How can we put a price on art?

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How can we place a value on it?

 

 

 

 

 

Many artists produce their work to sell. This is far from mercenary. Artists have to live and materials cost them money. Customers will receive years of pleasure - aesthetic, emotional, spiritual - from the work, and it is perfectly reasonable for money to change hands. But how much money? What value has the artist added to the canvas?

 

Many people gauge the significance of an artwork by the price it will fetch. Occasionally one will read that a Van Gogh, say, has achieved a record-breaking sum in an auction room.

 

So, does that make it the most important painting in the world?

No. It simply says: this painting has sold for more money than any other painting so far.

 

But perhaps the buyer recognised such extraordinary significance in the work that they were prepared to pay this eye-watering sum for it. Maybe. Although a number of the works which are bought for ‘private collections’ end up in the safes of multi-national companies in Tokyo (or elsewhere); locked away as a financial investment for the future. The buyer has bet that in x years time, artist y will have grown in popularity and therefore in selling potential. This is hardly an aesthetic judgement. The economics of scarcity and demand apply to the sale of artworks just like anything else. If Josie Bloggs’ watercolours become wildly popular in Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, you can expect their price to go up, at least locally.

 

Consider too the question of insurance.

Imagine that I have borrowed Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from

the Louvre for the evening. During the said evening, there is a

dreadful accident and the painting is burned to ashes. How much

is the insurance company likely to pay out? Well, given the

insurance principle of indemnification (making good the loss you

have suffered) they might just offer me the cost of some 16th

century wooden panelling and some oil paints. After all, I can hardly

go out and buy another Mona Lisa to replace it. In fact, insurance

values are based on actuarial assessments of the most recent sale

price and market trends. Yet again, these are not aesthetic judgements.

 

The question has relevance, too, for artists selling new work. What should they ask? If you add the cost of materials, any overheads, and the artist’s time, will that give you a fair price? What about the artist’s skill, the years of training and working to achieve skill? How much should we ask for that? And most difficult of all, what about the aesthetic content of the work? the degree to which the artist has created beauty or balance or truth? How do we value that? Probably we can’t, and we are back to scarcity and demand (driven by the market’s assessment of the aesthetic content). There is a longer discussion of this particular issue here.

 

Let’s try another way into this thorny matter. Might we argue that the artwork which sells the most reproduced copies is the most important? Huge sales must say something about an artwork’s appeal, if not its worth, surely? Well in the 1960s and early 70s the highest selling print was Chinese (or Green} Lady by Vladimir Tretchikoff. The most important or valuable painting of its decade?

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A more recent example has been The Singing Butler by Jack Vettriano. This was painted in 1991 and quickly became the biggest selling reproduction in the UK. Vettriano was not shown in any national gallery until 2011 (much to Mr Vettriano's well-publicised chagrin), and has drawn negative comments from a wide range of critics: “brainless erotica”, “poorly conceived soft porn”; “crass male fantasy”; and painting with “slick, empty panache”. Nevertheless, his sales continue to be high and there is no shortage of private buyers for his originals. So whose assessment is best?

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In fairness to Messrs Tretchikoff and Vettriano, is this any different from, say, Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen (1851) or A Child's World by Sir John Everrett Millais (1886), both of which sold extensively in reproduction (engravings) and were used widely in advertising?