A few days back I wrote a post about pricing of fine art prints. After thinking a bit I decided to do an experiment with upcoming exhibition to find out how much people are willing to pay for my prints. I’m going to do a silent auction with no reserve, no starting price for the prints that are going to be exhibited. I’ll find out just how much people are willing to pay for them (if they are willing to pay for them at all, of cause).
Here are the images that are going to be exhibited:
All the prints are on a canvas stretched with gallery wrap 27”x18”.
I’ll let you know results.
vitali prokopenko | fine art 
Update: The result is quite encouraging. I sold three of the pieces at the silent auction at good price.
Hi Vitali, I got your blog link from our photo DL. You have some beautiful work. I’m interested in this post. I have had some relatives frame some of my work, and I’m wondering if I should pursue selling more of my work. Can you tell us more about how this experiment turned out? Did you sell them all? Did you make money overall? What kind of prices did you get? Where was your auction?
Hello, Ian. I sold 3 out of 10 at average $70. The price was good enough for me. I probably recouped cost of materials spent on all 10 but definitely did not make any money.
I’m still happy with the result. There was very limited publicity. The gallery is very small non-profit. I got impression from speaking to some visitors that they were not aware and it was not clear that all the prints were up for an auction.
Some learnings from it:
– Publicity is important.
– Making it more noticable that auction is in progress is important.
– There is such thing as too many. 5 prints would be enough for an auction. The gallery was not big enough to hang 10 large prints. I had to hang them too tight in 2 rows which made presentation less attractive. Also selling 10 prints in a small gallery are very unlikely.
– There is a market for my work.
– There is a price point which people are ready to pay and I’m willing to sell at.
– It was an important input for be to build pricing formular for my website.
The most important thing is that 3 prints found people who would appreciate them.
Moving into the future selling work is still extremely hard. Commercial gallery takes 50%-60% of all sales, which means I would need to double the price just to brak even, and I don’t think there are that many people who would be ready to pay that price. There is a lot of leg work needed to find those place willing to hang your work, more than I’m ready to put up.
Another option I considered is art fairs. I’ve talked to several people selling photography at art fairs and a common pattern is that it requires lots and lots time preparing, which I cannot put up given that I have a three year old son. It also requires large up-front investment and largely is gambling. Many are loosing money on it.