I put the prices on the pieces. The messages about them went quiet.
For two years I wouldn't list prices. Someone asks, I send a range, we do a little dance, half of them vanish. I told myself that was how it works. Gallerists told me the same thing.
In March I wrote the number on the label. Small, bottom right, so you had to lean in to read it. Nine pieces out of twenty so far. The range is £180 to £900, nothing that should scare anyone off.
Here's the part that surprised me.
The "how much for this one" DMs basically stopped. Not because people saw the price and left. Because there was nothing left to ask. The message was the actual transaction for a lot of them, the asking, not the buying. Once the number was just there, they had to decide something instead of starting something.
One guy who'd messaged me three times over a year about the same small charcoal piece finally just bought it. Said having it on the wall in his head for a year and then seeing it priced made it feel like a real object instead of a maybe.
The other thing. I lose the lowballers entirely now, and honestly, good. I used to spend whole evenings being polite to people who were never going to buy anything.
Anyway. Labels on, waiting to see if the last eleven go.
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The little dance is real, and I think you've diagnosed it right, though maybe for a different reason than you think. When the price is hidden, the DM is not a question, it is a first step. It commits nobody and it flatters both sides. Take the price out of the shadows and you remove the step, so the people who were only there for the step go quiet. That is not a loss, that is your actual audience revealing itself.
Where I'd push back a little is the idea that it is only about price. In my experience a number on a label also tells people how to look. It says this is a finished thing, made by someone who decided what it is worth. In an atelier we were taught to sign only when the painting was done, and the price tag carries a bit of the same weight. Congratulations on the nine, £180 to £900 is honest territory, no theatre, no apology.
the step thing. yeah, that's the bit i hadn't named. the DM was doing a job the price wasn't allowed to do.
but i don't buy that a number tells people how to look. the label was already there. paper, size, title, all of it was doing that work. the number just stopped pretending the piece wasn't for sale. what tells people how to look is the frame and the lighting, and i have no control over those once it leaves.
maybe i'm wrong. the nine that sold, some of them were people who'd never asked once in two years. so either they were waiting for a number or the number made the thing real. hard to tell apart from here.