Sunday, May 17, 2009

Quite the Salesman

In the gallery where I used to work we had an unofficial award that we bestowed when someone sold a particularly unsellable piece of artwork. It references one of the most amazing feats in sales I have ever seen.

One day, the gallery owner, Rich and I were in the gallery and a woman walks in and asks about one of our illustrators, Barry Moser. He happens to be a good friend, and has given me quite a few of his paintings. The gallery represents a number of well known children's book illustrators in addition to the fine art. Anyway, she asks if she can look at Barry's illustrations and mentions that she was looking for paintings of cats. So Rich pulls out a couple of pieces and she loves them. Then the question...

"How much are they?"


Most of Moser's full page illustrations start around $1000 and go up to $5000, which was way out of her league. She was budgeting at most around $350. Rich tried to find smaller pieces that might work, but there was really nothing that she liked. That's when he found it... at the bottom of the box of illustrations he did for a book about a dog and cat.

It was a full page illustration of a cat, from the rear, consisting of a tail, two legs and a very prominent, puckered anus.

She bought it... overjoyed that she would now own an original illustration by her favorite illustrator.

And thus was born 'The Cat Ass Award'.

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