Re: Editioning ... and Unique Works of Art

From: Tom Ferguson <tomf2468@pipeline.com>
Subject: Re: Editioning ... and Unique Works of Art
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 13:38:23 -0700

> This subject may have been over analyzed!

True.

> My $450US starting price is not for hand made paper work. But, your
> comment does work as a perfect example of what the "selling" artists
> are up against, and it is hardest on photographic artists. Just a few
> posts ago I said "You can buy a Burkholder or Enfield or Arentz for the
> price of a new chair" and you replied "No thanks, I have photographic
> memory of images I like :-)".

It's nice to know that, but I didn't try to mean much when I said
"photographic memory." I wanted to make paper for some time but
thought it must be very hard. My material already takes too much time
and effort to make, so I'm trying not to think about making paper
myself...

> So, if my "new chair" price (about $600-900US in my estimation) is too
> much for you to even consider, how is my $450 too low?

You might have read that $450 too low if the work used handmade paper
from my post, but not $600 for a chair part... I understand that
pricing is a difficult matter. (thanks for the comparison and links.)
But speaking of the furniture, I have a little observation.

In Boston area where I lived for almost a decade, it appears that both
furniture stores and galleries seem to have hard time because of tough
market. While in college people talked like new furniture was
something to pick up from the street on the last week of August (when
everyone moves because vast majority of leases begin on Sept 1st) and
laughed at each other being cheap. But people actually do this. You
want a new chair, a new sofa, a new dining table, wait to end of
August and drive around such and such area with a pickup truck. Only
the thing that never gets picked up from the street is CRT monitor for
computers. Now one of my friends own a gallery in downtown Boston but
he seriously tells me that he makes much more sales through web than
anything else, and most of the work get shipped to NY, CA, other
places one would expect. Since making these observations, I somehow
started thinking that sales of furniture and art work in a city are
highly correlated. If people own large house, they spend money for
furniture and art. If people pay premium dollars to rent small places,
neither furniture nor art is likely to fit in the home.

Incidentally, the "photographic memory" part poped up in my mind
because of my shocking memory while in college. There is a famous
mathematician called Paul Halmos. His book on measure theory is a
classic book that every student of analysis and probability theory
must read. So I studied that dense book, and wondered what other books
this guy wrote. Catalog search at library showed a book titled "I have
a photographic memory" or something like that. I wasn't sure if such a
book was written by the same man, but I went to the stack to find
out. It was his book, and the book was filled with pictures of his
friends and mathematicians. That was a photographic memory.

--
Ryuji Suzuki
"You have to realize that junk is not the problem in and of itself.
Junk is the symptom, not the problem."
(Bob Dylan 1971; source: No Direction Home by Robert Shelton)