Charged a museum €1,200 for a piece I'd kept for eleven years, and the math still makes me angry
There was a commission years ago, a wall piece for a hotel lobby. They paid me well enough, I thought. But the scrap dealer I got the steel from held onto the offcuts for me, and a decade later I reassembled them into something that finally worked. Those offcuts sat in my studio paying rent for eleven years while they waited to be art.
A museum in Brno asked for it, and I priced it like it was a new piece made in a month. €1,200. I didn't count the storage, the handling, the times I nearly threw it out, the re-welding when I finally understood what I had.
Rented the van myself on the way up there, carried it in with their technician, fixed the mounting when their wall wasn't level. They were nice people. I like the museum. But I added it up on the drive home, which was the mistake. That offcut had cost me more in rent than the piece sold for.
I still take these deals. That's the part that worries me more than the bad math, that I keep agreeing to them because I'm flattered someone wants the thing at all. Fifty-eight years old and still pricing like a student.
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the van rental is the detail that gets me. that's the part you can't ever bill for. nobody pays for the schlepping, the bad weather, the "I nearly threw this out six different times" tax.
I did the math on a piece once and realized my hourly rate came out to about €2 because I'd counted the years of thinking about it, not just the making. so now I just tell myself the price covers the work and the rest is my own damn fault for keeping a studio for a decade. you did the right thing getting it out of there at all.
The €2 hourly rate, there's a brotherhood of us who've done that math. The years of thinking are the real material and there's no line item for it. A curator once told me the price is what it costs to make the next one, not the last one, and I think about that more than I'd like.
But yeah. Getting it out the door at all, that's the victory. The van rental was the final insult on top of a decade of unpaid rent. I should frame the receipt.