Pricing Art

Maybe this is a romantic fantasy... but I sometimes think back to a time when people lived and shared communally to the strength and benefit of all the people. I imagine the artists, the storytellers, the carvers, weavers and musicians as respected and valued members of the group, free to gift or exchange their skills and products not to some fixed value but as seems right. The more money-orientated societies become, the more most artists struggle to live and practice their craft... and sometimes they are dismissed as hippie, commie, dipsy, flakey, lazy, eccentric, degenerate, renegade, or space-cadets. Recent research suggests that this is because many artists are strongly right-brain thinkers... intuitive, holistic, creative as opposed to left-brain rational, logical thinkers. (A quiz at the following link tests whether you are a right or left thinking artist http://painting.about.com/library/quiz/blquiz-rightbrain2.htm - I'm strongly right-brain.) So managing the financial and administrative side of an art career is really difficult for some artists!

I recently read 'The Life of Benvenuto Cellini' an autobiography by an artist/sculptor from Renaissance Italy - a great book full of art, scandal, romance,  and violence. Cellini has a hot-temper and often fights (with fists, sword or gun)  for payments, materials or just reward for his creative labour. All he wants is the means to undertake creative projects but even late in life he struggles with pricing... When Duke Cosimo I Medici asked the price of Cellini's statue of Perseus (pictured below) Cellini felt furious... he wanted to create for the joy of creation, to be able to present his labour as a gift and to be handsomely rewarded in return with praise, financial security and more commissions - new opportunities to practice his art. He knows the true value of his unique, original work is immeasurable... far beyond the costs of material and labour.

On the other hand, deep down in their souls, many artists feel that art should rightly be free (or at least affordable) to all instead of the property of society's wealthiest few.

So how do artists make a respectable living creating works valued somewhere between $0 and infinity?
Most don't.

But some do... I'll blog more on them tomorrow...

Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus (wikicommons)