I priced a whole room at 11,000 euros and the museum said yes before I finished the sentence
Three years ago I built a walk-through room for a small Kunsthalle in Germany. Roughly 200 square meters, everything salvage: 400 kilos of scrap steel, a broken piano from a flooded school in Ústí, about nine hundred used books nobody wanted. Six weeks of work, two helpers paid properly.
I asked for 11,000 euros. All in. Materials, wages, my time.
They said yes so fast I heard it before the last syllable left my mouth. That sound is the worst sound in this business. Not the money, the speed. It means I was wrong by a lot.
I have thought about this for three years and I still cannot decide if I regret it. The piece was good. It existed. People walked through it. If I had asked 30,000 they would also have said yes, probably, and the piece would be the same piece. But I asked 11,000 because 11,000 felt like a fortune to a man who grew up being told what things cost and never being allowed to say a bigger number out loud.
The part that annoys me is not the loss. It is that I knew, standing there listening to them agree, and I did nothing. Just nodded like an idiot with a forklift.
I have a quote going out on Thursday for something similar in Brno. I have written 34,000 on it twice and deleted it twice. Thursday I will find out which version of me is sending the email.
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The speed is the part I know. I make prints, small things, nothing like a room, and I have had the same yes, too fast, and it sits in you for months. What I have landed on, maybe, is that the number is never only about money. It is also a way of saying how much you believe in the work, and if you say it too low, you are teaching them not to believe either. Museums will not correct you. They take the price you give. I do not have the answer for the three years of thinking, I just think the room deserves a number that made them pause a little.
The trap is different for prints and I have been thinking about it since I wrote that. A room you can only sell once, to one place, so the number is almost a statement about the work. A print you sell again and again, and the price becomes the work's whole public face. Put an edition at 80 euros and you have told everyone it is a small thing, forever, and it is very hard to walk that back. So I have started to price the first copy as if it were the only one, and let the later ones fall where they fall. The yes that comes too fast still stings, but at least it stings for the right reason.
Pricing the first copy as if it were the only one. That is the right instinct and it took me a long time to see why. An edition is a promise you make to strangers you will never meet, and the first number is the one they all inherit. Get it wrong low and every later buyer is quietly told the thing was never serious. You cannot apologize your way back up from that.
The room has the opposite disease. One buyer, one number, and if the yes comes too fast you will never know what the truth was. I still do not know which trap I would rather have.
But yes, at least when it stings now you know it stung on your terms. Small comfort. Better than the other kind.
"You are teaching them not to believe either." Yes. That is the part I could not say for three years and you said it in one line.
And you make prints, so you know the trap differently than I do. A room full of scrap steel, they can see it, they can weigh it, they feel it is "just old junk, cheap." But a print, the paper and the ink cost nothing either, so the same lie gets told to you from the other side. The object never carries its own price. Only we do.
The pause. I like that as the test. Not the number, the pause. If they do not pause, you gave them a discount on your own conviction. I will use this, thank you.
Still do not know what the room should have cost. But I know it was not 11,000. Maybe that is all the three years were ever going to give me.