DEALER’S CHOICE

AFTER YEARS OF SHOWING THE work of some of the finest Texas artists, Eugene Binder recently closed his Deep Ellum gallery and left town with angry artists howling that he still owed them thousands of dollars. Even before the closing, Dallas painter David Bates had been trying to collect payment from the Eugene Binder Gallery for artwork that had been sold three years earlier. Eventually, a frustrated Bates explained the situation to a collector he knew wanted to buy his work through Binder’s gallery. Binder finally paid up.

Fort Worth artist Bill Haveron says Binder still owes him for art work sold, though Binder says he has settled all of his outstanding debts to artists in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Bates, Haveron, Vernon Fisher, and other major names in the Texas art world appeared in a panel discussion at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary in April to decry what they regard as the archaic business practices of the art world, which allows dealers like Binder to put the artists’ share of money from sales of artwork into the gallery’s business accounts.

“It’s left up to their good will as to when that money goes out of their accounts to the artist,” says sculptor James Surls, who organized the panel after experiencing a similar situation with a Houston gallery, When a gallery faces a financial crunch, artists often don’t get paid, he says. “After a while, they [dealers] don’t even tell you they’ve sold something, ” Surls says. “They don’t want you to know.”

Surls would require dealers to provide artists with a copy of the sales invoice that goes to the client and to deposit the proceeds in a trust account, much like attorneys are required to do. So far, Surls’ suggestions have met with a tepid response from gallery owners, who complain that such a system would be “too complicated,” he says.

The 300-plus audience at The MAC got a big surprise when Binder, spotted sitting in the back, was invited to talk about the problems the gallery faced. Binder blamed the gallery’s failure on the downturn in the art market, and he defended his business practices, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d do the same thing,” he told the crowd.