Art Publishing

Publish: to put a work into a material form for the marketplace. If a writer composes a poem and a newspaper prints it, that's publication. If the writer pens a novel and a business prints it, binds it, distributes copies to individual book stores, that's publication. If an artist paints a painting and a gallery hangs it on a wall where the public can see and buy it, that's publication of a sort. If an artist conceives of a graphic, a work on paper, say an etching, then prints a proof, then shows the etching to a customer who buys it, the artist is acting as publisher: because the etching is potentially a multiple original. When Rembrandt pulled an etching and signed it and sold it, he'd estimate how many good prints he could get before the etched grooves degenerated, the image lost clarity: say 7. So: he'd sign the etching and number it 1/7.

Modern printing allows plates to be made that will bear up under many impressions. So the art business, artists and galleries and fine art publishers, arbitrarily limit the number of prints. Editions of 10 or fewer used to be common. Then editions of say 30 became common. Then the Twentieth Century made editions of 250, 300, 500 common.

The Twentieth Century then also introduced the practice of prodding artists to sign reproduction of already famous images and call them "originals": Norman Rockwell, LeRoy Neiman, for example. The term original was degenerating: rapidly. I doubt it will ever recover.

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This subject deserves a better treatment than I just sketched. I'll keep at it: make a good one eventually.

Fine Art publishing is an unusual business. The terms can be very confusing. People in the business can be confused by their own terminology. Don't expect help from lawyers: they don't understand it either. Defining things never helped much in my case: the people I was trying to communicate with, Gail and Murray Bruce, for example, my supposed partners in Gail Bruce imagery, would follow what I said for a moment, then revert to whatever understanding suited their own agenda (of raking profits and the hell with meaning, promises, ethics).

Let me come at it via examples. I, my company, PK Fine Arts, Ltd., published GH Rothe's mezzotint Interlude.

Gatja had worked the image up on the plate and proofed it, showed it to me. I liked it, said I wanted to publish the whole edition: meaning, I was promising her to pay her for one hundred singed and numbered mezzotint prints, plus a few additional artist proofs. She, as artist, could retain a few additional artist proofs for her own use: selling them, giving them as presents ... Artists are supposed to make no more than 10% of the edition size as artists proofs, but that's a limit much abused in practice.

I wanted to bring Interlude out at around $75 or $80, then stabilize the retail price at $100, then raise the price once I'd sold more than fifty of them. I don't remember what I promised to pay her: probably $10 each, with it understood that I could pay her over time so long as she got a fair chunk soon: a few hundred at least.

Dance of Tom I wound up paying her $20 each for the bulk of the edition. At first I'd paid her 25% of retail, when I could, after the customer's check had cleared (and after I'd paid Gail Bruce more than I owed her so she could deceive her husband about our "success"). In the case of that small mezzotint, Gatja had offered it to publishers, been rejected, then consigned parts of the edition (250 numbered prints plus 25 or so artist proofs) to various publishers: Lublin, Nabis ... After years she was still sitting with the bulk of them. As little cash as she was getting from me, it was still more than she'd ever gotten from anybody else (though Lublin had once given her a $1,000 check: for which they got tons of stuff).