Charged a museum shop €150 for editioned prints and then did the math on what that actually pays me per hour
A museum shop in Vienna picked up a small edition of my screenprints for their retail. I was thrilled, museum shop, right, that feels like validation. They paid €150 per print, wholesale. I sold them 20.
I did the math yesterday because I was avoiding something else. Each print takes me about four hours from exposure to final trim, not counting the drawing time before that, not counting the screens I burned and then rejected, not counting the test proofs. So €150 for roughly six hours of work per print if I'm being generous about what counts as labour. That's €25 an hour if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong.
I'm not saying the museum shop ripped me off. That's just the going rate, they were fine to deal with. But I sat there thinking: I have an MFA, I've been doing this fifteen years, and I'm making €25 an hour selling to an institution that will mark it up to €400 and call it affordable art. And I said yes because I was flattered they asked.
I don't know what the right number is. I just know that the gap between what feels good for the ego and what's actually sustainable keeps getting wider and I keep choosing the ego.
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Twenty prints at that price is a respectable wholesale order, but €25 an hour after everything you don't count is hard to sit with. The museum validation is real, I don't mean to dismiss that. But it's also the sort of validation that doesn't pay the studio rent.
I've been in a similar position with botanical prints. An institution's interest feels like proof you've arrived, until you realise they're treating it as a retail transaction like any other, and the prestige is just part of their margin. The real test is whether they come back at a better rate once the first batch sells. Some do. Many don't.
What I've found useful is separating the professional satisfaction from the financial calculation. One feeds the work. The other keeps the work possible. If you can't get the second to a sustainable number, the first doesn't last.