The free market is booming (for now) and there are countless books on economy, monetary policy and running a business, to be read and understood by the curious people who wish to know how value is created.

This is thanks to the wonderful economists and fiduciaries and other skilled individuals and groups, all trying to explain and help society make the best out of its resources (well, the good guys at least). But, looking at how the world of business, even smaller business today, isn’t that bad — why is the world of emerging art so horribly underpriced?

No sane business owner has ever said: “Let’s sell this doohickey here at a 10% loss and make absolutely no calculations as to how much we need to make to stay afloat with our rent payment and other expenses.”

But artists on the web debate whether or not to charge 2€ or 3€ an hour in places where the minimal hourly rate is about 10€. And before we start blaming the “unappreciative consumers”, imagine if the iPhone, since it’s unveiling, had been selling for 50€. Would you really blame people for shouting “ripoff”, if Apple suddenly decided to price it high enough to be able to actually make some money?

Instead of fair pricing, we buy our iPhones for a little under 1000€ now, so that we can play with AR monkey animojis, and all is well in consumer land. And I am not being cynical — Apple probably has at least one more price rise in them before the whole company slowly starts to falter, and even that would take a long time!

No, people pay a lot for many things; from useful but outrageously expensive survival kits on Kickstarter to ultra thin military-grade, self-charging, automated wallets with 5 credit card compartments. They are not lacking  the adequate space for all the plastic cards we use, they are being praised for their minimalist approach in design. Like the new Mac. And they cost a premium because of giving us less.

This isn’t just a phenomenon of today — around the turn of the new millennium, someone sold origami boulders, which were in essence crumpled-up pieces of shiny silver paper in nice bamboo boxes. And they made about a million dollars doing it via their online store! 

Dear fellow artists,

Let’s all just stop whining about how people don’t have money for our art, because people nowadays have a lot of capital to spend and there are a lot of people doing so every day. More than there ever were, actually.

And let us rather address the real elephant in the room. 

We should stop undercharging for our work. All of us. And pick up a book about how to run a business or ask a friend, that has some experience. 

Because as soon as ten out of a hundred people start making quality portraits for 50% less than the average price, well, the average price just dropped significantly. And if the other 90 want to stay in business, they might even lower it some more, to stay competitive.

I mean, would you pay 50€ for your internet connection if you could get more or less the same service for half of that?

In the end such price drops only end up with outraged customers, when telling them that your 72 hours spent painting and 20 years spent honing your skill to even be able to do it in the first place cost 100€ plus shipping.

Art is a business like any other, even the priests have accountants, because believe or not, even the work of god has an income and expense statement and cashflow attached to it.

P.S.:

Today’s the first official day the Surviving Art project is live. Apart from slowly building up a platform with as much useful information as I can (still a lot more to come), I have decided to document my process of trying to go full-time with my art. 

I will be expanding my blog and podcast with a video series in both Slovene and English (I’m slowly becoming schizophrenic) and invite anyone interested to stay tuned: videos will come to IGTV, Facebook Video and YouTube and you can find all of them by searching Surviving Art.