ART IS SOCIALLY VALUABLE
Something positive that has come out of the pandemic is how valuable the arts is and what artists can bring to the world.
Without arts we would live in the dullest, colourless, most utilitarian gray boxes. Artists bring character and life to things around us. They create stories and transform them into dynamic visuals, they create inventive spaces and objects, they bring music into our spaces.
If you think about how often you engage with art each day it’s apparent how important it is to our society.
Unfortunately, this question holds some truth. While we want to enjoy movies, plays, music, beautiful clothing, exciting graphic design and meaningful paintings, artists often have to fight to be paid fairly for their work.
It makes us think about a Southern Graphic conference we attended a few years ago. We had a booth set-up there and were inviting the artists who came to visit the booth to share a story about a time where they were taken advantage of, usually financially.
For example:
- being asked to create something for free.
- asked to create something, and it was implied that they were going to be paid, but then when they finished the project the money never came
- giving the client a price for a project and the client seemed offended by the fee.
EVERYONE had a story.
Seriously. We don’t think there was any single person that came to our table that didn’t have a story to share about not being paid or being made to feel bad for asking to be paid for their work.
WHY IS ART/ARTISTS UNDERVALUED?
So if we know art is socially valuable, why don’t artists get paid accordingly?
Perhaps artists and their art are undervalued because…
-The industrial revolution and mass production of goods. It allowed products to be made quicker and cheaper than handmade items.
-Maybe that’s what we are seeing now with AI art – you can get something designed quick and cheap?
But that doesn’t really work for artists. It’s like the old saying, there are three kinds of services: good, cheap and fast (but you can only pick two).
Artists are usually focused on creating good work and usually that takes time and therefore isn’t cheap.
Of course there are exceptions to this. Some artists can create amazing work quickly. Usually though this is because they have spent years honing and developing their craft and all that hard work and dedication giving them the ability to do something quicker.
Maybe artists are also undervalued because:
-There tends to be a “hush, hush” attitude around the cost of art. It can be hard to determine what something should be priced at even when you are the creator because there isn’t really a “standard” for pricing art.
-Also, so many art sales are done privately with the most publicized art sales being done through auction houses at exorbitant prices. There is so much flux in pricing depending on location, type of work, length of time, associations, fame, etc.
An issue we see in ourselves is that we can be our own worst enemies when it comes to properly valuing our work. We often feel uncomfortable about pricing our art. AND it can become very awkward when giving that price to a client.
This is something we have been getting WAY better at and it is in part because we use Notion to track our time and our Project Planner to manage our budgets.
We love this comic by Lauren Purje about artists and pricing. It’s so relatable!
If you do need help with coming up with some artist fees you can look at CARFAC’s artist fee guide.
We’d love to hear from you! What are your thoughts about this question?
