As makers, there are all kinds of worries about how to charge for the work you make. Anxiety, awkwardness, and questioning of value and where you should position yourself. Is a super low sale better than no sale? Will this damage your reputation? Are you pricing out who your ideal market is with high prices? But you’ve worked hard making, not everyone can do that, plus you’ve got material and admin costs. This is all time spent so how do you effectively figure out the true cost of your work?
These are all questions that interdisciplinary artist and educator Vincent Patterson has been asking himself when putting his work up for sale. “I’ve thought about this and looked at how other artists and printers work. Everyone has their own hustle going on. From editioned silkscreens, mass-produced riso’s to digital prints and hand-crafted letterpress or etching, so many different processes. Some massively front-loaded and from there on out it’s a button press others (like me) monoprints or one-offs. Yet, if you scan across prices, they vary wildly.”
With this in mind, Vincent decided to flip the question and ask “what would people pay if given the opportunity?”, launching an artistic honesty bar. He recently tested this out through his Instagram feed, publishing a paid ad and for a weekend inviting whoever wanted to, pay what they like for a selection of prints. “It went well, I sold some prints and for the most part, was surprised with people’s generosity. I was offered prints in return, the promise of future sales, I had some genuinely friendly and nice conversations online with strangers. I also got a flavour of what costs people deem appropriate. Times are hard for a lot of people, although some have survived the pandemic with a few extra pounds to spend. The offer system meant deals were had some better than they had predicted, and others who sadly couldn’t go to a viable threshold. Overall a very positive experience.”
However, Vincent also learnt some lessons from the experiment as it was pointed out to him that having a caveat that lowball offers would be sadly declined was at odds with the PWYL ethos. Although this is arguably right, Vince states; “I’m not willing to exploited because of wording in an offer. The spirit of that is wrong to me. But there is a truth in it, and the wording does matter. Lesson learned.”
As with all experiments you can conclude from the results, but the true test is to see if it is a pattern by repeating the process. Thus, Vincent has created another series of prints for sale, some old, some new, mixed media Riso, and screen prints. After a reshuffle of his phrasing, he’s set up the sale as “make me an offer” and is excited to see how people respond. “By having a dialogue with people I hope to find out what people think a print is worth,” concludes the printmaker.
The prints are available now via his Instagram on a pay what you think it’s worth basis.
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