Some things people have told me about selling art this month

1. You must NEVER, NEVER, give your work away for free. It means it has no value.
2. Price things depending on what you need. If you need a laptop, that string’s worth £1,000.
3. Prices must never be round numbers or it looks like you’ve made them up.
4. You just have to make the prices up.
5. If I love a work and it’s cheap I’ll buy it for myself; if it’s expensive I’ll buy it for my collection.
6. Artists need a good few years of making work before they start selling, or they might never get their work straight. A lot of good artists never became great because they started selling to early.
7. I think you’re just going to have to grow up about it.

It needs a thinking gaze

On Saturday while we ate our V.I.P. cinnamon whirls two New York collectors Susan and Michael Hort talked us through their approach to art collecting.

They keep all the artworks they’ve acquired in their home, but they can only show about fifteen per cent of it at any one time because of space. They’ve thought about opening a museum to house it all, but keep coming back to the conclusion that they want the work to be lived around. To keep the works in circulation they rehang almost everything every four or five years (a handful of works are permanent fixtures; a handful are no longer loved), lend work out to museums and galleries on request, and have big brunch receptions so the work reaches a wider (but still exclusive) audience.

Art Market

When my sister and I were quite young (I was six probably, and she would have been seven or eight) we spent a whole day making small saleable items out of paper and rubber bands and card and plasticine and sellotape, including very possibly some sculptures made entirely of sellotape, which were a speciality.

Then out in the garden we put up some tables and arranged on top of them all the things we’d made. By now there were dozens because many of them were variations on a theme and so didn’t need much time or effort to make in a good quantity, and some were very carefully made, and there were some things in groups and some things on their own, and then we put prices on all of them and called our parents down because there was a summer fête.

ARTISTS DRIVE THE BUS

Last week I found a book called Letters to a Young Artist, with a front cover so ghastly I’ve had to actually tear it off. The idea is that a recent art graduate wrote to several established artists for advice about maintaining integrity while participating in the art world, and printed in the book are their replies. Below is an extract from Gregory Amenoff’s response, in which he lists some things the reader might want to remember “as you continue on your chosen path in visual art”:

“As you read them, imagine me yelling them at you with urgency!

First and foremost you must remember that ARTISTS DRIVE THE BUS! It is an easy thing to forget. We sometimes feel we are at the bottom of the heap (artist as victim). But for an artist in his/her studio, working in relative isolation and producing objects from the imagination – no critics, no curators, no art historians or art history departments, no museums, no auction houses, and, finally, no galleries. The entire enterprise is built on one central event: the creative act in the studio.

Getting round to the Money Question

I want to sort out my ideas about selling my artwork. It’s been coming up a lot lately in things I’ve been reading, conversations I’ve had, and especially with talk about the price list for this exhibition.

At the moment my part of the Citations price list has no prices on, and just asterisks pointing to a rather ambiguous “for acquisitions please contact the artist”. I was careful to use the word “acquisitions” rather than “sales” because I am open to people having my work, I’m just not sure exchanging money is the way to go about it. It might turn out to be the best way, but there’s no reason to assume it.

Let me try to write down what concerns me about selling my artwork. I should point out that I’m talking specifically about my own artwork, rather than artwork in general, because my concerns are very specifically tied to my own approach and practice.