Pricing Your Work
Journal Entry: Friday, September 2, 2022
Pricing Your Work
I personally am a gallery artist so all of my advice is based on that version of the self-sustaining creative lifestyle. This is the well worn path. There are other ways to do it but I won’t be discussing those because I don’t have any experience at them and I would only be speculating.
Making a living as an artist is about making a living like anybody else. So how do you do that in a self-sustaining way? That’s the central question. If you get in the gallery market you are going to have to pay for your materials, studio costs, your effort, your intellectual property, shipping, gallery commission and discounts off retail and then taxes. Calculating out all of these costs, you are going to end up with 15-20% of actual personal income at typical retail prices. This needs to be the calculation. So, this tells you that whatever you think your personal income needs to be from a given body of work, you need to multiply by 500% For example, to end up with $200.00 of personal income after expenses and taxes you need to price it at retail for $1,000.00.
Keep in mind that even though you love working and your artwork is personal, as a business all of your expenses related to your art are not part of personal income. The 15-20% is for personal living expenses, savings and investment and entertainment.
You need to charge that price even if you are selling the work yourself, because you are then acting as the dealer too and the dealer half of the work costs time and money as well. If you have a dealer, then his/her calculation is roughly the same as yours or maybe little better but not by much. Some claim that the actual profit margin made by an art gallery is something like 6.5% (after the dealer takes his salary out?). The advantage that the dealer has over the artist is that they have a lot more artists’ work to sell, than the artist has galleries to sell his/her works. An artist’s sales then, are limited to production inventory. The dealer is limited to his/her client base.
You have to set your prices at whatever you would need to sell the work for after paying gallery commissions and discounts even if it isn’t in a gallery. All of these gallery expenses you just have to accept as the cost of doing business. This is often hard for the artists to wrap their head around if they are selling the work themselves. Every hour you are being your own dealer is an hour you are not producing art in the studio.
The advantage to selling your work through galleries is that you have constant retail exposure and sales people working for you while you stay focused on what you love - your studio practice and art production. You have to decide. Do you want to spend your time making business or making art.
Being in the art market can seem confusing at first and there can be fear about whether your work will be rejected or doesn’t sell. It is easy to feel despondent or intimidated about the process of getting your work into the market. Still, if you look at all the art out in the galleries you will likely wonder to yourself how a lot of things that you don’t think are any good at all are actually selling. But the fact is every artist has a potential market and there is a diverse range of ‘tastes’.
How I have come to think about it for myself is that when I am working in my studio I am an artist and that is all I think about. When I am going out to see what I can do about selling it then I become an agent or representative of the body of work that is in the studio. As a representative, I don’t really care what anybody thinks about it. I stay detached from the work on an ego or emotional level. I like my work, but I can’t expect everyone else to like it. Just like there is a lot of art that I don’t find interesting. I am just looking for the right people that do like it and take an interest in it. Everyone else doesn’t matter when it comes to business. Since I operate through my dealers, they are the only ones I have to concern myself with.
Some artists feel like they need to be in the very best galleries or none at all. However, you can build a career just fine by getting in any galleries around the country that fit your work. Often it is easier to get into galleries when they first get started and are looking for artists to represent so you can keep your ear to the ground for this kind of startup gallery. It is riskier because starting a gallery is like starting a restaurant. There is probably a high failure rate in the first few years. It takes deep pockets and at least 5 years of gumption to get a gallery off the ground.
Every artist starts out with no gallery representation and hence no financial support. In order to get in any galleries an artist has to have inventory that can be put into the gallery setting and have their prices set for that future environment. So what an artist has to do first is build a body of work without support. That will take a while. The artist will also want to get some practice at exhibiting work through group exhibitions or in community art centers , libraries, etc. and try to build up the resume a bit so you look like you are doing something. I’ll discuss that in another article.
More ideas about pricing work.
When thinking about the value of your work, all of your work, down to the smallest thing has to bare its share of the business expenses. Since my early years, I was primarily a works on paper artist because I was working by the seat of my pants as they say, poor and without support. Making drawings, paintings on paper and collages was my thing. Cheap to produce, easily stored and shipped, small so they could be made quickly and because of that I could develop my ideas rapidly and have a large body of imagery. In the early years this was my smartest way to go and fastest way to develop.
To get into galleries I figured it wasn’t a big commitment on the dealer’s part to throw my work in a flat file drawer, sell to designers and clients and then they can make make extra money from the framing when needed. What is not to love about that as the dealer? In the early days, in the 1980s, dealers agreed with my strategy. Things sold, I started getting a good reputation I think (you don’t really know because you are always in the studio working)
But after a few years of this I was in 2-3 galleries and I noticed I was selling a seemingly reasonable amount of work at competitive prices at the time but I was not moving out of abject poverty. Hum. So I decided, I need to track my production and figure out what is going on here. So I kept a record book to carefully record my production, the current value of it, the size, etc. Every time I made something I thought I might put for sale, I wrote it down. At the end of a year I tallied up the year of work, how many pieces, the total retail value at that time, etc. and realized that if I sold everything at the current prices I would still be very, very poor. And you are not going to sell everything and what you do sell is going to take a long time. I am still selling things from more than two decades ago.
Well, that answered my question and I didn’t like the answer. What was I going to do about it? So I sat down and started thinking… Can I cut my expenses? Yeah right, I am forced to live as close to free as possible already. So, no to that idea. Can I double my prices? I don’t know, might cut down my sales? Can I double my production? Hum, I am working pretty hard already. Maybe I can double or triple the scale? Hum, that will slow me down, reduce production and working space and cost more to produce and ship. Maybe I need to start making paintings on canvas. Hum, that is expensive to and I like working with paper, paper is a big element of my thought process and working method. What to do, that to do… ?
Long story short, I decided to do all of the above, go up on prices as far as I could imagine without fear of losing too much market, increase scale and start making smallish paintings on canvas and then later bigger paintings on canvas or panel once I started seeing - to my surprise - people would buy them. But it took a few years to develop my method. Eventually, I was almost starting to make a living once I was starting to get checks in thousands of dollars instead of hundreds . Still though, not quite enough checks. Not enough to reliably live on and build enough savings that I didn’t have to constantly worry about making the bills. I needed a cushion, I needed at least 3-6 months worth of expenses saved up so I started thinking about that. I hate worry intruding on my creative time. That had to be addressed.
I started to try to build up savings. At the beginning I would put money away but then there might be a dry spell and I would have to burn through it. Glad I had it to burn through but now I had to start over again. It went on and on like that for a long time but eventually, in fairly recent years we got to the point of consistently having more coming in than going out. But in just the last few years! This had a lot to do with going much, much larger on paintings and way higher on prices for those new sizes. And low and behold they have been selling too. So it is a constant slow moving set of experiments on my part. I might be a slower thinker than some but I keep figuring it out as I go along slowly but surely.
One thing I realized, the collectors are not poor, they were not living under the same kinds of extreme limitations like I was as someone in poverty. Money was not an issue for them. They didn’t worry about making the house payment. So I slowly kept going up on prices. Much too slowly I now think, because I had mouths to feed, bills to pay and miles to travel before I sleep. I felt I had to be conservative. But really that was just poverty thinking. I had a hard time thinking about how people with wealth think and value things. If you are selling things too cheaply the people with money don’t respected it. “Why is it so cheap?” Suspicious. I am an artist I don’t usually think about that stuff. But low prices can work against you.
I still didn’t cover the nitty gritty details of exactly how to price what. It is going to be a little different for each artist. But a lot of the thinking process and how it evolved for me might give other artists some things to think about.
There are a lot more related insights and strategies I developed for myself that are not mentioned that have to do with thinking about the artist’s position in the market, taking into account all of the different players, how the collectors think, etc. I will try to remember to write about that later. The whole art world is a very complicated beast. The art market is also its own creature. It doesn’t work like a regular market.
Disclaimer:
Again, I have my limits, assumptions and unconscious biases and can only share my own thoughts, realizations, speculations and experience. I am sure some of it is spot on but some might still be a little off - hard for me to say. I am sure there is still a whole bunch of things I have not taken into consideration and can only wait for it to smack me in the head. To me everything is always tentative and experimental.
My secret plan is to eventually make the posts in the Touchonian a book about the Creative Lifestyle for Artists. You, my favorite readers, are privy to the book in it’s formation. I would really appreciate your help by making comments, asking questions and suggesting topics I should explore and write about. It is hard for me to dream up what artists need and want to know to keep going and keep creating. I have fifty years of figuring out all of the details I needed to keep going and become self-sustaining as an artist and want to share enough insight to smooth the path for others facing this complicated, daunting task of being a self-sustaining artist. I know from experience it can feel overwhelming, unreachable and even depressing. So feel free to say or ask something! Thanks in advance.
This is one of my favorites of your writings so far. It is reassuring knowing that you didn't price your art high, at first. I recently took on a commission for twice what my mother was paid for the same work, and the buyer didn't flinch, so I know I should/could have doubled my number again. UGH. Also, as my friend said, "you're LilyHopeWeaver, OF COURSE you should double your first instinct prices." So wild.
My husband and I never relied on art sales as we chose academics. Teaching. He has continued to produce way more than I, which is fine aa storage has become an issue. We produce more than we sell. Hahaha. Pricing always an issue. My husband is afraid to raise his prices. We haven’t found a gallery in our small city to be a rep. Show the work but not rep it. Our son, also an artist, raised his. And he has a gallery or two but not where we live. It’s so interesting. I think what you’ve written will be helpful to younger artists or an artist beginning a career as an artist.