Does Expensive Art Just Look Better?

Want people to respect and enjoy your artwork more?  Evidence suggests that you should think about raising your prices.


"If it Doesn't Sell...Raise Your Prices"

We know a very famous, talented and respected artist whose paintings now sell for upwards of $100,000 apiece.  He once shared his pricing "secret" with us.  It was a simple philosophy.  He told us, "If a painting doesn't sell, I simply raise the price."  He went on to relate the story of showing a painting in New York for $2,000 where it didn't sell.  So he moved to another gallery in New York and raised the price to $4,000.  It still didn't sell.  He moved it to a Santa Fe gallery and raised the price to $6,000.  It still didn't sell.  Finally, he exhibited the painting at a show in Oklahoma and raised the price to $10,000.....and it sold.

How can this be?  We've all heard about the "laws" of supply and demand.....but those laws just don't seem to apply to art.....or indeed other luxury items.


Expensive Wine Just Tastes Better

A few days ago I stumbled across a blog post on Brain Blogger titled Expensive Wine Just Tastes Better, which led me to the initial study reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences dryly titled Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness.

If you can look past the dry title, the study surprisingly concludes,  "Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates."

In short, the study concluded that Expensive Wine Tastes Better, or, more correctly, if you charge more money for the same wine.....people will think that it tastes better.


Does Expensive Art Look Better?

It seems to us, that this study, coupled with our anecdotal evidence related in the story of our famous artist above leads us to wonder....if you charge more money for the same painting, will people think it looks better?

The answer seems to be . . . yes.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson
Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic

PS - Raising prices can be a big step.  We still feel that it's best to raise your prices little-by-little, consistently over time.  Remember that in the wine study that the people did seem to enjoy the "expensive" wine more . . . however, they were given the wine.....they did not purchase it.  We have enjoyed a couple of $100 bottles of wine that were given to us as gifts....but we've never actually purchased one.


Related Pages and Posts:

Expensive Wine Just Tastes Better (Nicole Obert / Brain Blogger)

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness (Plassman, pnas.org)

Masterpiece in the Subway, Trash in the Museum (Clint Watson, FineArtViews)

Is there no Limit to Man's Ability to Make a Jackass of Himself? (Bill Bonner / Daily Reckoning)

A 71 Million Dollar Fool (Clint Watson / FineArtViews)

Guidelines to Pricing Art (Clint Watson / FineArtViews)