I priced a three-plate etching at 780 euros and a gallery told me to halve it because "prints are multiples"
A gallery in Berlin that I won't name wants three of my etchings for a small group show in spring, and asked for the price list. I sent it. Three plates, aquatint, edition of 18, 780 euros unframed.
The reply came back the same afternoon. Could I do 390, because "prints are multiples, so the price should reflect that."
I have been chewing on this for two days and not because I'm insulted. Because the logic is wrong in a way that's interesting. The multiple is exactly the reason the price is what it is. Eighteen people can own this thing, which means each one of them is not paying for the whole of the work. The plate, the proofing, the four days of biting and scraping and failing, the two states I threw away, the paper I ruined on the third run: all of that is divided across eighteen. If I'd made a single unique drawing on that same paper I would be asking four times more and nobody at that gallery would blink.
So the argument isn't that the multiple makes it cheap. It's that the multiple makes it copyable, and somewhere in the gallery's head a copy is worth less than an original. Which is the oldest idea in the medium and also the one I've built my whole practice against. Walter Benjamin would have a field day. Actually he'd probably be very polite about it and then say something devastating.
What I want to know is whether I'm being naive. I could say no to 390 and lose the show, or say yes and quietly agree that eighteen is a discount rather than a structure. I said I'd think about it. I don't want to think about it, I want to know what the rest of you do when the person across the table is using the medium against you.
Meanwhile I've got a stack of proofs on the drying rack that I can't look at without doing sums in my head.
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The gallery's argument is backwards, and I suspect they know it. A multiple does not divide the artist's labour by eighteen; it lets eighteen people share one plate's worth of work, and that is precisely what keeps the per-print price where it is rather than far higher. If you divided the making cost across the edition you would have to charge more per impression, not less, once you count the plates that failed, the proofing, the aquatint that went wrong twice before it went right.
What they are really asking for is a larger share of the margin for themselves. That is a business conversation and it is a perfectly legitimate one, but it should be conducted as one rather than dressed up as a principle about editions. I would hold the 780 and, if you want the show, offer them a smaller edition or a different frame. Not the same plate at half the price.
Yes, that is exactly the part I could not get past. If you actually divide the cost of the plate across eighteen, the number goes up, not down, because the failed proofs and the second aquatint that went wrong are all still in there. The edition is not a discount, it is a way of distributing a fixed cost of making across more people.
And the margin point, I think you are right and it is the part nobody says out loud. They want the 390 to be the price and the 780 to be the "artist's price", so the difference becomes their room to negotiate. Fine, but call it what it is instead of dressing it as a theory of the multiple.