There is a wonderful analogy used at the beginning of the book The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, where the author describes any entrepreneur as a company of three strongly distinct individuals: the entrepreneur, the operator/manager and the technician/craftsperson.

When we start to offer our skills and services to others, we inevitably become all three, but one of the biggest problems for a lot of us artists (pretty much the majority, really), is that we love the craft and enjoy it immensely, but have no clue or even desire to do the business part and management of our small business.

Just like Ferrari and Honda don’t use the same pricing model for their products, we artists have to differentiate between two distinct ways to approach our prices. Depending on whether we aim to have a go at the gallery system or sell our art directly, we need to adjust our behaviour to fit either one of the markets demands.

Today I want to talk about the gallery model and the way I believe any one of us should think about our prices, if indeed we are going all in and focusing on becoming part of the fine art market.

Being an artist is a full-time job and then some; creativity doesn’t just come on its own and setting up a routine for us to be able to create day in and day out takes a lot of effort. And so does marketing and taking pictures and writing applications for open calls and all the other stuff we do. 

But there may be an aspect of our job that a lot of us never think about, because it’s more boring than a weekend of watching paint dry, but alas, it is incredibly important in the long run, so today I want to talk about archival work and cataloging.

As tastes in art are incredibly subjective, the value of any particular piece can seem like it has been decided upon on a whim. But while this may even be true for many a piece of art being sold today, there are many factors that can be defined and influence the value and as such, the price of our art.

Knowing who to sell to and what their needs are is crucial; too many artists struggle with not knowing who their target group is or what they want. While we might think that portraits are for everybody (I mean, the majority of people I know have a face and therefore can be potential customers), the reality actually is much more complex, when demand is taken into consideration.

But before we think about how much people might like our work, we need to find out who they are first. Regardless of what we produce, the question is always the same: Who is it for and why do they need it?

And the easiest way is to compare art to drill bits — yep, we obviously know what we are doing here.

Up until this point, we have been discussing pricing as a one-sided equation of how much I as an artist need to get, to pay for whatever my lifestyle or other financial requirements are. But sales are never just a one-sided discussion — a deal always has to have two sides.

And while of course it’s imperative to find a good place to set-up our side of the equation (meaning we don’t sell our work for bread crumbs, and are consistent in our pricing structure), there is an equally important part that a lot of us may not give too much thought to, but is imperative that we understand.

The customer.

We’ve talked about setting our prices by the hour and calculating them via size and base fees, and now it’s time to tie it all together and talk about project based pricing. 

What I mean by this is the way we present our prices to our customers; the easiest and most straightforward way is to just add all of our expenses, base fees and pricing model of choice and end up with some rounded-up number, but a bit of tweaking can make our prices a lot more understandable and transparent to our customers.

Cars can sometimes be confusingly used to extend ones, well, let’s call it perception of self to be kind. Art on the other hand, cannot only provide us with a symbolic extension — sometimes it’s even made in the literal shape of one. But today’s podcast is not so much about sizing-up as it is about putting a price tag on it, so brace yourselves, because we’re going to explore the pricing-by-size model of art evaluation.

In yesterday’s podcast, I discussed the importance of calculating ones base expenses and all-around financial needs on a yearly basis, and today we’re going to look at one of the most popular but potentially most problematic ways of determining how much our art is actually worth.

This model has a lot going for it — especially for anyone starting out — as it is the easiest to use in order to determine how we’re going to make the minimum amount we need to make, for our business and personal life to flourish and even eventually come to the point, where art becomes our full-time profession. But it has a lot of problems, too!

Story is Everything is a booklet I prepared for United Art Space and in this podcast, Michelle and I discuss the importance of storytelling, narrative and context in art. And, if you like to get to know more about Michelle's project United Art Space, here are the links: United Art Space Website, United Art Space Facebook, United Art Space Instagram. Enjoy!