Pricing Artwork: How to Value Your Artwork from an Art Gallery Perspective

Tips on how to correctly price your paintings, including price per square inch. How to avoid the pitfalls of incorrectly pricing your artwork from a dealer with 25 years of experience.

Pricing Artwork: How to Value Your Artwork from an Art Gallery Perspective

So, you're an artist, and you're wanting to know: how do I price my paintings? It's a very important question you have to answer correctly, and you have to get it right pretty much at the start of your career. The reason I say that is (because) this is going to be the foundation, which you build upon all your paintings that you sell in the future.

Now, one of the things you'll see is, as a young artist, your paintings will be (they should be) much less valuable. Generally, what my artists do, is they price by square inch. The range in my gallery is from about $4 to about $30 per square inch. $4 is a very young artist, who's just getting going; he's only been doing it for about 10 years, and in my mind that's a young artist. The $30 per square inch has books, museum collections, has been on a stamp. So, these types of artists demand a higher amount. You can't – once you've set your prices, it's hard to reverse and go in the opposite direction. So, set it correctly. Again, for a beginning artist, one dollar per square foot or square inch is about correct.

Now, one of the things that you should understand, as an artist, when you're setting your price is: talk to your dealer. We're assuming you're at the point where you have somebody who's representing you. Most dealers (including myself, if you're bringing me your paintings) we want a certain level. We can't sell something for two to three hundred dollars; it just doesn't make sense to put it on our wall; it's just not cost-effective. We need things that are more valuable. It doesn't mean we don't want to see you in the future, but at this point, you need to be with a gallery or an artist representation that can accommodate that type of work. So, have your dealer help set the value of what your paintings should be worth.

Talk to other artists; that is a very good way to start. But, remember this is the foundation, so everything you sell from now on is going to be based off this point, and as time goes on auction records may also reflect this as well. So, one of the things that I've seen for some artists is they raise their prices too fast. Now, this can be the kiss of death because they're selling, selling, selling, and then they double their prices because they're selling everything, and now suddenly, their markets dead in the water, and everyone says, “well, I'm not going to buy it. It was x and now it's 2x, and it's just been (you know) one month ago.” So, the best way to do it if you're selling everything, that means you're probably too low – your prices are too low.

You could raise it 20%; that's not an unrealistic amount. 15% would be better, and see what happens. Slowly gradate how you raise your prices; just don't make huge, huge leaps. You can always cut back your production a little bit to see what's going on with the price structure before you either mess up your market by raising it too much, or not having your prices high enough.

Remember, if you're selling all these paintings at a low price, somewhere in the future people are going to start to be getting rid of your paintings; it just happens, whether it's at auction or privately, and now you're going to be competing with your old paintings, which you sold at a much lower rate.

So, it's very important to get price structure (first) when you're starting off, and be careful on how you raise your prices. You don't ever want to have to go a back in direction and lower your prices. That's a real negative – turns off your collectors. And these are the things you need to think about before you put your first painting out for sale.