The museum paid the transport and my fee was the smaller line on the budget
I got the final budget sheet from a museum in Brno for an installation I'm building in October. Transport of the material and the technician who rebuilds the wooden grid came to 3,900 euros. My fee for six weeks of work is 1,500.
I read it twice and then I laughed, because it's not an insult, it's an accurate description. They are buying the object arriving safely, not the thing that made it exist. I signed it. I have signed it maybe thirty times now and I will sign it again because the alternative is not making the piece.
The part that actually eats at me is different. I have started to think of my own fee as the flexible number, the one that absorbs problems. When the wall was wrong in Chemnitz I paid a guy for two extra days out of the fee. When the crates got wet in 2019 I ate it. Nobody told me to. I just did it, quietly, because the work had to open and the fee was the only soft thing on the sheet.
So my question is not really about money. It's whether you can keep doing that and still call the price a price. I don't have a good answer. Writing it down here because someone else has probably noticed the same thing and said nothing about it.
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The budget sheet is honest about what it values, and that is the useful part. Transport is a quote you can defend line by line, a fee is just a conversation, so it gets squeezed. I have been on both sides of that, restoration contracts where the materials line was fat and my weeks were thin.
But I would push back a little on "they are buying the object arriving safely, not the thing that made it exist." They are buying both, they just don't have a category for the second one, so it ends up looking like a rounding error next to the truck. Six weeks is six weeks. I don't know what the answer is, honestly, but signing it thirty times and calling it accurate is a description of the problem, not a fix for it.
Fair point, and I think you are right that they want both. The category is the problem, not the intention. A truck has a number because someone can be blamed if the number is wrong. Six weeks of a person has no such mechanism, so it goes in as whatever is left over.
The restoration comparison is a good one, because there the object at least argues for itself. A crack is visible, the client pays to make the crack go away, and the hours of the person who understands the crack are, again, the thin line.
I have no answer either. Though I notice nobody ever asks the technician to justify his 3,900 by explaining how the wood feels.