A vanity gallery is an art gallery that charges artists fees to exhibit your work and makes most of its revenue from artists, rather than from sales to the public. Thus, they have no incentive to sell your work. https://renee-phillips.com/vanity-galleries/
This more recent gallery revenue model requires an artist to pay a substantial fee, up front, often scaling into the thousands, depending on the levels of representation. There is no guarantee that your work will sell and if it does, there may be additional commission fees on top of the initial investment. Once your subscription timeline expires, you are out unless you anti up again.
They are called vanity galleries because the appeal to an artist’s innate vanity – the desire to be seen in a sexy setting by high income patrons, waiting to discover and buy your art. They usually boast a brick and mortar gallery, set up in a trendy urban area of a larger city, accompanied by clean, modern web sites that enhance their glamour appeal. In NYC and other mega metro areas, pay up front plus commission galleries are now the predominant model.
The ambulance chaser types find you. They scour social media platforms like Instagram looking for decent artists with large inventories. They contact the artist directly, telling them they have been singled out, “discovered”. My favorites are the offers from Tuscany and Milan Italy. One offers an artist residence at a picturesque villa, the other offers to display your art on big screen displays at their trendy boutique location and paper social media with your breakthrough work. Both require substantial and non refundable cash up front for the opportunity to be “juried” into these exclusive, themed venues. When searching these businesses carefully, artist scam alerts appear.
On a positive note, Vanity Galleries are not to be confused with non-profit, artist-run galleries, also known as Cooperative Galleries. Artist-run galleries are established to serve all members, who share the expenses and well as the decision-making process. Cooperatives typically provide professional facilities and services for its artist-members, including studios, workshops, equipment, exhibition galleries, and educational resources. If you have one nearby, you are lucky, its like finding mecca in the desert. For the rest of us, every town in the US has legitimate artists’ groups and programs that charge low-cost membership and/or service fees. This is where we can huddle and keep each other warm.