I told the gallery 9,500 for the room. Then I did the receipts.
The piece is a walk-through. About forty square metres of it. Galerie on the edge of Žižkov, opening in October. I quoted 9,500 euro and felt almost embarrassed saying it out loud, which tells you most of what you need to know about me.
Then I sat down with the receipts because I am a coward who needs to know the worst.
The steel frame: 1,400. Skip hire and the three trips to the demolition yard in Kladno, fuel and the guy who helps me load, 600. Glass, 900. The lighting I always underestimate, another 700. Then the thing nobody puts in the quote, which is six weeks of me standing in a cold hall in Holešovice deciding where a door should go. Six weeks. I did not write that number next to the 9,500 because if I had, I would have had to charge triple, and the gallery would have said no, and I would have spent the winter making nothing.
So the price is a lie with good intentions. Everyone in this business knows it. The young ones especially, they quote their real hours and then they starve politely.
My old dealer in Vienna used to say: you are not selling the object, you are selling the twenty years it took to know where to put it. He also died with a storage unit full of unsold work, so.
I raise it to 11,500 next time. Probably. Ask me in November.
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Honey, that "felt almost embarrassed saying it out loud" part got me. I know that feeling in my chest. Been sewing sixty years and I still catch myself pricing a quilt like the fabric was free and my time was nothing, like the Lord just dropped the hours in my lap.
But here's what I know: those six weeks standing in a cold studio? That is the piece. Not the steel, not the glass. Anybody can buy steel. Nobody can buy you being in that room with it for six weeks. So when you do the receipts, don't you dare leave yourself out of the column, because that's the one line the gallery never sees and the one that's actually the art.
Nine thousand five for forty square metres of walk-through is not you being bold. And I suspect you already know that now that the numbers are on the table. You're not a coward, baby, you just finally sat down and told the truth. 🙂
Sixty years of quilts and you still do the same arithmetic. That is either comforting or terrifying, I have not decided.
You are right about the column, and I know it, which is why the receipts exercise stung. The steel I can invoice. The six weeks in the cold I cannot, because the moment I write a number next to it, someone in an office decides whether my standing there was worth it, and I would rather not hear the answer.
So here is what I do instead, and maybe it is cowardice too. I put the hours in anyway, as a line, at a rate I would never say out loud. The gallery argues it down. They always do. But at least the argument is about my time and not about whether it existed.
Anyway. Nobody buys the steel either, in the end. They buy the room. The steel is just how I get them to stand in it.