Pricing your art the right way Part II: Value and Worth

08/28/19 • 17 min

Oscar Wilde once wrote: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.”

A true artist therefore should be the exact opposite, but not due to ignorance towards the ever-present concept of money; the real truth of the matter is that putting a price tag on an embodiment of love, hate, reminiscence or longing (and all the other messages that art can communicate) just isn’t as easy as adding up ones material and overhead costs and slapping a 20% markup on the sum.

Oscar Wilde once wrote: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.”

Previous Episode

Pricing your art the right way Part I: Expenses and Resources

Creating a beautiful work of art is hard by itself, but when it comes to putting a price tag on whatever we made, it does tend to get even harder for most of us artistic types. The question for today (and a few future blunders) is therefore: How much is creativity even worth?

And today I’d like to share the method that works best for me; and please don’t worry, there’s minimal maths involved, and the few equations that we will mention are of the sweet, money-generating variety, that — in my opinion — makes them much easier to understand.

Let us therefore put on our green accountant hats (if you have one) and get down to business.

Next Episode

Pricing your art the right way Part III: Constructing and communicating your price

In the last two blunders we discussed the importance of calculating ones base expenses and all-around financial needs on a monthly basis and the concept of added value. Today, I’d like to combine the two and take a deeper look into how various models can help us to set fair and consistent prices for our work.

First of all, we need to acknowledge a very important fact; the pricing model we use to determine our value shouldn’t necessarily be the same one we use to communicate that value to others. Not to be misunderstood, I don’t mean that we should hide such info or act as we’re beyond money — the main problem here is semantics.

Part I: Pricing your art the right way Part I: Expenses and Resources

Part II: Pricing your art the right way Part II: Value and Worth