I quoted 14,000 euros for a room. The curator asked if that was per square metre.
Last spring I sent a quote to a small Kunsthalle for a room installation. Fourteen thousand euros. Materials, three weeks of my time, the two students who help me weld and haul, transport from the depot in Holešovice, and the part nobody budgets for, which is the week at the end where you walk through the thing alone and move eleven objects until it stops feeling wrong.
The reply came back the next morning. She asked whether the fourteen thousand was per square metre.
I sat with that for a while. Not because she was being rude. Because she genuinely did not know what she was looking at. In her head a room of art is a quantity, like gravel or plasterboard, and it must have a unit price. Somewhere in her institution there is a spreadsheet column for that.
I wrote back and said no, it is for the whole room, and then I halved it, because I wanted the show and because I am fifty-eight and still doing that. Seven thousand. She said it was a lot for a temporary project. I said nothing for two days. Then I signed.
The thing I keep chewing on is that the number was never the problem. I could have held fourteen and she would have found it, institutions find money when they want the work. The problem is I have no vocabulary for defending the figure. I can talk about assemblage for an hour. Ask me why a room costs what it costs and I go quiet and discount myself like a man haggling over his own coat.
I am told younger artists have this figured out. I hope so. It took me thirty years to learn to weld properly and I still cannot say a price out loud without apologizing in the same sentence.
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The per square metre question would have flattened me a little, honestly. But I think you put your finger on the real thing, which is that the last week you described, walking through alone and moving eleven objects, is exactly the part nobody can see in a quote. It has no line item, so to her it did not exist.
I paint portraits, much smaller scale, and even there the hours that matter are the ones where I redo the same mouth four times and it looks like nothing happened. People are always surprised when I say a pastel takes longer than a day. I am starting to think the answer is not to justify it better but to say it plainly, this is what it costs, and let the ones who get it come to you. Easier said than done, of course. Did you reply to her in the end?
The mouth four times is the whole job and it photographs as nothing. With watercolor it is worse in one respect, because you cannot lift a wrong wash back to white paper. So the four attempts are four separate sheets, three of which go in the drawer. I have stopped calling the drawer wasted time. It is the work, it just does not survive to the framing stage. Anyone who only sees the framed piece is seeing perhaps the fourth part of what was actually done.
The drawer is the honest part of the studio. Mine is a shelf in Holešovice with pieces I would defend to anyone and no one will ever see.
You're right that watercolor is crueler, no lifting it back. With objects I can at least unscrew the wrong thing and try again, though by the fourth try the wall has holes in it and the holes start to become part of the piece, which is how you end up with a career built on accidents you decided to keep.
The mouth four times, yes. That's the same week as my eleven objects, just smaller. And you're right that it looks like nothing happened, which is the cruel part, because it is the only part that actually happened.
I stopped justifying years ago. Not out of pride, more out of exhaustion. Now I just say the number and let the silence sit there. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't. The ones who come back are usually the ones worth building the room for.
One thing though. Don't let the invisible hours stay invisible to you, even if they stay invisible on the invoice. Keep some kind of record, even a stupid notebook. Twenty years on you'll want to know how many mouths you redid, and nobody else will have counted them for you.