Hmmm, I'll have to look up this article and read it -- the topic is of particular interest to me in that, years ago (when I was an art critic) I wrote an article for a local magazine about how local artists (mostly painters) priced their work.
I'll be particularly interested to see how he rationalizes his idea of "$20 fine art" because it's pretty much contradictory to what I was told by a painter who since my article has become extremely successful. This guy said that when he first arrived and started trying to get into galleries, he checked around at what established painters were using as their prices... then priced himself just below the highest-priced painters in the local marketplace.
He said common sense would have been to start pricing his work lower, and then raise his prices as his reputation grew. But he said he didn't want to do that, for two reasons that I thought were interesting:
1) "You don't want to be the cheapest painter in town" -- once your customers get used to a price level, they'll be alienated if you try to move up to a higher level; meanwhile, people who are used to paying higher prices will not be willing to pay them for your work, because they've already got you pigeonholed as a "budget" painter.
2) "In our society, people tend to judge something's worth by its price" -- his point here is that your perception of an artwork's value is strictly a matter of opinion, but your opinion of what it's worth in dollars is subject to your judgment and perception. To some extent, he said, if people see two paintings hanging in a gallery, and one is priced at $4,000 and the other is priced at $2,000, they'll tend to think of one as a $4,000 painting and the other as a $2,000 painting -- even if they find both paintings roughly similar in aesthetic appeal. Sounds counterintuitive, but since then I've seen it borne out many, many times.
It's true that taking this approach made my painter friend's work less "affordable," but he said that there are a lot of art buyers who can easily afford paying $4000 for a painting if they think it's worth it. The key, he said, is whether the buyer perceives the price as appropriate: "It's as if you went to a fancy restaurant, and had an expensive meal, and afterward you asked for a toothpick, and the waiter said, 'That'll be $10.' It's not that you can't afford $10 -- it's that you don't want to spend $10 for a toothpick." His point was that with that meal you might have had a $45 entree, and a $50 bottle of wine, and that didn't bother you because those prices seemed appropriate to you. It was the $10 for a toothpick that didn't seem appropriate. He wanted his paintings to be seen as the $50 bottle of wine, not the $10 toothpick.
As I said, I'll have to track down the magazine and read the article, as pricing is an interesting subject for me.
(PS -- I never sold worth beans during my entire 15-year gallery career, no matter whether I priced my work at the toothpick level or the bottle-of-wine level. Of course, that may not have been anything to do with pricing psychology -- it could be that my photography just stinks...)
