Tuesday's Aside : Invitation Greening Pros and Cons

Tuesday's Aside, a weekly post in which I will do my damnedest to answer your questions. In order to keep each Tuesday's thread on topic, I'll ask that you post any additional questions on the original thread (even though it will fall off the main page, I'll be emailed each time a new comment is added there and so, thus, will be monitoring continuously).
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Carol wrote:

I’ve begun to hear from galleries (Von Lintel and Team recently) that they will be “saving paper” by replacing the traditional post card exhibition announcement with email. As a critic, I get tons of emails from galleries, many I've not heard of nor been to, and never open any of them. To me, they're not much better than spam. I do, however, look at each and every card I get in the mail—-cards with images, that is. And I often save them for months or even years.

Then as an artist, I’m concerned that once a gallery establishes this as a policy, will it then become an expense that gets passed on to us? And will there be a reliable database available if we do want to send cards?

This is how I go about choosing which galleries I visit: I make a stack of all the announcement cards that look interesting, go through the ads in Art in America and Artforum, then print out the ArtCal list of galleries by neighborhood and address and highlight what I find. I also do research from the ArtCal list as well.

Another thing I appreciate is when galleries include thumbnail images of each piece next to the entry in the checklist. Like announcement cards, they serve as a reference I’m likely to keep for a long time.

As a gallery owner, what are your thoughts?

Perhaps if more galleries understood that sending critics a card with an image played such a big role in getting the critic to come see their exhibition this would become a non-issue (i.e., galleries would just print up cards), but I think there are several interesting issues in Carol's comments/questions, and I'd like to separate them out. (For the record, our gallery does both, printed cards and email announcements...but then I'm a media whore, so....)

First is that most galleries I know end up throwing away thousands of invitations each year because printers generally only offer their services in units of 1000 or 500 at best. If a gallery's mailing list then is 4,200 people, say, and to send that many they have to print up 5000 cards, after the stack of 100 they archive and the 100 or so visitors take away during the exhibition, they still have 600 cards per exhibition that end up being landfill. Multiply that by 8 exhibitions a year and 300 galleries in Chelsea alone and you begin to understand that even if "saving paper" is only a euphemism for "saving money" there is actually a good deal of waste going on (the math tells us perhaps as many as 1,440,000 cards get thrown away each year in Chelsea).

Also, there's definitely a Paperless Nation movement underfoot. Banks, utilities, airlines, newspapers, you name it, everyone is encouraging their customers to use the Internet instead of relying on print. Whether it actually is out of concern for the environment or an easy way for them to save money is probably besides the point. Once businessmen realize they can cut that corner, it will be difficult to get them to turn back.

But ours is a visual industry. We trade in images. I will confess to spending more time with cold-sent print invitations than with cold-sent emails (by cold-sent, I mean someone whose mailing list I didn't sign up for or someone sending me an announcement because they sought me out, rather than the other way around). A card is much easier. An image in an email might be an attachment or take forever to load. With a printed card, I flip it over and voilà! Of course so much depends upon the quality of the image (both in printing and in original creation), but that's another matter.

But Carol wisely thinks through to the future issues that galleries going paperless might consider first: "Then as an artist, I’m concerned that once a gallery establishes this as a policy, will it then become an expense that gets passed on to us?"

I think that would probably be a yes. If an artist wanted printed invites and the gallery's policy was not to produce them, then many a dealer would argue that that falls under the artist's individual promotion efforts. Of course, it could become just another exhibition negotiation, but if the gallery has a set budget per exhibition, getting them to shell out for cards might mean cutting back on something else.

But Carol's second question is more to the point on what galleries should keep in mind, IMHO: "And will there be a reliable database available if we do want to send cards?"

Most likely not. Galleries update their mailing lists when the post office returns a card with an address correction or a client, realizing they've stopped getting them or having moved, contacts the gallery to update the records. If you're known to be emailing announcements only, who would bother to contact you with a change of address? It takes years to build up a quality mailing list. The expense of printing and mailing cards might be a small price to pay to ensure yours is as up-to-date as possible.

Finally, Carol notes: "Another thing I appreciate is when galleries include thumbnail images of each piece next to the entry in the checklist." I loved that the first time I saw it as well and promptly stole it (we do it for 95% of our exhibitions). I should acknowledge that I first saw that on a checklist from our friend Jeff Gleich's gallery in Paris, g-module. It takes a bit more time to set up, but a lot less than walking a critic writing about the exhibition back through the show on the phone, hoping your explanations are making sense.

Thanks for the question Carol. Others' opinions on the fate of printed announcement cards?