Aimee Murphy from Art UK makes the case for Suffolk museums to get more involved:
Art UK receives over 4 million unique users from across the globe each year. Joining Art UK allows you to put your collection into the context of the nation’s artistic heritage and provides you with plenty of opportunities to increase the awareness and accessibility of your collections. For example, you can:
- Add works on paper to Art UK, increasing the accessibility and awareness of your art and photographic collections
- Promote the collection by writing stories and articles on Art UK
- Participate in Art UK partnered initiatives like the 2020 Great British Art Quiz and Art Unlocked, an ongoing online talk series in collaboration with Bloomberg Philanthropies
- Generate revenue from your collection by using the Art UK Shop
- Request the help of specialists around questions of sitter identity, attribution and location through our Art Detective network.
There are many other opportunities, which you can take a look at here.
Partners pay us an annual fee to be represented on the Art UK Platform. This fee relates to the number of artworks they show on Art UK and contributes to our sustainability and supports our work to make the nation’s art accessible. There is more information about how to join Art UK here.
Art UK Partners are able to utilise the Art UK Shop to sell prints, books, merchandise, and image licenses. You can find out more information here. It’s totally up to you how you want to participate in the shop, and we have different commercial agreements to reflect this.
Joining the Shop is very easy. You pick the works you want on the Shop, sign the relevant commercial agreement, and then we upload the high-resolution images to the Shop. All images get quality checked before being imported to ensure they are of high quality for printing. We would need to have copyright clearance for everything that went on the Shop, and we have a dedicated copyright team to work on this. You can also sell merchandise from your own online shop on the Art UK Shop, reaching new customers and generating extra revenue.
The revenue generated is all split between the collection and the supplier (Art UK does not take a cut). The way the revenue is split depends on the product. For example, unframed prints are 50/50%, print to order products are split 35% to the collection and 65% to the supplier, and image licences are split 85% to the collection and 15% to the supplier. There are currently over 100 Partners benefitting from the Shop. In the financial year 2020-21 we generated £280,000 in gross revenue, which resulted in around £100,000 in net profit for collections across the UK, and we are continuing to grow year-on-year.
There is no extra cost involved in joining the shop or creating products, it is all included in the partnership fee.