What determines the monetary value of art?

I went to Gallery Night in Providence last night. I had a ball! But I couldn't help but notice the prices on some of the descriptions of the pieces I was looking at.

Some of them seemed reasonable; this set of four small paintings was listed as $250 altogether, a price I would gladly pay for them if I could afford such a purchase. The picture doesn't do them justice, they're much more vibrant in real life.

The same artist also had some fairly large paintings, which cost at or above $2,000(!).

I went to the URI gallery, and it seemed to be work all by one artist. I'm not putting her name here--heaven forbid Google find this page. She had a lot of sculptures made with what appeared to be wire woven together, strongly resembling chicken wire. The prices of these sculptures could possibly be justified by sheer effort alone, ignoring asthetics; imagine if you had to make chicken wire by hand, and then make a snake-like sculpture out of it? She also had several drawings, I guess they could be described as geometric? Lots of straight lines. Some had lines with interwoven circle patterns, and those were pretty cool.

I normally try and be fairly open minded when it comes to art. I know that I won't always "get it" and that doesn't always mean it's not "good." It's just my opinion.

But then I saw this sculpture that instantly flipped the cynical switch in my brain.
≡ Click to see image ≡

It's called Volume Study: Anchored.
It is a concrete block that is roughly 1 1/2' from left to right, 1' from front to back, and 1' tall (probably a little shorter), with a few scraps of wire and orange mesh on top.
The price of this sculpture is $1,500.

$1,500.

Now, is there something I should know? Unlike paintings, are the prices of some of the more abstract, "modern" works... rhetorical or something? Is it some unit of measure for how much the artist likes it?

I know I'm not the best person to be talking about this. My friend and her mother had the hardest time trying to pay me for taking her senior portraits. I feel almost guilty accepting what I view to be comparatively exorbinant sums of cash for performing a very simple act, that I enjoy doing!

But the prices of this piece, and some pieces I've seen in the past, astound me. Especially when I see no correlation between what's in front of me and the number of figures after the dollar sign.

What do you guys think?

Andrew Brennan
GYOFB: Trivial Rant, 2008
text, image on website
$1.25

As an aside, what do you call the little white cards in art galleries and museums that contain the information that I spoofed at the bottom of my post? Is there an official term, or are they just "descriptions?"

What determines the monetary value of art?

Theoretically, it's just the same as anything else: the maximal value someone is willing to pay for it. Once you've made something and decided to sell it, the amount of time and effort you put into it shouldn't have any bearing on the price you charge.

In practice, however, a lot of artists don't think like this, and end up incorporating their emotional attachment to the work, the time they spent on it, and subjective judgements of its quality, into their pricing decisions.

I once helped out at a private view of a friend's mother's work, and her rationale for pricing was crazy. Also, she lost some of the description cards shortly before people were due to turn up, so we had to make up half the prices on the spot. That said, one couple walked in and five minutes later casually handed me a $10,000 cheque for one of her paintings, so to some extent people will pay for art regardless of how inconsistent and ad hoc the prices are.

I think there have been several discussions on Metafilter why art is priced the way it is and the whole art is subjective, blah, blah. I'll try to find some posts because I'm interested in the subject as well.

The artist of the four small paintings that also had large paintings for 2000 dollars might be absolutely reasonable if it took more time and effort. I don't think I'm paying 2000 dollars for art anytime soon, but that price isn't too steep if it's good and you like it.

The concrete block sculpture is not pleasing to me in the least. It is worth nothing to me but might be worth a great deal to another person. 1,500 is crazy - to me. I wouldn't pay five dollars for it. I think art prices can be overly inflated. I have little desire to be a collector. I don't buy art as an investment, obviously, but some people do. Maybe this sculptor is up an coming. Maybe it took him forever for the concrete to dry. Haha. Probably he thought it was worth that. I wonder if artists have some sort of pricing system they go by.

I want art that effects me in a positive way. I don't want anything that is ugly, disturbing, or sad in my house. Although I can appreciate it in museums, galleries, books, etc.

I don't know what the little white cards are called.

Take for instance this little oil painting I paid 19 dollars for. It's cute as a button and I have two others by the same artist that I group together. Her larger oil paintings are obviously a lot more money because they take more time (months in some cases).

I love this 25 x 30 painting for 295 bucks. I don't know why I haven't bought it yet. I bought two other paintings very recently (that look similar to this) to fill a wall to replace prints that I bought to fill a wall. Never buy art just to fill a wall. You think I would have learned that buy now!)

Here is one AskMe question.

My aunt is an artist in a small town, who shows her work at a small-town gallery. My father and grandmother have also shown things in the same gallery, so perhaps my perspective is a little different, but anyway here it is.

Artists were largely free to set their own prices at that gallery, which causes a lot of angst and heartbreak for amateur artists. On one hand, they DO feel a need to be compensated for their time. Yet, they want pieces to be sold so that they're not cluttering up the house at the end of the exhibit. There's also a feeling of inadequacy when it comes to putting a monetary value on their work - if I think a painting is worth $1000, but no one buys it, what does that say about me as an artist?

Oftentimes, artists will price pieces way higher than they think it's worth, because they don't think anyone will buy it. I suspect that's the case with the concrete piece. Would you have considered buying it at $100? Probably not. It's a show-piece, meant to give future patrons and idea of the artist's aesthetics. It's not really a living-room piece.

The little white cards are just called labels. The words on them are label text. I write it sometimes; a great deal of care and thought goes into those little white cards at a museum or at a serious gallery. Each label will have at least the following, usually in this order: title of piece, date, media (what it's made of) and dimensions. It might also have the name of the artist (definitely will if it's a group show) and the price. More upscale galleries will never put the price on the label; they will have a separate price list that you can get from the intimidatingly gorgeous twenty something sitting at the main desk looking bored. In a museum, label text will also usually include some more information about the object or the artist or the time period; sometimes that will be covered in a larger label and the immediate object label will only contain the basic information. Also in a museum the label will have a number on one corner: that's the acquisition number and it's how the object is tracked by the registrar in the collection.

Ah, prices. Before you start pricing things out at cost of paint and canvas and $5.15 an hour artist' time, remember that an artist will often be lucky to sell three or four paintings a year. If that artist doesn't have a day job, well, then $5,000 a painting is barely subsistence living. So keep that in mind. Generally, artists on the very bottom level of the art world (like me and a lot of my friends) will charge around $200 or thereabouts for a small painting and up to $2500 for a big one. Those are your local artists who show in bars and coffee shops and small local galleries. They may be artists who have never had a one person show (a one person show is one of the pinnacles of an artists career.) Also, you want your work to be valued. A gallery who is looking for artists and realizes that you're selling drawings for $50 a piece knows that you don't value your own stuff. And, remember also that most galleries take at least a 50% commission. Some take more. 70% is not unheard of.

As the artist gets better known - work is juried into larger exhibitions, the artist is written about in magazines and gets good reviews, the artist gets representation from larger, better established galleries, the prices begin to climb. If the artist makes it all the way - represented in museum collections, retrospective exhibitions, major galleries in New York or London or Tokyo, stuff being auctioned at Sothebys, then the prices go astronomical because that art then becomes an investment. So it's the combination of name recognition, time invested, critics, gallery or galleries representing, auction houses and museums (they do not price work at all but having pieces in a museum collection is still in many ways an imprimatur of worth) who really drive up an artists' work and set the prices. It's not a simple equation and then for site specific an installation work it gets even weirder.

Can it be hacked? Yes. It can. Given a sufficiently driven artists agent or a gallery things will suddenly go sky high that maybe were never worth it. For example, Jean-Michel Basquiat. IMHO, he was a good artist with great potential. He died before that potential was realized. A lot of his stuff is on the level of student work. Some of it reaches higher. But the notoriety is definitely why he's priced so high.

All that's said above is true.

A couple of years ago, in a Philosophy of Art class, we spent a morning talking about art prices. We worked out some price-setting sums, set into context with the artist's material costs, the artist's cost of living, the price of maintaining a studio (or potter's shed or darkroom), the cost of education, training, or apprenticeship, and some other factors. For the purposes of the exercise, we left out very influential factors like notoriety and surges in popularity.

I cannot remember the sums or the formulas. I do know that suddenly art prices seemed far more reasonable to me, and that impression has lasted.

I know you didn't ask, and free advice is worth less than it costs... but... you sound (and not for the first time) as if you undervalue your own worth, both literally and metaphorically.

These are really good answers.

I just want to throw out there that when I was involved in a photography gallery opening at the beginning of April, our group had a lot of discussions about pricing. Most of it did revolve over the fine line between valuing our own art as Important, and how much someone would be willing to pay (factoring in the supplies and the frames and the time involved). One photographer sold his 5-inch by 5-foot panorama of the Chugach Mountains, but I don't remember what price he set. To the best of my knowledge, his is the only one that sold - and on opening night, too.

I didn't put a price on mine because I didn't want to sell it, and also it feels pretentious. And also I probably undervalue my work and my worth as a photographer. Who am I to tell you that you should pay me $150 for "just a snapshot." But I'm working on this.

As an aside, what do you call the little white cards in art galleries and museums that contain the information that I spoofed at the bottom of my post? Is there an official term, or are they just "descriptions?"

I work at an art museum, and used to work at my parents' art gallery. The museum term for that info (artist name, birth-death dates [if included], title, year, medium] is "the tombstone." In galleries, they're just called labels.

As for how artists determine their prices: I wrote a semi-lengthy post on AskMe about a year ago regarding how my father determines his prices. I'll post a link to it when Mefi's done with its massage.

scody, I've worked at two art museums and a science museum and I've never heard tombstone before! We always just call them labels. I wonder if it's a west coast thing?

Maybe... I know they call them tombstones at the other L.A. museums where I've known editors (MOCA, Getty, Norton Simon). But we also have an editor in our department who used to work in New York at the Whitney, and she's always called them tombstones, too. Weird!

Here's what I posted last year about how my dad determines prices for his artwork.

I worked at the Walters in Baltimore & the Asheville Art Museum (where the director came from the exhibitions dept. at the Guggenheim) and they've always just been labels. Bizarr-o.

Another thing-I have noticed that artwork can sell better if priced higher, at times. I used to practically give my artwork away, though.

this reminds me, I need to start painting again.