A couple of days ago in casual conversation a friend of mines asked me and a couple other friends where should they sell their art and how much should they charge. I suggested the site Society6, but another friend of mine advised that they should not use that site given that to sell small prints on the site you have to charge a minimum of $15, which ultimately means charging $25 to make a profit. And what he said next is what bothered me the most, “no one is going to pay that much for a print”. I’m not well versed in that area since I am an writer but I personally felt that $25 really isn’t out of the ordinary for a print the size of your average photo portrait that can be found in every household. I especially didn’t find it out of the ordinary given how talented my friends are and how much work they put into their art.
This is a part of a bigger problem where a lot of artists are mostly underpaid simply because people do not want to give their money to artists. I can understand that there are those of us who don’t have the money to spend, poverty is real and thriving, but it’s also a very real problem that people do firmly believe that artists should offer their services for free. Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI), not too long ago posted various job openings to work for them and each and every one of those offers offered no salary and no benefits other than being able to work for Marina Abramovic. In 2012, W.A.G.E (working artists and the greater economy) released a survey that revealed that majority (58.4%) of artists who have featured their work at galleries in NYC received no payment for their work. And when you take into account that artists of color have a hard time even getting their work into galleries it puts us in an even tougher position. This is why most artists rely on etsy, big cartel, storyenvy, etc to make a living off of their work. And even then they hardly make profit or they simply break even because they have to sell their work for a portion of its worth.
In order for artists to make their art they have to buy the supplies. For photographers, the proper lenses and cameras can easily go into the thousands. This doesn’t include money to pay for the models if any are used. The software to edit their work and any added enhancements most people don’t even think about when it comes to creating a beautiful shoot. For painters, to produce a beautiful piece of art, their money goes into canvases, paint, supplies to prime a canvas (yes this is thing all painters do and it must be done in order for their work to come out good and last), and this can run easily into the hundreds of dollars. Art cost money to create and in order for artists to keep doing their work and produce this art the masses will love, they will need these supplies.
People expect artists to churn out masterpiece after masterpiece for their own pleasure, not taking into account the labor and money that goes into it, and expect to receive this for free. I get asked all the time from people to write poems for them for free, my friend Anisa (@ohlafemi) gets asked all the time for commissions, “People be like “draw me, draw me!’ and I say okay but once I give them a price they’ll say “I thought you could do it for free because you’re good at drawing”. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Ask any artists out and they’ve had at least three people ask for free commissions.
“Most people don’t want to buy art by people who are alive”
There’s this fantasy most people have about artists and that’s a part of another big issue. They love the idea of a struggling artists who lives in an abandoned building who gets their big break after they pass in the most tragic way, ideally starving to death doing what they love or their mental illness driving them to their grave. This romanticization leaves artists poor and hardly unable to keep up with our art. For a lot of us this is our living; art isn’t a side hobby that we are just passionate about this is a job we just so happen to enjoy to do, but it’s a job nonetheless.
In the writing world, if you’re starting out most gigs don’t offer any pay and when they do the pay can range $250 an article no matter the word count to 50 cents per word, most of the time it’s the minimum. And your average successful freelance writer is writing an article or two a week. That’s minimum wage, and when you take into account that there is a huge wage gap between people of color and white people, can you imagine how much a writer of color is being paid if they’re even getting paid at all?
- Sandra // @ig: frglblg // @softmami
artwork by Anisa @ig: ohlaafemi // @ohlafemi
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