Equality at Work - How to Price Your Art Without Conformity and Despotism

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Painting of Dennis Wilson (Beachboy) 50" x 70" acrylic/latex on unstretched canvas

First – do not tell your client how easy it was to create your artwork or they won’t respect it, there-by devaluing your ability and talent. For example: If you can do a drawing in a couple of hours tell them it took a week and you suffered black-lung disease from the charcoal dust. This pricing policy is based on equality between you and the client so they need to know you have struggled and endured.

The best clients have struggled through their MBA program and now sells sub-prime mortgages or unsecured bonds – and we all know how hard those items are to sell. Like you, they are selling an intangible item that has no intrinsic value. So you have to establish grounds for cooperation in place of competition for their all-mighty dollar. Because, invariably, they have the money and you don’t.

Here is how the pricing policy works. Let’s say it takes five days (in an eight hour day) for you to create a piece of art. Your price on the work is exactly the same to everyone – and I mean everyone. You want, in return for your five days of work, the same amount of money your client makes in the same time period. For example – you paint the portrait of a piano bar musician who makes (between his gig fee and tips) around two hundred dollars a night. The musician pays one thousand dollars for the portrait. Let’s say you paint the portrait of the Wal-Mart greeter who works the third shift. He makes ten dollars an hour (if he is lucky) and only works six hours a night. He pays three hundred dollars. But you get an attorney and he is making three hundred dollars an hour. That is twenty four hundred dollars a day or twelve thousand dollars in five days. That is what he pays. Twelve thousand dollars.

As you can imagine this pricing policy brings out deep-seated resentment in some "would-be" clients. And just so you know why this irritates some people so much: it is that you (the artist) think you are on equal footing with them.

Now – you know who will yell that your price is way out of line. But it is not. Everyone pays the same price. Five days of labor. I have had lawyer men tell me this is not fair. Fair? Fair? And I tell them they are welcome to come over and take five days painting my house and we will call it even. Or he can give me five days of that lawyering stuff he does.

But you may still run into some resistance with the attorney. He will say that he spent a lot of time in attorney school. You counter with the fact that you also spent years in graduate school and have your Master in Fine Art (MFA) and have fifty thousand dollars in student loans to prove it. He will say he has a large, plush office to maintain and needs it to impress his clients and justify his high fees. And you counter and say you have a large and luxurious studio that you have to maintain to impress your patrons. He punches and you counter-punch. And he will come up with enough excuses for why his time is more valuable than yours. And at some point his arguing skills will wear your down. At that point you say: "Okay. Okay. You are right. I’ll knock off twenty percent and you can have it for seventy-two hundred."

Do not sell your artwork short. When pricing your artwork here are my final words: Thousands and thousands of years ago "man" started painting on the walls of caves. (That is – if you believe in evolution. If you don’t then quit painting like someone else does) If god wanted artists to bend over he would have had those cave people paint on the floor.

PS: If you do not like this pricing policy check blog posting: "Capitalist at Work - Pricing Your Art in a laissez-faire Manner"

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