The Price is Wrong

I am an artist.  And the single most loathsome aspect of me artistic existence is, bar none, pricing my art.

I’m sure I’m not alone on this.  And I’m sure that every artist has a slightly different formula.  Things like cost of materials, time invested, level of quality, size, number in a series, all must be taken into account.  Is it framed?  Well, that’s an extra $50.  But it always comes back to that old push-and-pull:

How much I think it’s worth versus how much I think somebody will pay for it.

Now, this formula itself is fraught with smaller considerations that have nothing to do with the quality of the art itself.  Now we must consider level of education, time spend in the industry, name recognition, and prices of previous sales.  And I’m sure there are more I’m forgetting.

But it all comes back to the aforementioned formula, since I could have been creating and exhibiting art for decades, and my work could have sold for $1500 back in 2007, before the markets crashed.  But in 2010, nobody’s paying for expensive art by local artists, so there’s no way I’m selling that figure drawing for anything over $1000.

I’ve read all sorts of articles on the subject of pricing, and all their rules make sense in a vacuum.  They’ll tell you that your prices should raise by “X” percent every year.  They’ll tell you to never, EVER give away your art.  They’ll tell you not to trade art.  They’ll tell you to- essentially- remove yourself from society (and you KNOW how I feel on this subject…).

But we- artist or otherwise- don’t live in a vacuum.

This philosophy completely ignores the markets.  And it brushes aside the networking that we all have to do as artists (especially before we create a name for ourselves).  And what the hell good’s it being an artist if you can’t make gifts for people instead of paying for them?

No, if I know somebody who entertains a lot, and is willing to put my art in their living room, you can be damn sure they’re gonna get one of my pieces.

As so often happens in life, this economic model was created by those who are not- and possible never had to- struggle to make ends meet.  It’s like when people who “started their own business from nothing” are interviewed on how they did it, and they say, “I took the $10,000 gift I got and invested it in…”  Yeah, how many of us have gotten that $10,000 gift?  And not to knock anyone, frankly more power to you, but if your parents or domestic partner are financially supporting you while you get that business on its feet, then you’re not really going it alone.

The rest of us cannot ignore the trends that affect the rest of the fiscal world.  If my art is simply not selling at the price it “should” be at, then I can either hoard my art and let it swallow me up, or I can adjust.

It’s not the strongest of a species that survives, but those more able to adapt to change.

So I’ll lower my prices if I have to.  To be truthful, I have a luxury that other artists may not.  I work in multiple media, one of which- printmaking- was designed to be more egalitarian than most other media.  So I can still follow that model for my large figure drawings, and I can adjust my etching prices to better fit the markets.

Darwin’d be so very proud of me.