Pricing art is different from making art. Making art is about the individual personal creative process, experiences that come from within.  Pricing art for sale is about what's happening on the outside, in the real world where things are bought and sold for money, and where market forces dictate in large part how much those things are worth. 

Art prices are not pulled out of thin air. When you price your art, you must be able to show that your prices make sense, that they're fair and justified with respect to certain art criteria such as the depth of your resume, your previous sales history and the particulars of the market where you sell.

EVALUATE YOUR SITUATION

1.     Look at the history of selling your art and the price range. And the consistency of selling in this range.

2.     What is your level of experience?  How many years have you been working professionally as an artist.

3.    Where you have had shows, how many solo?  How many group?  

4.    Do you already have gallery representation?  If so, where?  Is the gallery is well known and in a large art or metropolitan area?  (The area where you show your art has a value.)

5.    Define your type of art. What kind of art do you make? What are its physical characteristics? In what ways is it similar to other art? How do you categorize it? If you paint abstracts, for example, what kind of abstracts, how would you describe them? This is the type of art you generally want to focus on for comparison purposes.

6.    Note similarities and differences of your art to others: ie., size, shape, medium, weight, subject matter, colors, the time it takes you to make it, when it was made, how long you've been making that type of art, how many you've made, who your audience is, and so on.

7.    Is your art light and decorative or is it soulful and serious as in meaning and philosophy?  In other words, what are you aspiring to do? 

8.    Does it appeal to a large number of people or only a few?

9.    Is the work easy to experience or hard, esoteric, inaccessible, idiosyncratic?

10.     How does your art relate to the context of art history and other masters?

11.     Do you sell locally, regionally, nationally or internationally?

Your job is to explore your art, your intentions, your goals, and get to know your market, keep an open mind, find similar art, find the artists who make it and have similar experience and qualifications to yours, and see what they charge for their art and why.

Hope this helps begin the process of pricing art.

Suzanne

If you have any questions, please email me below.