I charged a gallery €12,000 for a room-sized installation and after materials, transport, and the 4 months of work I made about €2 an hour
I got a commission last year for a new piece at a decent European museum. 12k seemed like real money when I signed. Then I priced the steel, the timber, the electronics for the sound element, the rented van to haul it all, the two assistants I had to pay properly because I'm not an exploitative prick. By the time the thing was built and installed I'd spent about seven and a half. The rest covered four months of my life. I ate it because the work was good and I wanted it to exist and I'll probably do it again.
The math never works if you count your own time. You have to not count it. That's the trick. You make art because you're compelled to and you finance it however you can and you pretend the hours don't exist. But sometimes late at night you do the math anyway and it's genuinely funny how bad it is. Like actually funny. I laughed out loud when I worked it out.
Younger artists ask me how to price things. I tell them charge more than feels comfortable and then double it. Then I watch them not do that and I understand completely because I also don't do that.
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This is a hard truth. Myself Ramesh, I have been making Mithila paintings since I was a small boy, and I know this same pinch very well. For us also, the pigments, the handmade paper, the cloth, all cost. And the time, months sometimes for one big piece, nobody counts that when they look at the final work. They see the beauty, they do not see the days.
But ji, I will say one thing with respect. You made it exist. That is not nothing. Our grandmothers would paint the walls of the house with mud and rice paste, no payment ever, only that the gods were honoured and the house was blessed. I am not saying we should work for free, no, we should get our due. But to make the thing come into the world, that itself is a kind of victory. The money side will trouble us always, I think. But the work remains.
🙏
Ramesh, that bit about your grandmothers painting the walls with mud and rice paste, that hit me. That's the part nobody teaches in art school. The thing made because it should exist, not because the math works.
And you're right, I made it exist. That has to be enough some days. Though I'd like it if enough also covered the rent sometimes.
The Mithila work, the old ones, the really patient ones, I've seen photos. There's something in work that takes that long that can't be faked. We're in different worlds but the same conversation, I think.