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I had a gallery ask me to deliver the work, install it myself, and pick it up after the show, all at my own cost. No mention of covering transport, no help with hanging. Just "you bring it, you hang it, you take it back." I said no and walked. What's the most they've asked you to cover that felt less like a partnership and more like you were their supplier?

Had a gallery offer last year. Small space, not a bad spot. They wanted 50% and I had to deliver, install, label, and patch the walls on the way out. I told them no. Maybe that's normal now but it didn't sit right. What's the line for you? What are you willing to do and what makes you walk?

I got a commission last year for a new piece at a decent European museum. 12k seemed like real money when I signed. Then I priced the steel, the timber, the electronics for the sound element, the rented van to haul it all, the two assistants I had to pay properly because I'm not an exploitative prick. By the time the thing was built and installed I'd spent about seven and a half. The rest covered four months of my life. I ate it because the work was good and I wanted it to exist and I'll probably do it again. The math never works if you count your own time. You have to not count it. That's the trick. You make art because you're compelled to and you finance it however you can and you pretend the hours don't exist. But sometimes late at night you do the math anyway and it's genuinely funny how bad it is. Like actually funny. I laughed out loud when I worked it out. Younger artists ask me how to price things. I tell them charge more than feels comfortable and then double it. Then I watch them not do that and I understand completely because I also don't do that.

Gallery sold one of my bigger installations last spring. Fine, good money, I thought it was over. Then the collector's conservator calls me: they want to install it in a stairwell in a private house. The piece has a sprinkler head and a functioning old fire alarm that I wired to a bicycle bell. It's not decorative. It goes off if the humidity shifts. I spent three weeks in a correspondence about whether the bell is "part of the artwork" or "safety equipment." Their lawyers had an opinion. My whole life's philosophy was in that email thread. Anyway it's installed now, in a corridor, and the bell rings if someone opens the window in winter. The collector loves it. Says it's alive. Funniest part: the piece was originally built from an abandoned factory's evacuation signage. I made it about how we don't hear warnings anymore. Now it's genuinely annoying them in their own house. Sometimes the work knows better than you do.

I sold a piece last year through a gallery in Berlin. Big installation, months of work, shipping a truckload of steel and glass across two borders. The collector paid 18,000 euros. By the time the gallery took their 50 percent, the trucking company charged me for the special crating I couldn't do myself, the assistant I hired for the install, and the hotel I stayed in because the loading dock appointment was at 7am and I don't know anyone in Berlin who'd let me sleep on their floor at 56, I looked at the bank transfer and it was 3,400 euros. The framer who built the crate made more than I did. I know because I asked him what he charged. He told me. Nice guy. He earned it. I'm not telling this as a sob story. I agreed to the terms. I just keep thinking about how the whole system is built so that the people who touch the work for ten minutes make more than the person who spent four months making it exist. And we all nod and say that's how it works. But it's funny, no. You spend your whole career getting to a number like 18,000 and then you do the math and realise you'd have been better off framing other people's pictures.

Last year a German foundation commissioned a permanent installation for their new building lobby. Big civic space, lots of foot traffic. They had the budget. I quoted €28,000. I spent six months collecting material. Three months building. Two weeks installing on site with a helper. When I finally sat down and divided the total by hours, I landed just under €9 an hour. Before tax. Before the studio rent I still paid while I was working on their thing instead of my own. I knew it while I was doing it. You always know. You just don't do the division because the number is embarrassing and also you want the work to exist, you want it in that building, you want to see people walk through it. So you pretend the math doesn't apply to you. I don't regret it. The piece is good. But I keep the calculation now. I write the hours down from the start. I still ignore them sometimes but at least I'm lying to myself with full information.

Mine was "who handles the insurance while the work is on the wall?" Nobody mentions it, nobody puts it on paper, and when my first show got damaged in the install before it even opened, suddenly it was my problem. Live and learn. What's the one question you wish you'd asked before you signed with a gallery? The one that would've saved you a headache or a loss if you'd known to ask it.

First gallery I ever worked with sent me a list of shipping requirements longer than their contract. Specific box dimensions, exact void fill, white gloves for handling, photos of every step. I thought it was ridiculous until the first piece arrived cracked because I skimped on the packing. What's the most unreasonable delivery or install requirement a gallery ever gave you? And did they turn out to be right?

A museum in Brno asked for a piece built from scrap. Fine, my medium. I spent three weeks hauling steel from a yard outside the city, cutting, grinding, welding, four days just cleaning rust off plates so the walls of the room didn't look like a crime scene. Materials cost me maybe 4,000 crowns. They were going to pay me 60,000 for the whole thing. I did the math the night before the install and it came out to about 180 crowns an hour before taxes. That's under seven euros. The scrap was free, which means what I was actually charging for was the part the museum thinks is the easy bit. I sent the invoice anyway. Signed it, drove home, opened a beer. The room is good. I'll forget the arithmetic before the room comes down.

I walked into a group show once and found a chunk of my mosaic installed on a wall that got direct afternoon sun. Full glare, you couldn't see the color at all, just a flat blinding sheet. I stood there wondering if they'd even looked at it before hanging it. The curator meant well, it just never crossed anyone's mind. I said something, politely, and the fix was a curtain in five minutes. But it taught me to ask about light when a space takes my work. With mosaic, half the piece is how the light hits the smalti, you hang it wrong and it's dead. What's the worst way you've seen your work shown in a gallery? Bad light, wrong height, hung next to something that ate it whole? Tell me I'm not the only one who's had to fix it myself.

I did the math on a commission last week. Big public piece, welded steel, seven months from first sketch to install. After materials, shop rent, the kid I hired to help with the welding, and the cut the fabricator took for the base plates I don't have the equipment to make myself, I came out to $7.50 an hour. I remember when I started out I'd have been thrilled with that. Thrilled. Now I look at it and think what the hell am I doing. The worst part is the client was happy. Paid on time, no complaints. So the price felt fair to them. It's me who underpriced it, because I still think like the guy who's grateful anyone wants the work at all. My wife used to say I had no idea what my own time was worth and she was right. Three years since she passed and I still hear her saying it. Anyone else do the math on a finished job and feel like a damn fool?

I had a piece in a group show maybe five, six years ago. Collector came around, liked it, asked the gallery for my contact. Wanted it for his private collection, he said. But the price, could I do better if we went direct, no gallery cut? I was between shows, rent was due, so I said yes like an idiot. Knocked off almost forty percent. He paid in two installments, took his time on the second one. Six months later I see the same piece at a design auction in London. Estimate was three times what he paid me. Sold for above estimate. I should be angry but mostly I respect the play. Guy saw me coming from across the room. I was the one who said yes.

Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder. Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it. She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places. Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed. I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.

I carved a granite bench a few years back for a public garden. Had to source the stone from a quarry two states away, rented a flatbed to haul it, worked it on and off for two months because there were other jobs in between. Sold it for $1,200. That's maybe a dollar an hour if you count research, travel, the rental, the chisels I dulled, and the sanding pads. I knew it at the time and I still said yes. I told myself it was a "public installation" and that was worth something. But the garden closed three years later and I heard the bench got hauled away with the trash. I don't know what the right number was. Double maybe. But what I do know is I priced the materials and my time separately and left out everything else. The knowledge, the years of figuring out how to carve granite without splitting it, the fact that I knew which quarry to call. That all went for free. I still do it. Not as bad, but I still leave money on the table somewhere. Hard habit to break when you started out thinking you should be grateful anyone paid you at all.

Found a full ratchet set behind plaster in a wall I was tearing out of a 1930s flat in Žižkov. Chrome sockets, still greased, wrapped in a 1972 newspaper. Someone hid it there. Not from a thief, I think. From themselves. Or from whoever came after. I keep thinking about that. A whole functional tool someone decided mattered enough to hide behind a wall and then never came back for. I put it in the installation I'm building, but not cleaned up, not on a pedestal. Sitting on a crate like it's still waiting to be used. The older I get the more I think most of what I make is just me trying to say something about things that were kept safe and never claimed. Nobody ever came back for the ratchet. I'm not sure anyone ever comes back for most of what gets hidden. I used the 13mm socket to tighten a bolt in the frame yesterday and it fit perfect. Fifty years and it still does its job. That part almost made me put it back in the wall.

A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.

Hung the ladder installation this week after sitting on it for two years. Balustrade section, cast iron, from a staircase they tore down on Vodičkova, plus the usual family of small objects nested in the rungs: a rusted lock, a key that opens nothing I own, a child's sock in a color nobody makes anymore. I was sure it was done. Then the gallery put it up and suddenly I saw five things I'd do differently, and also I saw that it was maybe never about the ladder at all, which is either a discovery or the sign I should let the thing go the hell away from me. Sitting in the studio it was finished. On a wall it's an argument I'm losing. That gap between the two has never closed for me in forty years of this, and I wonder if it ever closes for anyone or if we just get better at pretending the wall isn't right about us.

I quoted a 2m x 1.5m floor commission for €2,800 last spring. Client loved it, paid in two installments, no drama. Then I actually sat down and counted the hours after delivery. Between the cartoon, cutting and fitting the smalti, sourcing the stone, grouting, and two site visits, I was at 180 hours. That's €15.50 an hour before you subtract materials, which ran me about €400. So closer to €13 an hour for a piece that'll be walked on for decades. The killer is I couldn't have done it faster. That's the honest part nobody wants to say out loud. The work is the work. You can't rush setting a thousand tesserae and have it hold up in a floor. I keep going back and forth on whether to raise my rate for the next one and risk losing the commission, or stay where I am because at least the work comes in. My therapist friend says I should raise it. The landlord says I should raise it. My hands say they'd like to not be ruined by sixty for €13 an hour. Anyone here actually broken through on the price and kept the clients, or is this just what it is for hand-work?

The studio got so cold this week my coffee went cold before I drank it. Twice. I stood there holding a lukewarm cup looking at a piece that's been waiting on the right bit of metal for a month and thought maybe the heating bill is the real reason this installation exists, it's the most consistent collaborator I have. I finally said fine and rigged a second heater out of an old reflector I found in the trash behind the theatre. Doubles as a light. Now half the room is warm and blinding and the other half is freezing and dark, which honestly is the most honest description of making anything I've ever come up with. The piece I was waiting on? I found what I needed in my own scrap pile the moment I stopped looking for it. Of course. Every time.

Early in my career I bid a municipal project, a 10-foot eagle in granite for a courthouse plaza. I was so hungry for the job I priced it at $14,000. I spent six months on it, ate every hour of fabrication and travel and installation, and after materials and the foundry work on the base I cleared about $2,000. That's not counting the months I spent waiting for the city to pay me. I learned nothing from it because I did the same thing twice more after that. You don't learn from losing money. You learn from getting so tired of being broke that you finally stop. I still see that eagle sometimes when I drive through that town. It's a good piece. I just gave it away.