How To Price Art Are You Pricing Your Art Work Wrong?
Knowing how to price your art can be intimidating. It is one of the things artists ask me about the most.
Do you price your art in the same way a lot of other artists do? Are you so traumatized by the very question of pricing that you decide to wait for posthumous fame?
Let them discover you after you are dead? That way, you can hide your work, so no one will ever ask how much it costs.
Or are you attaching your self-worth when you price art? This means choosing the biggest number you can think of, thus inflating your prices to match your ego.
Or do you find yourself wishing you could give your work away for free, so you do not have to set a price? Better yet, maybe you even tell customers to pay whatever they think it is worth, and you will take anything, so you do not have to price it.
This trick never works. You must stop giving yourself away.
Instead, why don’t you try this? Educate yourself about the market, so you can price art with confidence and feel comfortable standing by your art prices.
Whether you intend to make a living from your art or not, pricing art correctly is important.
Confidence in Pricing Is Born From Knowledge
When it comes to pricing art, you are in good hands. I know my stuff.
I have priced contemporary art for years, for thousands of artists. I have even been certified by the American Society of Appraisers as an expert in fine art. Appraisers are professionals who determine the value of artwork for auction houses, insurance companies, tax purposes, and for collectors.
And this is my best advice for how to price art: You want to grow your market like a garden. That means you want to prepare the soil and sow the seeds with low prices and patiently tend your career so your prices can grow organically.
Do not be in a hurry. Do not price art with your pride or emotions.
But why am I telling you to start with low prices? The reason is this: You do not want to lower your art prices. Avoid that at all costs. OK, I am not saying you cannot ever, ever lower your art prices, but I really would not do it lightly.
If you start pricing your art low and raise your art prices gradually, you can make sure the market will always support you. But if you lower your prices, you are telling your collectors they made a bad investment. Think about it.
Sure, people buy art because they have an aesthetic, emotional, or conceptual connection to your work. But at the end of the day, art is an investment. And they are investing in you, in your career. They are hoping the value of your work goes up.
So, for their sake, have a steady hand when navigating your career. Raise your art prices slowly so you do not find yourself having to lower them — not unless it is necessary.
When things like recessions and economic downturns happen, you can be sure they will affect your sales. I have found the art world is always the first to be hit and the last to recover economically. But that does not mean you stop working.
I once asked art superstar Kiki Smith how economic downturns affected her art practice when she was starting out. She remembered those times when she had no sales whatsoever and could not even afford supplies. When that happened, she went out on the street and got cardboard.
She said a recession might affect you economically. It might affect the decision making of what materials you use. But it does not affect your work.
“Artists get stopped where they want to be stopped,” she said. So rather than letting economics stop her, she just adjusted to what was happening.
That is such strong advice. If the bottom falls out of the market, just figure out a way to keep working, to keep making art.
It will change again. That is the nature of the market. And that is why it is so important to educate yourself thoroughly about how this business works — so you can weather storms and come out sailing.
How To Start Pricing Your Art
Begin with research and consider your audience. Do you show your work in a prestigious gallery? Or are you selling out of your studio? Is your work on the wall of a gift shop or a Michelin-starred restaurant? Is it online?
What I am asking is what your audience is willing to pay. What are their expectations?
Here is a question: Have you ever shown at an art event and found you were the highest-priced artist there? It is mortifying, isn’t it?
Or even worse, that you were the lowest priced! My friend, artist Andy Smith, told me a story of being at an art fair and watching everyone else sell around him. But no one was interested in his stuff.
An artist from the next booth finally took pity and came over to see what the problem was. He took a pen and added a zero to each of Andy’s prices. And it worked!
This is an example of matching your art prices to your audience’s expectations.
Now, when pricing art, it is also important to look at your contemporaries. What prices are they selling at? Once you find someone who is selling in your geographical region and your artistic genre, you get a firm sense of what their art prices look like.
Then you can start to adjust for your work and your career experiences. For example, let’s say you found an artist who shows work like yours in the same geographical area and who shows in the same sort of venues. Note how the artist priced their art.
Now you start making adjustments. Adjust for your resume. If the artist has had more one-person shows than you or been included in a museum exhibition, the artist will have a higher price tag than what you ask.
If you have more professional accomplishments, your art prices might be higher than the artist’s prices.
Next, adjust for the size of the work. Bigger pieces equal bigger money.
What about the medium? Paintings and sculpture cost more than photographs, prints, and other works on paper.
I want you to research at least five artists in your geographical region, doing the same kind of work as you, and learn about their prices, their professional experience, and their market.
I know this is not a science. It sounds hazy and imprecise. But it is not. The key is to dive in and really study the art prices of your contemporaries until you see the patterns and precedents emerge.
And that is how you begin to get a real understanding of how pricing works in your market. From there, you will be able to find your place and your price.
I know, I know. It is a lot of work.
Everyone thinks there is a magic formula they somehow do not know. And though I am sorry to say there is not, this really is how to best price art. You just cannot get around it.
And I warn you to be incredibly careful of anyone who advises otherwise. There are a lot of so-called art coaches out there in Google land who pretend to know what they are talking about. They want to sell you the easy option.
But check their experience. Because if art is your business, you do not want to be taking professional advice from just anyone.