OUT OF THE BOX - A Long Answer to Your Short Question
If you enjoy this newsletter, help us grow the community by sharing it with a friend. When I wrote a post a few weeks ago about collecting art on a budget or a payment plan, a reader asked a great question (I love getting your questions): “How do you know if the work you love is worth $700, $250, or $6,000? I totally value the artist but I have no clue how to ‘value’ the art.” I’ve heard different versions of this question over the years—from people who are interested in collecting art but who don’t necessarily feel knowledgable enough to trust their sense of how much something should cost—so I thought I’d answer it here. Let’s assume two things: One, that we’re not talking about speculative art collecting for profit and are instead having a conversation about buying work that speaks to you as a way of making your life richer and supporting living artists. Two, that we’re talking about situation in which you’ve fallen in love with a piece of art at a fair, a store, in an artist’s instagram feed, at an outdoor market, or at an artist-run gallery,¹ and you don’t have a sense of whether or not the work is priced “appropriately.” I’ll give you the complicated answer first, and then the very very simple one.
If you’ve found a piece of work that you’re in interested in bringing home, but you don’t have much to go on in terms of how or why it was priced the way it was, here are a few things to keep in mind: Materials In the same way that you’d expect to pay more for a cashmere sweater than you would for the exact same one in polyester, a sculpture cast in silver is going to be more expensive than one cast in stainless. Oil paints cost more than acrylic. The price of certain hardwoods would blow your hair back. Materials can have a huge effect on the final cost of a piece, but the materials are not always apparent just by looking at the work. If you’re interested in buying something, it’s okay to ask the artist about the materials they use. You might be surprised. Every once in a while an artist will come out with something like, “Oh, do you see those little flecks in the piece that catch the light? I used this thread that’s hand spun from 24K gold by monks at a monastery in the South of France where my family comes from.”² At no time should you ask the artist how much their materials cost, or grill them about everything they put into the piece (some artists like to keep certain processes proprietary). But it’s lovely to ask thoughtful, curious questions about what went into making something. And if you’re genuinely interested, the artist will usually be delighted to talk to you about it. If the artist mentions a material or a process that you’ve never heard of, you can ask them more about it. Or you can write it down, slip away for a minute, and Google the hell out of it. This usually goes one of two ways: you will come away thinking Of course this costs two months salary! It’s a two-hundred-year-old printing process that’s super expensive and labor intensive! Or you look up what “giclee”means and learn that it’s just a fancy word for inkjet. In addition to the materials in the final work, there are so many consumables that the artists went through while making it: the mountains of sandpaper now in the trash, the paint-crusted brushes and bottles of primer, the specialized $800 tool they had to buy from the only manufacturer on the planet that makes it. There are often as many invisible costs as visible ones, which is why this is just one thing to take into consideration when you’re trying to figure out if something has been “appropriately” priced. Labor An artist’s labor is another one of the invisibles that we most take for granted. With the exception of some artists I know who work very quickly, you would be shocked by how much time goes into making things. An artist’s time has value, just like a plumber’s time or a caregiver’s time or a fill-in-the-blank professional’s time. So, if an artist spent a hundred hours making something—even if it looks fairly simple (this can actually be quite deceiving because once an artist has achieved a certain level of craftsmanship and ability, some of their most time-consuming pieces may appear to be the simplest or the most effortless)—you shouldn’t expect to be able to pick it up for a cool $99.95 like it came off the shelf at Pier 1. The amount of labor will influence price more in certain artistic disciplines than others. For example, a sculptor might have spent 40 hours on one piece in a show and 400 hours on another, and the price will usually reflect this. Conversely, if you’re interested in a photographer’s work, they will likely be pricing their prints by size, regardless of whether it took five minutes to capture one of the images and five days to set up another. Size Size affects price because it usually corresponds to an increase in the cost of materials or the amount of labor required, or both. That said, it doesn’t mean that the huge thing is always worth more than the tiny thing. Sometimes an artist works in an extremely detailed way at a smaller scale, which might make their material and labor costs for, say, a 6” x 6” piece similar to that of another artist’s piece that measures 12” x 18.” None of these parameters are meant to stand alone. They’re simply pieces of the puzzle to help you get a bit more clarity about pricing. Artist’s Experience The price of an artist’s work usually increases throughout their career—if they work somewhat steadily—as they gain more skill, experience, and virtuosity in their practice. If you want to get more information about where an artist is in their career, you can go to their website, where many of them will have their CVs listed. You’ll be able to see if they attended an art program, how many group and/or solo shows they’ve been a part of, what awards or grants they’ve earned, if they are represented by any galleries. However, an artist’s CV should never be used as a cudgel against them. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that we shouldn’t use a CV as a measure of anything due to how many artists are currently, and have been historically, excluded from opportunities to build one. Not all artists are able to maintain a website. Not all artists are interested in or have the ability to attend art school. And, depending upon the institution, some art schools give artists a leg up in the early days of their careers, so they may have more exhibitions and line items on their CVs than their counterparts that didn’t attend. Neither one is a reflection of more or less talent. These are simply markers throughout an artist’s career that may affect how their work is priced. I’ve had experiences where I was interested in an artist’s work, saw that they had almost nothing on their CV but fell so madly in love with their artist statement that I ceased to care about anything else and went on to buy something from them.
My grandfather, who co-owned an art gallery and worked as an art restorer, always said, “A piece of art is only worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it.” By that he meant if, say, a wealthy collector tried to sell a painting that was worth $80,000—but the style of painting had recently fallen out of vogue and no one wanted to buy it for that price anymore—that painting is not, in fact, worth $80,000. My grandpa passed away long before Maurizio Cattelan duct taped an overripe banana to a wall and sold it at Art Basel for $120,000—which left most of us bemused, befuddled, and horrified—but I think if he’d been alive he would’ve said that that god damned banana was worth exactly $120,000 because that’s what someone was willing to pay for it. So the real answer is that any piece of art that calls to you for whatever reason³ is worth whatever you are willing to pay for it. Let’s say you fall in love with an artist’s work and in talking to the artist you fall even more in love with it because you really like the artist, but after doing some digging it seems that the work is a bit overpriced based on the rough parameters I’ve outlined above. It’s okay to ask yourself:
If the answer is yes to both of those questions, congratulations! You’ve just successfully determined its value. 1 If the piece you love is at a commercial gallery, the only thing you need to determine is whether or not the gallery is reputable. Check out their website, their social media feed, check out the artists they represent, read their mission statement, etc. If the gallery is legit, you can trust the way they’ve priced the work. 2 I just made that up. I don’t think it’s an actual thing. But let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Either way, these are the types of amazing things you will learn when you ask artists more about their materials choices. 3 If the reason is that it matches your couch, please don’t mention that to the artist. |
Older messages
The Systems of Power Reinforce Themselves
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
The goal is to build systems that allow for people to be held accountable, for redemption, and for us to move forward without having to bury our heads in the sand.
Put These Seeds in Your Pocket
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
This post is dedicated to each and every act of resistance, no matter how big or small.
Dear ______
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
I'm wondering what I would want someone to write to guide my trip each day. And what I would want to write to them.
Taking Down the Establishment in Six Easy Payments
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Anytime I hear someone refer to art collecting as the domain of the wealthy and the powerful, I want to scream.
Something From Nothing
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
On days when it feels like we have so little to work with, I always think of the sculptor Chakaia Booker.
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