Over in FB land, artist Bardia Jaan asks an often-asked question:
Easy easy question: how do you price your art?
Material cost + (hourly rate * number of hours * 2)? Plus studio cost Plus Misc stuff like going to Sushi?
That’s what I thought someone said. This might be for artists who have just started selling.
In my opinion, there's really no formula - art for sale is a commodity; therefore, ECON 101 tells us about how prices in most cases is driven by supply and demand, but that doesn't work for 99.999% of us because it only works for that art that is very limited in supply but in high demand.
About a decade ago, you could pick up a painting by my good friend Sam Gilliam at a local DC area auction house for hundreds of dollars, because there was no "demand" and buyers were not willing to pay above a few hundreds for a Gilliam canvas from the past.
Ten years ago this Gilliam painting from 1972 was estimated at $1000-2000 and sold for $600. That painting is now probably worth several tens of thousands of dollars if not 100s.
Why?
A couple of things happened driven by art galleries (not in DC) "discovering" Gilliam and suddenly there was a demand, and his prices skyrocketed and it couldn't have happened to a nicer person!
Or take the case of Carmen Herrera, for decades and decades her canvasses sold for practically nothing (if they even sold) - then a curator from the Tate "discovered" this artist who had an amazing pedigree (she showed alongside some of the greats of art in the 40x, 50s, etc.) and organized a retrospective for Herrera at the Tate, and suddenly the world art collectors discovered her work and rushed to buy it - creating the demand and thus a huge rise in prices.
More examples?
In the 60s Alice Neel was on welfare and traded her paintings to Lida Moser for Moser to take slides of her work so that Neel could try to get galleries interested in her work... then... go back to the top of this post and substitute "Neel" for those two artists... cough, cough...
