Pictures are painted in studios or usual living apartments, but they are sold where they will sell. In Kyiv this is usually on Andriyivsky uzviz. The paintings are not auctioned off here, but they are sometimes taken by those who will auction them off elsewhere. The place is often visited by foreign gallery bosses and guests hoping to invest their money for the prosperity of their own business, rather than out of sheer interest. It will cost them much less to buy the works of Ukrainian painters than to pay for similar works of their compatriots. Prices of paintings here and there are as different as heaven and earth. Frankly, this also applies to all other results of the work of talented individuals. Aware of this tremendous price differential, our artists still do not try to increase their own income at the expense of such lucrative buyers. For some foreign lovers of painting are past masters of bargaining and drawing profit by minimizing their own expenses. They know how to fight desperately for every sawbuck. One Dutch millionaire tried to buy three pictures he wanted to adorn his own gallery for $500, although they were each priced at $700. Fortunately, he failed.
In contrast to foreigners, our salespeople, who push paintings abroad, do not use the hoary tactic of pressure sales. Normal aborigines always make a detour. They never go directly through the thick jungle of the names, titles, and experience of artists who know their own and their works’ true value. They prefer to bypass hurdles and run directly to the walls of art college dormitories. Those who inhabit the latter are often talented and seldom well- fed, so they at first value their pictures without undue ambitions. And the trailblazers acquire these without undue expense.
In fact, pictures and their authors are sometimes lucky. In that case, they go together overseas, only to part with each other after a personal exhibition. This is not at all the end but the means owing to which you can buy colors, frame mounts, canvases, and a whole bag of oatmeal. After all, one lives not by spirit alone. Being lucky means that a work is sometimes gets top dollar abroad, and the creator finds it far easier in this case to part with his beloved works, which will stay behind in an alien land.
Exhibitions of this kind are initiated by the foreign gallery managers mentioned earlier. They usually resort to this when their pockets are not deep enough to buy everything at once, while intuition does not give an unequivocal answer to the question whether all the pictures will sell. In this case the artist is advised to deliver the works on his own to the exhibition venue. The organizer will have, in return for his activities, advertising, and premises, to be content with 25-50% royalties. Fifty percent is taken off the most inexperienced and needy by the most greedy.
In fact, our gallery bosses have nothing to complain about because the Ukrainian land is rich in talent and, hence, personal exhibitions are held from time to time in galleries not only in exchange for sale royalties (Western style) but also in exchange for any picture the gallery mogul sets his eye on. The picture will go even if none of the artist’s works are sold as a sort of rent payment. In such situations, the artist must be on his guard and specify immediately which of the pictures will leave the parental home. For it sometimes happened like this: the gallery boss demanded any picture, the artist promised one, but neither of them specified anything exactly. Then a well-to-do visitor would suddenly crop up and offer money in exchange for a certain picture. But the gallery owner would tell him that, as the result of an oral agreement with the artist, this picture is his gallery’s property. Of course, it is on sale, but at a higher price.
In any case, connoisseurs know that exhibitions are famous for gallery surcharges. This is why they only prefer to meet the artist there and then to buy pictures from him personally. It is much cheaper.
But sometimes pictures occur, which are not the fruit of an artist’s work but the result of sleight of hand. I mean two types of swindle: when an attempt is made only to cheat the buyer by fake authorship, and when this is done with both the buyer and the artist whose name is on the canvas. The former technique is more labor-intensive and old as the trees from which frames used to be made long ago to hold a picture and not necessarily a masterpiece, an amateurish one could do. Today, these frames often sell briskly among artists who specialize in forgeries. A frame is matched with a suitable canvas and mount, the two latter being carefully made to look old and adjusted to the required age. Then all this will become a copy painted from a little-known picture of a well-known artist to be taken to an antique shop. However, the antiquary is on his guard, too. Besides, it takes modern experts only a simple examination to find out the true age and authenticity of a picture, leaving the copy no chance at all. But this does not mean the copy’s seller will also lose his chance. The antique dealer, as befits the law-abiding passenger of our train called the state, will upbraid him paternally, bring down the price quite a lot, and issue a copy of a warrant for the picture to be temporarily kept in his shop until somebody sets his eye on this “little- known work of a famous artist.”
Scam no. 2 employs a simple mechanism: a charismatic business lady, mediating between the buyer and the artist, informs the latter that the buyer is busy and unable to see the works but asks to give him high-quality photos of the pictures and their fragments. And it is no trouble if the client dodges the deal: the lady will promise to show the photos in all sorts of important offices, hoping for a stroke of luck. But it is the lady, not the author, who will be lucky, for she keeps somewhere an underground team of smart operators who will rapidly make a high-quality copy of the photograph the buyer feasted his eyes on. So the author will get nothing, nor will he even know.
