FWIW - We sold a single large painting through an auction house. This is a living artist and I would term their work to be decorative, rather than fine art. He has a handful of motifs, you can pick one and he will reproduce it any size you want. My spouse bought three, two for home and one to hang in the office at work. All in maybe $4,000?
Anywho, we moved across country and didn’t want to move the largest of the three so we needed to offload it. I contacted the artist to see what he would recommend (maybe he would buy it back?). He gave me the contact information for a local large auction house. (We were in LA, so there was a lot of local resources. I’m sure it might be a bigger hassle if you are not in a population center.) The auction house was quite happy to list the piece, and it ended up going for about $2,500 on it’s own. To me that was a wee bit odd, because with a little googling the buyer probably could have gotten an identical work directly from the artist for less than that. Ah well.
Keep in mind the different goals of the auction house vs the gallery. Gallery is incentivized to give you as little as possible and still get the piece for resale. They will THEN sell it for as much as they can possibly profit, which does you no good whatsoever.
The auction house is getting a percentage of the sale price, and you get the rest. They are incentivized to get as much for that piece as humanly possible. If their percentage demand is too high, it is still possible that you would net less than if you went to the gallery, true. But you will have the peace of mind to know that the price you got was the best one available.
You haven’t said whether or not speed of sale is an issue. As others have mentioned, the auction house would likely hold your piece until an appropriate auction where the right buyers will be present. You could get lucky and find one coming soon. But chances are, if you need money within a couple of months, Gallery will be your only option.
Is that how it works? I thought the auction house fees were in addition to the sales price. So if a painting I inherited goes for $10,000 at an auction, the buyer pays that plus a commission of perhaps an additional $1,000.
OK, Googling further, what I was describing is apparently called the “buyer’s premium” and may be in addition to whatever commission is charged to the seller.
I don’t know why I’m being cagey, there’s no reason to. It’s an original by Philip Pearlstein, a nude somewhat similar to this one (not sure of the NSFW rules here, sorry if this is not appropriate!)
I did hear back from Artsy (the site linked above) and they said they “don’t have a selling opportunity for this work right now.” Haven’t heard back from the gallery managing the estate yet.
This tracks with what I think I’m seeing online. It makes perfect sense that an auction house would likely net more for the seller than a gallery. Speed of sale is not at all an issue, but I feel like there is a right time to sell the work of a recently deceased and very well-respected artist. I just don’t know what that is.
This is indeed more common in the arts market (at least to my knowledge), but in a world of Economics 101 rational actors it doesn’t make a difference whether the commission is paid by the buyer or the seller. The buyer has a maximum price he’s willing to bid and doesn’t care how much of it he is paying it to, the buyer or the auction house.