A Long Answer to Your Short Question

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.

THE COMPLICATED ANSWER

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 three months salary! It’s a two-hundred-year-old printing process that’s supremely 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.³

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.

THE VERY VERY SIMPLE ANSWER

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 tries to sell a painting that was once worth $80,000—but the style of painting had recently fallen out of vogue and no one wants to buy it for that price anymore—that painting is not, in fact, worth $80,000 anymore.

Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian, 2019

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 reason⁴ 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:

• Can I comfortably afford this, either outright or on a payment plan?

• Is the price of this work commensurate with the amount of pleasure I will get from enjoying it every day?

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. I am adding this footnote post-publication to bring attention to something that an artist, Grace Weston, so thoughtfully illuminated in the comment section. She said that the real answer to the question of how long something took her to make is: “My whole life - because that is what has gone into it - my experience, my evolved skills, my thinking, my individuality, everything that makes that piece something only I could have made.”

4. If the reason is that it matches your couch, please don’t mention that to the artist.