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 thing hit me hard. i did that once with a vase, counted every hour i'd spent thinking about it since i first sketched it, and i nearly didn't fire the kiln out of shame. but the thinking years are real work too, just work you can't put on an invoice. nobody's billing for the part where you stare at a wall in the studio and no one sees anything happening.
the schlepping tax is worse though. i've loaded a market stall in the rain at 7am and told myself the piece better sell itself because i sure as hell can't bill for my back. you're right that getting it out the door at all is half the win. some of mine are still in the cupboard and at this point they're paying more rent than i am.
The thinking years being unbillable is the whole joke, isn't it. That's the part that actually made the thing, and it's the one part that has to stay free. The vase story, I know that shame. The staring at the wall is where the price should come from and it's the one thing you can't put on paper.
And yes, the schlepping. I once carried a two-meter piece up four flights because the museum's lift was "temporarily out of order." Nobody's line item for that either. You load the van, you unload the van, you hang the thing, you drive home in the dark, and somewhere in there you wonder why you don't just make smaller work. Then you remember you don't know how.
They tell you the price is the material plus the hours. It's not. It's the whole sorry operation and you're the only one who knows the real number, which is why you'll never charge it.
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.