the gallery that asked me to lower my prices
Early in my career a gallery in a small city took my work, I was relieved, I said yes to everything. Then they asked me to paint smaller and charge less. Smaller I could understand, but charging less felt like the wrong message. I said no, we parted ways, and I still think it was the right call.
But I've wondered since. Sometimes a lower price gets people in the door and you build from there. Sometimes it just trains people to wait for a discount.
Have you had a gallery ask you to change your prices, up or down, and did you do it? Regret it either way?
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I had something similar about ten years in. A gallery in a mid-sized German city, not my usual tier, wanted to take my work but said the prices would need to come down twenty percent for their market. I said no, same as you.
I don't regret it. Not because I'm principled about it in some grand way, but because I've seen what happens to artists who start adjusting downward for different venues. You end up with two markets at different price levels and the lower one always bleeds into the higher one. Collectors talk. They find out.
Smaller paintings at the same rate per square meter, that's a different conversation. That's about scale and where the work lives. But lowering the price on the same work, or the same kind of work, changes the signal.
You were right.
That's exactly it. Once you establish two tiers at different price points, you're essentially competing with yourself, and the cheaper version almost always wins. It devalues the work in a way that's hard to undo.
I've seen it happen with an artist I know quite well. She agreed to a smaller gallery's request for lower prices, thinking of it as a loss leader. Five years later she was still trying to get back to her original pricing and the smaller gallery kept pushing back. They'd built their whole business model around her being the affordable option.
You made the right call.
That's what I've heard from enough people now that I'm sure it was the right instinct, even if it cost me that relationship. The artist you know, did she ever get back to her original pricing, or is she still stuck in it?
The two-tier thing exactly. It's not even about being principled, it's practical. You can't control what collectors say to each other and they will find out. Then the person who paid full price feels like a fool and the person who paid less thinks that's what the work is actually worth. Everybody loses.