How to price your art?
Pricing your art is simple, it may be difficult, but it’s simple—the price should reflect the quality.
This is a much debated topic and I’ve heard and read and watched most of the “standards” on pricing our art. I’ve also dialogued with fellow artist on how to set prices—time based, by square feet, materials used and so on. The best advice that sounds objectively accurate to my ears is to price your art based on quality. I whole heartedly disagree that there should be one standard for all artist. All people are equal, all art is not.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not objective enough nor am I knowledgeable enough (yet) to answer, “what is the quality of this piece?! We need to grow ourselves as artists and as humans to be honest, as well as remove our egos enough to set honest prices. This approach forces us to drop the inner critic and habitual self judgement and offer an honest assessment of our work. Frankly that also means developing the humility to ask for help because almost no one is qualified to judge their own in the beginning. So, I set the price I think and then talk to an art expert who helps me finalize my price.
The art community is just that, a community and often times an art loving expert will be more than happy to lend their opinion to emerging artist. I’m growing as an artist and as a person with this priceless outside object influence, very humbling and incredibly helpful.
“It doesn’t matter how long it took or what materials you used, what matters is how good is it?” Makes sense. Everything on earth is priced that way. Every price for everything is: “Get as much money as you can”. As much money as you can is based on market value and quality.
“Every artist, even the great ones, have made crappy works.” Also so simple and true.
So I forget how long a piece takes me, I dismiss price per square inch and I’ve chucked the notion of materials being a main influence. If you make a turd with 24k gold-leaf, it’s still a turd—it’s just gold.
I’m turning the screws on my ego and humbly approaching the art world with honest prices with the desire to bring art to everyone.
Hope you found this helpful, it certainly changed everything for me.