering stuff. But I love art. I could have gone into art if I wasn't so into my ADD. If only one could pay the bills by artwork.
During the pandemic I was looking to make big-ish prints of the family and so I looked into various things like just buying a god damn printer, and that was $$. After some research I was convinced that carbon printing was "the shit" and I could impress my friends and family with awesome prints. So down I went into the rabbit hole. $10 here, $20 there....uhh! So cheap! I thought. I got gelatin and pigment, transparencies and ammonium dichromate....man look at the tiny vials of it that they sell at art stores! What's going on with that I thought. Everyone you find can't ship to Washington state for some reason. So I found a place of dubious origins that sold me a big 250g of dry ammonium dichromate. Meanwhile, waiting for it in the mail, I started reading up on the process watching videos and slowly learning of all the dangers of using dichromate. Finally, as I visited a local plater for work related stuff and hearing about such and such passed away from ammonium dichromate poisoning / cancer, I realized I was never going to open that bottle. Also how the heck do I get rid of it? Meanwhile, in msny/all of Bob Carnie's videos he doesn't gloves! WTF Bob! Others use tongs to handle it. The reason why you can't ship that to Washington state is became of all our fresh water fish. If you dump that in the water system you'll be killing fish for a long time. So I started looking at alternatives. There are three main alternatives SBQ (really ungly chemical name), DAS (also ugly chemical name) and FAC and other ferric compounds such as FAC or FAO, don't try anything else, nothing else works for non chemists. DAS is what people use to make logos on T-shirts and Hats. It's alright but you can't find it as a chemical that you yourself can use. SBQ is $$$$ and like DAS you can find the very expensive material online but both cause cancer in California, both are dangerous chemicals that you shouldn't touch.
Meanwhile ferric ammonium citrate is a vitamin used as iron supplement. So you can definetly touch it. FAO Ferric ammonium oxalate is not a vitamin but if you eat some you'll get diarrhea and the oxalate will damage your kidney. Neither of these will give you great results with cheap Knox gelatin. Not without dangerous UV light with short wavelength like 365nm or lower...which can slowly give you cataracts and make you blind. It so happens that your eyeballs are made of clear collagen just like egg whites and the thing you want is crosslinking polymerization. In egg whites you can cook them and they polymerize. In eyeballs you can cook them or just shine UV into them and they will turn white, that's a cataract.
So in terms of ferric, you must wear UV light protection and you should wear gloves. The best easiest, safest diy process is called "Mike Ware's NewCyanotype" he recommends adding dichromate as a preservative, don't. That gets you the most awesome blue images you could ever imagine. For color the gum dichromate alternatives that are safest are still in development. Some are using PVA and other synthetic gums. Habib Saidane on YouTube has some demonstrations of various versions of the Chiba process. Photrio and other art sites have various people talking about alternatives. Its close but not there yet. The experts are all using DAS or trying SBQ both in ready made emulsion which are also very safe but then they are no longer diy and are also expensive and somewhat hard to get.