The Iceberg Concept of Pricing Your Art

 

 

 I wanted an iceberg image to illustrate this journal entry about art pricing, but I didn’t want to use stock graphics or to draw one.  Everytime I considered something else, I balked.  It had to be an iceberg.  So, being fresh out of tickets for a North Atlantic cruise, I improvised.  Turns out the head-of-iceberg-lettuce-as-stand-in-for-iceberg-metaphor works even better, as we shall see.

While I have addressed pricing and other money matters here before, it’s been awhile and the confounding mystery of it continues. Honestly, I still have an agonizing time determining retail prices for anything I make, but I do have a helpful way in. So when I was asked to present some pricing ideas and practices at a workshop for the current crop of local Open Studios artists, I decided to describe the considerations looming below the surface of the topic in addition to the how-to methods we generally seek above.

 

Basic Premises

• Work hard to separate your pride (or your unvoiced shame) about your work from your pricing.
• It’s not a “once and done” effort.
• No single axiom/approach works every time or over time.
• Confidence in pricing requires research, soul-search, preparation, experimentation and experience.

 

Looming Just Below the Surface

YOU:

• What motivates you? Personal expression? Recognition? Money? If Money is the strongest motivator, you’ll be fine. If not, keep reading.
• What’s your level of satisfaction in your career and current style? Tentative? Changing? Loud and proud? Giddy?
• Are you able to see your work objectively? If not, how can you create some professional distance?

YOUR MEDIUM:

• What is it? Where is it in the fine art/craft market spectrum? (I’ve seen one of my top-priced ceramic beer cans placed next to a same-sized smallish watercolor of the same label which was asking – and getting! – three times the price.)
• Ask whatever you like, but what does it sell for?
• How does your work compare to similar works? (This is market research in comparables for information, not necessarily for replication.)
• Do you price the pieces you personally like higher? Should you?

YOUR PERFECT PEOPLE

• Describe your ideal collector in detail. You might already know them. How is this person like you?
• Whatever story and meaning you carry for your pieces, others won’t see them like that and will apply their own rationales and interpretations.
• Folks, even sophisticated well-heeled art lovers, buy art impulsively: they recognize it and fall in love. Price is just one part of this buying experience.

YOUR VENUES

• Where are they located? Do they have any particular cachet or limitations? Are they focused primarily on selling art or on eating and entertainment?
• How is your work displayed, labelled, interpreted and lighted?
• How do you or your representatives engage with visitors?
• Do you keep your retail prices exactly the same everywhere? (Please do.)

THE ECONOMY MATTERS

• Local or Global, it affects expectations and behaviors.
• Discretionary Money = Less available and more accounted-for funds.
• Impulsive Money = More available and less watched.

 

The Visible: Some Pricing Methods

TIME AND MATERIALS

• Great if you like to parse hours and receipts.
• Maybe it’s useful if your materials are costlier or your methods time-consuming.
• As you become more efficient and/or find cheaper materials sources, what does it do to your prices?
• Try it for yourself; it’ll be eye-opening.

A MULTIPLIER FOR SIZES

• In 2D you can size by square inches or by perimeter measurement and use a base cost multiplier.
• Does this method work for 3D media using cubic volume or weight? Should it?
• These methods can have scaling inconsistencies and other irrelevancies.
• You still have to determine your multiplier.
• Try it for yourself, some folks swear by this.

PROTOTYPE ITERATIONS

• Price new work on the low end.
• If it sells easily, be quick to raise your price a bit. Raise again if it keeps selling and so on.
• Find the price point at which the sales slow up noticeably and hold or back down slightly, your choice.
• This is “green feedback.” Stay curious because your actual marketplace is speaking.
• Try it yourself over and over.

PRODUCT ECOSYSTEM FAMILY ARCS

• Use your entire body of work and assign a range of prices to ALL of it. Does it make sense?
• Do your price-points match the market for similar work? Why or why not?
• There is wiggle room for anomalies and one-offs, but price them after you understand the range you determine.
• Try it for yourself but beware, as it ventures well into perceived aesthetics, comparables and subjectivity.

JAZZ IMPROV

• Sometimes you just “know” the prices that work for you and your perfect people, your venue and economy.
• And it’s probably based on personally internalizing  your whole iceberg.
• You don’t “try” this, you just do it when you’re ready. Maybe now?

EXCEPTIONS

• There are always exceptions!
• Sales/Seconds/Discounts/Close-outs/Cash Buyers/Students/Trading Parity/Donations/Auctions/Freebies/Commissions/Layaways/What else?
• It’s probably a good thing to develop a stance regarding all of them. What’s your practice/policy?

 

So, there you have it.  Pricing is dependent on a whole convoluted sphere of influences.  Setting a price on something that is so deeply personal and doesn’t have a set market value is squidgy business.  And for your machinations and calculations, all you get is money.  That’s what you wanted, right?  (See: YOU:What motivates you?)

Detached confidence and practice helps.  That’s why the head of iceberg lettuce is even more suited to the notion of pricing being a more-than-meets-the-eye thing: it’s organic, integrated leaf by enfolding leaf, revealing itself slowly. Pricing art is a nearly untranslatable alchemy anyhow because it requires an artist to range from suchness to materiality, aesthetics to a number. Good luck with forging your pathways, whether adapted here or yet to be discovered.

–Liz Crain, who enjoys this observation of Oscar Wilde’s: “When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money.” She’s been both a banker and an artist and says it’s true.