How to start a gallery in your apartment - NOT!

Lots of artists sell art from home. It's a business model that can work well for many artists. ​BUT you do need to be aware of the legal and other  implications of selling from home.
Selling art from home

Artsy published an article on 4th January about How to Start a Gallery in Your Apartment. This article by Casey Lesser

• makes the case for the apartment based gallery
• interviews people who have apartment galleries in five different cities
• asks what does it take to start a gallery.

Unfortunately the article tends to focus only on the social and artistic considerations and wholly omits to mention critical factors which should ALWAYS be taken into consideration before you open a gallery in your spare bedroom - or your living room and a bedroom as Leo Castelli did.

Hence this blog post. I would urge all those thinking of widening their options for selling art in 2017 to read on before they potentially create a lot of problems for themselves.

It's not that you can't do it - but rather than it's rather more complicated than this "how to" article suggests it might be.

How to sell art from home - the nice cuddley version (published in Artsy on 4th January 2016)

So here are the factors it omits to mention - but if YOU ignore them you could find yourself landed with some very expensive repercussions!

How to sell art from home - the practical, hard-nosed and business-oriented version

​My page on Selling Art from Home provides you with a whole page of things you need to think about and resolve before you sell art from home

There is no mention in the Artsy article of:

• whether your legal title to your property allows you to do this. Do you want to forfeit your lease?
• whether your mortgagor allows commercial retail activity from a domestic home - the rates for commercial mortgages are completely different to those for domestic mortgages
  
• insurance requirements for your liability for the health and safety of third parties on your property - omit this at your peril!
• planning permission - for treating a domestic property as a commercial entity (working from home is very, very different to inviting people in to your home to sell art) 
• the impact on taxation on your property. In some places the way capital gains are taxed is very different if it involves part of the property being used for commercial activities. 

and that's just the beginning! There's a lot more on my - but hopefully you'll find the explanations short and helpful.

Do please read this page before being seduced into thinking it's really quite simple and straightforward from a legal and financial perspective to open a gallery at home.