I am thoroughly fed up of the suggestions I encounter frequently that my work is over-priced. Even my dear wife remarked yesterday, of a piece she admires, “If you put that on show for £75 people would bite your hand off”. The price for which I was proposing to sell it is £110. I slept badly last night because of a cough, and when I got up to take some medication I fell to thinking about the question of how I (and indeed, artists mote generally) ought to approach the pricing of our work.
I simple sum seems appropriate. Given the fact that I use quite good quality art paper, it is not unreasonable to assume that materials for a normal piece of work will cost me £10. If I price my labour at the national minimum wage for adults in this country, namely £9.50 per hour, and I assume that a relatively small picture might occupy me for 5 hours on each of 4 days, my labour costs work out at £190. As it happens, the piece which prompted this conversation has a frame I inherited from my parents, so cost nothing, but if I had to spend money on it I can ‘t see that I could get a decent frame for a work of that size for less than £40. We arrive at an estimate of £240. I was astonished to realise that I am proposing to sell this item at less than half the cost of its production …. and this takes no account of other costs, such as transport to the gallery and commission, and so on.
The question of how much I charge for my work has been troubling me for some time, and I have been alert to comparisons with colleagues. The current display in the Manor House gallery is interesting, in that the space my work occupies is next to that used by a group of local artists from Ilkley. I’ve noticed that my prices are rather lower then theirs for comparable work.
I’ve noticed one other thing also, and that is that the majority of the members of their group are married women. This is the case also in the Unit 9 group to which I belong. By far the greater proportion of artists in this country are, in effect, subsidised from other sources. Working partners is one such, but were it not for my pension from my former university service I could not afford to do what I do. Other employment (usually a position as a teacher of art) is commonplace among artists. In fact, under-charging for art work in this country is endemic, and the public is dreadfully misled by the reports one reads in the press about the astronomical prices that can be earned by a very small coterie of colleagues at the top of the pyramid.*
*Or, given the steepness of the gradient, perhaps a totem pole would be a less misleading metaphor.