First, I’d like to say that I wholeheartedly disagree with the way in which many commercial galleries deliberately hide the price of artwork, forcing you to interact with an employee (often a sales director summoned by an associate if you’re in person) to have a dialogue about the work as a proxy for determining whether or not you are a ‘serious’ collector. I understand different sides of the argument, but I can’t think of another industry where hiding the purchase price is understood as something particularly fair or satisfying to your customers. Do artists even want galleries to do this with their works?
Once that dialogue opens, you’ll start hearing bits and pieces of pricing justification that sound an awful lot like a cooking recipe. The funny thing about recipes is that when you try your own hand at them, you can almost never exactly replicate results shown in the cookbook. How did you arrive at that number? Is that what makes this dish so special? I always think of Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker article, ‘What’s the Recipe?’, a rumination on the challenge of trying to replicate the recipes found in various cookbooks. I think this statement sums up the experience: ‘We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!”, the honest answer is “Be me!” “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.’
The price is the summation of everything it took to get here. Not just the artist, but the seller as well. It could be, “the artist has been practicing for x long, went to these schools, has shown at these other galleries, is in the collection of these institutions, but also here’s who ‘our’ collectors are, and the artist is x years old (so there may not be more of these coming), and here’s what someone paid in the past, with a dash of how many other people have openly expressed interest in the work, plus where it may have shown up in pop-culture, or how many people outside the art world know their name.” Now we throw in a spoonful of ‘gut feeling’ and consideration for the intended collector audience. Voila! Coverage of George Condo’s recent New York doubleheader had me thinking about all of this. Much of the dialogue, despite incorporating a lot of earnest reflection on his techniques, seemed to try and point towards justifying the shows’ pricing rather than go deeper into what makes Condo such a special artist. All I could see was the connection between what everyone was saying, which ended up seeming like a persistent effort to uphold the thread of ‘high value’ throughout the show. Sometimes, it feels like the way we talk about legendary artists can’t escape the economics of it all.
So what should we do when we know that art prices, when we break them down, are largely arbitrary? We understand that they are ultimately the decision of whoever is selling. However, when interrogating pricing mechanisms, I can’t help but shake the feeling that there’s a pervasive desire to uphold a fundamental understanding of value in purely economic terms. It’s a dynamic of power that individuals and groups constantly feel compelled to negotiate and exploit. It works because we’ve been exposed to some form of it our entire lives in nearly every other category of consumption. But what if it’s blinding us from being able to see anything else?
-PB