Part Two: How to price your artwork
Questions to help you form a value-based pricing strategy
This newsletter is a follow-up to my previous post: A non-definitive guide to pricing your work—part of the ongoing Artist Relations series that provides real, actionable advice for working artists.
If the above post is a starting point that is formulaic, stressing the importance of reliability and consistency in pricing, the following is about the philosophy behind pricing. I’ve received a lot of great questions, most of which can be boiled down to: how do I know where to set my pricing?
This has to be the trickiest question to answer, and can’t be done in a single post. It’s bound to take me a few parts to really dig into the complicated psychology of pricing in the art world. I have lots of ideas: I can interview a luxury marketer about price psychology, track historic pricing trends in the art world, and ask artists what their prices are and share them in an act of transparency.
Today’s newsletter asks questions instead of providing answers, hopefully inching you closer to the important decision of how to price your art.
A brief programming announcement:
Come for a run with me! And talk about public art. As part of my Curatorial Residency at NAMARA | projects, I’m hosting an Art Run/Walk Club on August 17th in Toronto. We’ll meet at Dundas and McCaul, and end at the Toronto Music Garden.
This programming is part of my ongoing residency where I’m thinking about art outside of the “white cube”. How do we experience art every day? How do we talk about it? How does movement influence how we look at art? Sport and art are often closer than we think, so I’m also having a little bit of fun with incorporating a run into this residency.
Questions For a Value-Based Pricing Strategy
How can your values as an artist help you set your pricing? Below, I’ve listed out some questions and encapsulations about pricing art holistically.
Less: This is how much you should price your work. More: How to find a price that makes you feel good about selling your work and supports your life.