Well having been in direct competition with him while I managed my last gallery with Art Wolfe and Robert Rotella, I can certainly say he has the balls to make aggressive marketing moves that most would never sleep at night if made. He also has a wonderful apparatus to tie up personnel so the competition can not benefit from his voracious appetite for going through employees. There are enough stories floating in town to fill several novels.
With that said I must say that I admire his ability to roll out galleries and hit huge sales numbers. I am struggling to make my second million $ milestone and he is on 420. Dam he is good at it.
Robert
Www.robert-park.com
Www.nevadaartprinters.com
The fact that you made your first is pretty good going I'd have thought.
This thread has got me thinking (always dangerous) about the whole print market and why there is hardly such a thing over here yet people can make their living in the states from it.
The first thing to appreciate is that there have to be customers to buy the items. So why are there buyers in the US but not Ireland, or much of Europe come to that? Who are these buyers in the states and where are they hanging the pictures? Are American houses bigger and so have more walls to cover, or do people move house more often and so need to redecorate more frequently? I also get the impression that house prices in the states are more a reflection of how the house is fitted out and its state of repair rather than the value of the bit of land it is sat upon, a major factor over here where there is less land available. Does this have an effect on how people decorate their homes? Maybe hanging photos in the smaller rooms of European houses just makes them feel cluttered and can be overpowering or distracting?
Then there are the psychological reasons for for folk buying landscapes, is it because they want to bring the great outdoors into their homes, extend the vastness of America into their houses, be reminded of what was wrested from nature, or maybe that that nature still has not succumbed?
The list of questions is probably endless but what is quite clear is that you cannot always take a business model from one culture where it is successful and transplant it to another and expect to flourish in its new surroundings. Lik certainly knows that, which is why he has only one gallery in Europe, in Venice, a city inundated with cruise ships carrying American tourists.
