The Independent newspaper reported today that artist Damien Hirst has come out and said that the art market is overpriced. The Stuckists will rejoice! I, for one, am glad that Hirst, who is worth £200 million, has come out and talked about the price of art - when Piers Morgan interviewed Tracey Emin last month, she skirted around discussing the price of her art.
Hirst's line is: "Art is worth what the next guy is prepared to pay." I think that misses the point. Art pricing is based on what YOU are prepared to pay.
A friend of mine recently struck a deal with an artist who said he would sell his two canvases for £120. But my friend said that was underpriced and he wanted to pay more. So he paid him £150.
It would be revolutionary if Hirst made the price of art the subject of his next work. But that isn't likely to happen any time soon. "You feel as if you are touched by God," he is quoted as saying in reference to his success on the art market. And elsewhere in the same article: "That is what artists want, for people to hang the works on the wall."
But the best line is this: "As an artist, you don't stop making art because people are not buying it." It would be great if Hirst plonked his next idea in the middle of Leicester Square, next to all the portrait artists who sit in the wind and the rain everyday, and said: "No one is buying this -this isn't for sale."
I wonder what would happen and how long Hirst would be able to hold out?
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3 years ago
1 comment:
I always feel aware of how much leeway artists who make a living from their work are afforded in order to be eccentric! If he wasn't making ends meet through his work, perhaps Hirst or any others would have to take a job in education or some other field and have to be more hard-nosed pragmatists.
Convention comes into the price of art as well. It's all a bit perverse, I think that for the amount of work I put into making a wedding video, it's unfair compared to what an unestablished artist might make for a painting they made. But I'll not sell myself short either. Hm.
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