Daniel Hardy

At lunch today one of my colleagues and I where discussing the prospects of making a living as an artist. I brought up a cost analysis of an artist I had recently seen that seemed to make some decent money. This particular artist was producing bronze sculptures of various south-western themes and when I viewed the artist selections the average prices was around $8,000. He had approximately 10 sculptures out and each sculpture had a list of buyers posted beneath it. On each list was 5-10 names of customers who had placed deposits. I am sure you are doing the math and starting to realize like I did that this guy seems to be making a fortune. 10 sculptures X 5 people X $8000 is $400,000. This is crazy huh? I decided to start discussing some of the cost that the artist perhaps incurred to produce these pieces. You must figure that he was paying for the gallery time, shall we say $2,000 per month (it was a very high end gallery). Of course he is paying for each piece to be produced and while bronze is not a precious metal to my knowledge it is still fairly expensive so lets call the materials fee for each statue $2,000….

Suddenly I was interrupted by my colleague who stated “You cannot cost justify the creative process!” I took back for a second and proceeded to explain that I am not cost justifying the creative process but instead the production of the items that had been created. It dawned on me that this is the biggest piece of why creative elements in business are always outsiders.

Everyone else in the organization has a finite value to cost ratio which is often figured out to the penny. But how do you put a price on something that creates a subjective value, and maybe more importantly why should you have to?

I cannot answer the first part of the question but I think I have an answer for the second. The creative process needs a price and value regardless if you are working on a project for a business or a project for yourself. If you cannot set a price on your creation then you will eventually sink. Furthermore the better you are at demonstrating your price to value ratio you are, the more likely you will find success in the given field. A writer must convince a publisher that his work is of value for the requested price or else the publisher will not purchase it, a sculpture must demonstrate that his price per piece will add the appropriate value and of course a Usability specialist must demonstrate that the improvements made to the application are adding value.