What is your relationship with galleries?

Tom Otterness: For the first 15 years of my art world life, it was with Brooke Alexander and now I’m with Marlborough Gallery. It was one of the moments of my public-- a breakthrough for me in the economics of making everything work was to-- From the first Battery Park installation, I defined this complex work as a single work of art but I claimed the right to sell each individual element in it in the gallery. So that was the breakthrough. Usually with public work, they want a unique work and then you would be hampered from making sales from it. So that was a solution for me because with the nature of my work, I could…

What it allowed me to do is to spend above the commission amount-- you know, Battery Park, I’ve probably spent $200,000 more than I was given in making the work as expensive as I could or as complex, and that was made up for with gallery sales. So the two things kind of balanced each other and I couldn’t do the public work without the private sale sort of subsidizing it. And the public work becomes a kind of RND from me, for the gallery that I can experiment in and do a lot of work in that arena and have a kind of free hand. And then from that, you can pick out work that might sell.