Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Tue, 20 Jul 1999 21:08:34 +0000
Sam Wang wrote:
>
> - there IS a general market ballpark figure for every kind of prints
>
If that's so, why not post a list of those ballpark figures? I'm sure
that would be helpful to the original questioner, as well as to a lot of
other folks.
I will follow Bob Schramm's lead and share some actual experience
instead of generalities:
When I started showing gum prints, I was working completely isolated and
had no idea what to charge and no one to ask. I spent a weekend in
Seattle, the nearest "big" city, to research prices. Though I knew I
couldn't charge city prices in my coastal town, I hoped at least to find
a baseline to scale down from. There was a regional juried photography
exhibit in town as well as a number of galleries showing photographs. I
naively assumed that I would see some gum prints, but there wasn't one
on view in the entire place. The only alternative prints I saw were
some vintage platinum prints by Myra Wiggins, very small (like 3x5
inches) in HUGE mats straightpinned to the gallery wall. They were
priced at $4,000 each. (Not that it matters to this discussion, but
though they'd been hanging a month or more, none of them had sold.)
So I came home, no wiser than before, and set my prices by trying to
find a balance point between the two considerations of the time and
materials in each print on the one hand, and a price that might have
some chance of resulting in sales on the other. I settled on a price of
just under $100 for one-coat gums and just under $200 for multiple gums
including tricolor gums. (I don't work in editions; each print is one of
a kind and I almost never repeat images although I am often asked to.) I
wasn't making much for my time at that rate, but the prints sold well
and after a while I was able to raise prices without seeing any
reduction in sales. And Sam is so right: you can always raise prices,
but you can NEVER lower them.
>- price, unfortunately, also decides the amount of viewer enjoyment:
"wouldn't you rather look at a print you know is worth lots
>>of $$$?
I'm sorry, I don't agree with that at all. It's not true of me and I
don't think it's true of the folks who buy my work. I think of the art I
own, and in every case I bought the piece because I loved it, not
because of how much I thought it was worth in dollars. And besides, one
person's dollars aren't the same as another's. I've had people buy my
prints who had so little money they had to pay for months and months
before they could take the piece home; it gives me a lot of satisfaction
to know that those people chose to buy one of my prints rather than a TV
set or something. If you take the stance that you should price the work
to be attractive to people for whom price rather than the quality of the
work itself determines the "value" of the work. then you'd better have
some other source of income. I'd rather sell to people who buy art
because it means something to them regardless of price.
My 2cents.
Katharine Thayer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu Oct 28 1999 - 21:40:36