Are Art Galleries Fading From New York City?

When I attended Pratt Institute in the late 1980s, I was intimidated by shows at art galleries.  I went to lots of them, but I always had the impression that gallery owners weren’t happy to see young students like me wander through the door.  I’ve never been very eloquent about discussing art; I feel like I’m shoveling out a lot of BS.  So when I graduated with a bachelor’s in Painting, I was deeply intimated by the process of asking gallery owners to represent me. 

That was decades ago.  I still paint, my art continues to develop, but I don’t bother trying to get shows. I replaced that desire with the goal of snagging a literary agent.  By the time I’d written my first book, I no longer lived in New York City.  I’ve often thought that my Omaha, Neb address was part of the reason I couldn’t get the literary agents to read my books (most live in NYC).  But thanks to Amazon, it now no longer matters that I don't have an agent.  Epublishing has served me well; I've sold well over 50,000 copies of my self-published books in just a couple of years.  So I'm a fan of online sales.

Today I read art critic Jerry Saltz’s article, “The Death of the Gallery Show,” in New York Magazine where he laments the rise of online art auctions because the public never gets the chance to wander through an exhibition of that artist, to see the artist’s works juxtaposed together.  Mr. Saltz says he goes to 1,560 NYC gallery shows a year.  A year.  That is incredible. 

Reading his article brought me back to my school days, and to the research I did while writing my second mystery novel, which begins with a death in a Williamsburg art gallery (Murder with Art (Ruby Neptune Mysteries)).  And as I read Saltz’s defense of art galleries, in spite of the fact that poor artists might not get to NYC to see the art, I started to think the art world was following in the footsteps of the publishing world:  both had NYC as their center and a small tribe of New Yorkers decided who was in and who was out.

But after mulling over his argument for a few hours, I’ve decided that what’s lost by art galleries disappearing from Chelsea is what’s gained for Indie writers like me.  In online art galleries, even non-represented artists get to sell their art, so it sounds like the democratization of the art world.  But only for the artists.  For art lovers, the opposite is happening.  As Saltz points out, auctions keep art away from everyone except the collector.  Even though I felt intimidated going to art galleries as a young student, I still went.  I got to see some amazing art.  I couldn’t buy the art, but I could still be influenced by what I saw on those walls.  Jerry Saltz goes to 1,560 shows a year, but he's not buying something at each show (at least, I assume he's not, on an art critic's salary.)  He's just looking and enjoying.

There’s no doubt that Amazon, for all its many flaws, has democratized the publishing world for writers like me.  But readers, too, get to read more books.  Books that literary agents didn't think they would like.  I may not make my living off my books (yet), but I'm still a success.  Without an agent or publisher and with a marketing budget of less than $200, the first book in my mystery series (Murder Beyond Words (A Ruby Neptune Mystery)) sold 20,000 copies last year.  Murder with Art sales are steady, too.
 

Living outside the city has its disadvantages for agent-less novelists.  Besides the obvious one, (not living in the city), some bookstores only carry consignment books for local authors, and though I’m from New York I no longer count as local.  An art gallery would let me show from afar, but of course they have years of experience working with out-of-town artists.  I imagine bookstores will get there eventually.  More than anything, Saltz’s article made me feel my absence from my favorite city in the world.  He made me miss living on campus at Pratt.  He made me want to gallery hop.  He made me worry that one of the defining traits of the city, art galleries, might be an endangered species.  Let’s hope he’s wrong. 

Dead Mice vs. Book Sales

Mice. In our house. We have mice in our house!!!

I was enjoying the first quiet period I’ve had, probably in three years. Kids were asleep; husband was at a garage sale. I was in the recliner, reading. The house was gloriously silent. In this dead silence, a mouse ran into the center of the living room, saw me, and ran back under the sofa. My feet were up. I actually had time to read in the middle of the day. Sometimes, as a mother, you make choices you never thought you’d make when you were single. I kept reading. Then a second mouse appeared (different color), saw me, and ran back under the couch. I debated. I read another paragraph. Then I got up and called my husband on his cell. Miraculously, he had it turned on and he heard it. He’d found a used swing set for $10. I asked him to pick up mouse traps on his way home. I brought my dog in from outside. He didn’t want to hang out with me. He wanted to go back outside, so I had to use the baby gate to trap him in the living room with me. I had this notion that he might catch one of the mice. As soon as he fell asleep, a third mouse appeared, saw the dog, and ran back under the couch. My husband called. He was stuck on the interstate, behind an accident, with the swing set strapped to his little pick-up truck. “Get home as soon as you can,” I said. “I have the mice cornered behind the sofa.”

No more appearances by mice. My husband walked in full of doom and gloom about the mice. “Once you have mice, they’re here to stay. They were all in the sofa??? There's probably a nest in the sofa!” etc. By the time he was done, I was totally freaked out. I had to leave the room when he pulled back the sofa.

There was no nest. There were no mice. The little rascals got by me and my dog. Probably through the ventilation system. We set spring traps. That evening, as we watched TV, I saw a mouse run down our hall three times. Our traps caught no mice.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. We got glue traps. I had a mouse problem in college. Of course, that was in a dorm, in Brooklyn, NY. You expect mice there, but not in Omaha. I am morally opposed to glue traps. Mice don’t die instantly – they suffer. But in college, the spring traps didn’t catch them. And on one quiet, Brooklyn day, when I was studying philosophy in the kitchen and my roommates were gone for the weekend, a family of seven mice walked across our linoleum floor. They also got into all our food, including the bag of bread on top of our refrigerator. So I solved my moral dilemma. I only put the glue traps down when I was home. As soon as a mouse was caught, I threw it out my sixth story window. I killed ten or twelve mice this way. (Relax! They all landed in the courtyard in the center of the building. No one had access to the courtyard).

My husband bought twenty glue traps, which we put out after the kids went to bed. No mice.

Now, coincidently, I have an ebook for sale on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, and Smashwords. Every day I can see the sales I made. You might think I’d check daily for a week, then get bored and check weekly. But no, I check my sales about 25 times a day. I feel like a rat, pushing a button to get a pellet. Sometimes, I get a sale, sometimes I get four sales, sometimes I get nothing. In research studies, the more pellets the rat gets, the less it pushes the button. The more intermittent the reward, the more it keeps pushing. So, basically, I’m a rat. A writer rat. Now, here’s the weird part. The first day that I had no sale, we caught a mouse. Then I had sales for four days. No mice. Then a day with no sales, but a dead mouse. So now, I’m torn. Do I root for a book sale, or a dead mouse? And why can’t I have both? Because God thinks he’s pretty damn funny, I guess. Or fate, or the universe, or the Mouse God. Which would you root for? Book sales or dead mice?

The Truth About Dating, live on Kindle!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Truth-About-Dating-ebook/dp/B0045U9RJQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1287237042&sr=8-2

This week my novel, The Truth About Dating, went live on Kindle. I posted it after hearing an interview on American Public Media’s The Story with a writer, Karen McQuestion, who, after years of false starts with literary agents, posted her novels on Kindle. Within six hours she had a sale, and eventually, a movie deal. That’s when a publisher came calling.


The way Kindle works, you upload your book, set your price, and get a percentage of every sale. If you list your book from $2.99 to 9.99, you get a 70% royalty. This is amazingly high. Any other price gives you 35%, which isn’t bad either. I decided to set my book price at $1.00. After all, I wasn’t expecting to get rich from my book sales. I just want people to read it. A low price seemed like a good way to get people to take a chance with an indie author.

Posting the book was a lot harder than I expected. Amazon doesn’t really give you much help, but after a week or so of trial and error, I finally figured out how to convert my manuscript to html and upload it. I had a great cover, done by graphic designer Jennifer Digman.

When I finally went live, I put a bottle of champagne (actually, cava, from Barcelona) in the fridge. I was going to celebrate when I made my first sale. No one knew that my book was posted (except my husband). I started manically checking my sales sheet. It was like biting you nails or any other bad habit. I couldn’t stop, and nothing sold. After two days, I told myself, OK, no more checking for one week. But the next day, I had fallen off the wagon and was logging on to check. And lo and behold, I had a sale. I had sold a copy of my book!

I called my husband from work. He said, “I’ll have the champagne ready when you get home.” But then I started wondering if some family member or friend had stumbled across my book and bought it. Plus, it was a Wednesday night. Did I really want to drink a whole bottle of champagne on a work night? I called my husband back and said, “Let’s save it for the weekend.” Then, just before I left work that day, I checked one more time, and this time, I also clicked on the sales report for the UK. Two sales in the UK! I had sold three books, and two of them in the UK! I called my husband back. It was time to celebrate!

When I got home, he had made my favorite food, popovers. And mac and cheese. And we opened the cava and toasted those strangers who decided to take a chance on an author they’d never heard of before! The kids had juice. And of course, they wouldn’t eat the homemade mac and cheese because they prefer the instant Kraft kind that you cook in the microwave. Kids always help keep your life in perspective. I’m Julie Christensen, author, seller of three books, and mother of fussy eaters. Amen!