Ramtin Naimi

It's sending your dealer a gift when their baby is born, sending them Christmas gifts.

checking in from them from time to time.

And the reason I mentioned saying top of mind is the most competitive time to get a painting is during an artist's primary exhibition or during a fair like Basel because they send that preview out to their entire collector base.

5,000 people are going to see that painting.

You're definitely not the only person who wants that individual painting and your odds of getting that are close to nothing unless you're willing to jump through a million hoops to get there.

Every single artist, they're working, they need to make money.

So more often than not, in between exhibitions and in between fairs, they might make one painting and give it to the gallery and say, please sell this for me.

That's where I found most of my work.

The artist just made this one painting available.

We're offering it to you and three other people.

Please let us know what you think.

And your odds are much higher when it's just shared with you and two or three other people.

I think the big galleries do quite well.

The big galleries that have great clients and are able to control their markets tend to not only manage all the primary sales, but they tend to also manage the majority of the secondary sales.

And this is how they control the market.

If you're buying great work from Hauser or Gagosian or Zwirner or Pace,

and you want to sell a painting, they don't want that painting to go to auction.

They want that painting to go back to them because they probably have 20 other people that might be interested in that painting.

And not only did they get their 50% commission when they sold the painting to you in the first place, now they're going to get somewhere between 15% and 25% for selling it for you again.

On multiple round trips of a painting, they probably made more money on the painting than the initial cost of the painting.