What a Consignment Should Say

A consignment is a loan of your work with a promise attached, and the promise is only as strong as what is written down. Most of the grief in the artist and gallery relationship traces back to a document that never said enough: work sold without a word to the artist, a discount given that nobody agreed to, money that arrived a season late or not at all.

The document should name every work it covers, with its condition, its list price, and the split. It should say whether a discount can be given at all, how deep it can go, and who is asked first. Discounts are a normal part of how work is placed. A silent one is different: a third off a sale you learn about months later is a decision someone made with your money.

It should put a real date on the payment: so many days after the sale clears, with the amount tied to the price actually paid. If a gallery cannot tell you when you will be paid for a sold work, you already know something about how the relationship will feel in year three.

Where the law offers consignment protections, and in many places it treats consigned work as held in trust for the artist, the agreement should claim them by name. This is the clause that matters on the worst day, the one where a gallery closes suddenly with your work inside. Written properly, your work is yours to collect. Written casually, it is inventory in someone else’s wind-down.

You are also owed a record: where each work is, what has sold, what came back, and what the gallery is holding. A working artist should be able to answer, at any moment, where every piece of a career is standing. That record is the ledger of the practice itself, and it belongs to you.

None of this is adversarial. A good gallery will not flinch at a document that says when money moves and who decides a discount, because a good gallery is already doing these things. The document just makes the relationship survivable by both sides on the days that test it.