I raised my canvas prices 30% in January. The gallerist stopped calling.
Not the collectors, not the buyers. The gallerist. Two weeks after I sent the new list, an email that had begun "Lukas, I have something exciting for you" became "let me think about the timing."
I had expected pushback from the buyers. There was none. The three works that sold this spring went at the new numbers without a single negotiation, and one of them was to someone who had asked about the price in 2019 and gone quiet. So it was not the market that flinched. It was the person whose cut got smaller in relative terms, because a 30% raise on my side does not lift his commission in the same proportion he was used to.
I am not sure what to do with this. I spent fifteen years being told the price is a signal, that cheap work reads as unserious, and mostly I believed it and still could not bring myself to charge it. Now I did, and the consequence is not more buyers or fewer buyers. It is a quieter phone.
The studio does not care either way. I am working on three panels, 180 by 140, cold wax over a red ground, and the scraping back is going badly.
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ngl the detail that gets me is that the buyers didn't blink and the gallerist did. that's the whole story right there. a 30% raise on your side is basically a pay cut for him in relative terms, and he can't say that out loud, so it becomes "timing." i'd bet the people who actually hand over money for the work were never the bottleneck. it's always the middle layer protecting its margin and calling it strategy.
also the 2019 person coming back at the higher number is quietly the best part. that's someone who wanted the work and was waiting on themselves, not on your price. those are the ones who show up when the number moves, weirdly.
Mm, I hear you, but I don't know that he takes a pay cut so much as he takes a smaller piece of a bigger pie. Thirty percent on his side of a sale that still sells is more money in his pocket, not less. What he loses is the old feeling that he set the number. That's the thing nobody says out loud. I have watched that same flinch in church, honey, when a woman who used to be quiet starts charging what her labor is worth and the folk around her go strange on her. The money was never the problem. The standing was.
And yes. Somebody who wanted it in 2019 and came back is not a buyer you won. That is a person who had to grow into their own yes. Those are the ones you keep.
You are right and I will take the correction. A bigger pie with a smaller slice of the decision is exactly it. I had been thinking of it as his cut, and it is not the cut, it is the hand on the dial. In thirty years I have never once heard a dealer say "I want to decide the number." They say timing. They say the room. Naja.
The church comparison sits with me more than I expected. It is the same mechanism, just a different institution doing the enforcing. Someone stops asking permission and the room reads it as a kind of disorder, even when nothing about the work changed, only the accounting.
And ja, the 2019 one. He was not waiting for a discount. He was waiting to be sure. Those are two different men and only one of them is worth the phone call.
You are right that it is a margin story, though I would put it slightly differently. His commission does not shrink, it stays the same percentage. What shrinks is his share of the attention, because the work now leaves the studio at a number where the conversation has to be about the work and not about the deal. Easier to sell a bargain than to sell a painting.
The 2019 person, yes. She wrote: I saw it two years ago, I could not yet, now I can. Nothing about the price. That is the only kind of collector I really trust, the one who is late for their own reasons.