“It’s a tough business”

"Old Port, Portland, Maine" by *rboed* is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

One weekend this summer, I was walking through the Old Port in Portland with my family. We turned the corner and happened upon an art gallery - the kind that gives the Old Port its considerable appeal, but also makes you wonder how rent can possibly be made given the real estate it occupies.

My oldest daughter begged us to go in, not that it’s a particularly hard thing for us to say yes to, and in we went.

The answer to how this particular place stays in business is one that I’ve found a bit haunting since our visit. As we learned, the owner and artist of this particular establishment made his fortune not through art but by selling his own advertising agency many, many years ago to a larger agency that is still around to this day.

That sale, it seems, can fund canvas and paint and prime real estate decades after the fact. If you don’t own your own agency and you’re having a lousy day, this particular revelation can be a bit chilling.

Having traded a few agency life stories, we started to wind down our visit, and the owner of the gallery reflected on his time in the industry.

“It’s a tough business,” he told me. Even all those years later, the time “in it” seems to have taken its toll. That’s not to say it’s a bad business, nor is it a complaint. But it is a fact of life if you’re in it, as I have been for almost a decade.