This is not the perennial problem of how much to ask for a piece of art-work, but the related question of how much should the client pay for an artist’s time and skill. What is the going rate for a “professional artist”? The question has arisen for me in trying to decide how much to ask for my fee in relation to the commission for the design of memorial windows (discussed in earlier posts).
It’s actually a very old problem. In his biography of Mozart, Norbert Elias reckons that Mozart was the first artist to try to break away from the convention that a composer/musician was just a rather highly-skilled artisan. That was the kind of scale on which they were paid as retainers in noble households or ecclesiastical establishments. Mozart wanted to establish the notion of art as a profession, and not just as a craft. I think I’ll leave the interesting question of what exactly is a “professional artist” until a later post. Let’s look for the moment at the more practical matter. How much should I ask? (“What can I get away with?” Or is it “How much am I worth?”)
If I look back at the kind of daily fee I could expect when I was employed in the University, and occasionally working as a consultant, as I did from time to time, there is no way in which I could expect to ask for that as an artist. Similarly, the sums routinely demanded by barristers or consulting engineers would make anybody commissioning an artist run a mile, or fall about laughing. My intuitive response, when I try to convert a ball-park overall figure into an hourly rate, works out at the amount I might expect to get as a semi-skilled manual worker. OK: I’m no Mozart, but it looks as if the battle he started to fight is still to be fought.