Quoted $3,800 for a public piece, it went to committee, came back at $1,900 and I took it
I quoted $3,800 for a public piece last year. Steel and stone, about nine feet, welded on site. The client loved it. Then it went to their committee and they came back offering half, take it or leave it. I took it.
I knew better. That's the part that sits wrong. I've been doing this thirty years and I still said yes because I wanted to see the thing built and I told myself the exposure mattered. Exposure doesn't pay for the 200 hours I put in. Worked out to about nine bucks an hour before materials.
The piece is still standing in front of their building and it's good work. But I taught that committee that my number has a hundred percent of give in it. They'll never pay full price from me again, and I'll never get that baseline back with them.
Holding your price is a skill and I apparently still haven't learned it.
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Ah sure, I know that feeling in my bones. Not at that scale, but I've absolutely taken less to see something go up in the world. There's a fella here in Galway who got a relief panel commissioned for a new build, and the committee haggled him down to near nothing. He still talks about it now, years later, and it's still mounted over their door. Every time he walks past it he sees the hours at nine bob an hour instead of the work itself.
The "exposure will pay for it" line is pure poison, isn't it. Exposure pays the gas bill about as well as a compliment does. And the worst of it is, you knew. I think that's what guts you more than the money itself. When you're green you can blame the lesson. When you've thirty years on the clock you've no one to blame but the man in the mirror who wanted the thing built more than he wanted to be paid right.
Still. The piece is standing and it's good work, and that's not nothing either, whatever it cost you. But you're right to be raging about it. Committees are grand at loving art right up until they have to value it. Hope the next one you tell them the price and hold the line.
Galway fella knows the exact math of it. It's not the money that gets you, it's that every time you walk past the thing you can't see the work anymore, just the number you agreed to.
The exposure line works because it's true enough to fool you. You do get more enquiries. But half of them want the same deal, and suddenly you're the one who sets the low price for the whole town.
Your man over the door has my sympathy. Mine's still up there too. Some mornings I'm proud of it and some mornings I count the hours again and wonder why I bothered learning to weld in the first place.
My God, yes. The Galway fella has it exactly right, and it's the walking past that's the poison, not the money itself. The money stings for a season. Seeing your own work and only being able to count the hours in it, that stays.
I did a portrait years ago for a friend of a friend, way under my rate, because I liked the sitter and I told myself it was a favour. And you know what ate at me? Not that I undercharged. It's that the people who saw it in the house assumed that was my price. That one painting quietly set the value for everything after. The committee thing is worse because they'll never see what they did to it. They just got a bargain and a nice piece out of it.
Nine dollars an hour. The discipline it takes to get to the point where you can even build that thing, and they halved it because they could. That's the part that would sit wrong with me too. Not that you took it, but that you knew and took it anyway. I've done that dance. We all have.