Carlos Fentanes

You never knew what post is going to grab the attention of some group in your audience. This was the case of Galleria Banditto: I started to receive mails and DMs about the residency price of this gallery, they asked me about my experience and my results but also if this was a real prize or it was a scam.

My experience after my 100 galleries journey was very enlightening: I discover several types of business through an Art Gallery, I mean, there’s not one static business model for an Art Gallery and some of them are not exactly Ethical.

When I started the journey, I was looking for an Art Gallery that represents me and where I can show my work and sell art. I knew the business model of Galería Óscar Román in Mexico City, where the gallerist has a group of artists with different styles and sell their works but also promote them for museums and charity fundraisings, and I was looking for something similar to it.

What I’ve seen also was the curatorial fee, that everyday is more and more common in the Art World and I think that it’s good for the gallery and for the artist if the gallery is serious but also is an excellent trap for novice artists and some people are trying to use this model to get easy money so be careful about it, my recommendation it not to answer any unsolicited mails, apply only for galleries that you know or through call listings sites such as CaFe.

And then, I get an email from Galleria Banditto:

Dear Carlos,

With this email, we want to formally invite you to submit your artwork for our 10 day Banditto Residency Prize at our Gallery in Tuscany (flights and transportation are included).

 
Every year at Banditto Art we invite some of the most talented and world renowned artists to stay with us at our gallery in Tuscany, Italy. Up until now, this residency has exclusively been for established artists like Sascha Brylla and Emanuele Tozzoli (see more info here).

This year we have decided to extend this opportunity to other artists like yourself. We have organized this prize because we are interested in finding new talent from all over the world. We have therefore specifically kept the entry fee as low as possible, in order to provide equal exposure opportunities to these artists regardless of their current situation and what representation they may or may not have.

The gallery is transformed into an atelier to let your creative juices flow in the most picturesque of environments. Check out our Spring Round winners.

For further information regarding this opportunity, and to submit your entry along with the required handling fee of $15(USD), please use the following link:

https://www.bandittoart.com/banditto-residency3

(Closing date for entries is 31 July 2019)

Your artwork will be reviewed and evaluated by our Judging Panel which includes internationally recognized art collectors and curators Peter Ibsen and Claus Risvig. 

Best wishes and we hope to meet you in Tuscany, Italy! 

Who the hell are Peter Ibsen and Claus Risvig? After checking their profile in Instagram the first thing I noticed is that they don’t collect realism. Why do they invite me then?

But you can say that Fifteen US dollars is not bad for an opportunity to travel to Italy and show my work in Europe, that’s what I said too but, and there’s always a but… How they know that I’m an artist? Why do they contact me in first place? How many more like me received this same invitation? Can you guess?

Well, here it is what I imagined how this business model works:

1. They don’t know me, and they have never seen my work and probably they never wrote this letter either. They should use some kind of algorithm and got my information from Instagram, Facebook, Tweeter or another social media.
2. There’s an automatic email factory that send thousands, really: thousands, of emails everyday.
3. They don’t mind about your art, your message, your studies; they only want your money, so imagine that you have a platform that every three months is giving you $15,000 out of nothing, just by sending automatically emails to every profile that has the word artist on it.
4. At the end you should have enough money to pay the travelling expenses of one of these artists, so you send the flight tickets and, in some way, clean the doubts about scamming.

It is sad to find this kind of behaviors in the Art World or everywhere else, that is to play dirty. I don’t like this kind of galleries and my recommendation is, please get away of these galleries, do not play their game.