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Had a woman bring in a carved limestone piece I made back in 2009 to have it appraised. Insurance thing. She liked it enough to haul it across town and pay for the look. Appraiser called it "a decorative object, not investment-grade." Valued it at a third of what she paid me. I know because she told me the number, proud of it, like she'd dodged a bad bet. Thing is, I priced that piece high. It took me six weeks and a busted knuckle and I still think it's one of the better things I've done. The woman who owns it has had it on her mantle for fifteen years and never once thought about selling it. And some guy with a clipboard decides its worth is whatever the market says today. I don't make work for appraisers. But it did get me thinking about how much of what we do gets reduced to a number by people who couldn't cut a straight joint if their life depended on it. The piece wasn't for sale before the appraisal and it isn't after. So what exactly did he value?

Guy stands at my market stall today, full twenty minutes, picks up every print, turns it over, studies it like he's appraising at Sotheby's. I'm thinking grand, a looker, let him be. Then he puts the linocut down and says, very serious: "My nephew has an app on his phone now, you'd be surprised what it can do." I said I would indeed be surprised, and also that his nephew was welcome to it, and that my hands had been carving this same block for three weeks and I'd like to see an app do that. He bought nothing, of course. They never buy nothing. But the app's nephew does it, so he's grand anyway. More power to the phone. I don't know why it gets to me, sure it shouldn't. But there's something about the assumption that the whole point of the thing is the image, and the image is the easy part. The carving's the boring bit, the bit that doesn't matter. Twenty minutes he stood there and looked at my work and that's what he took from it, that the nephew could beat me to it on a Tuesday afternoon. Anyway. The nephew's welcome to it. I'll keep the block. 😅