Monetary value

The price (not to be confused with the art term value) that an art object, writing, intellectual property, etc., might bring in the market place. Buyers and sellers need good information in order to know what could be a high, low, or fair price to pay or ask for something, in order to appropriately insure it, or out of simple curiosity. Monetary value can be determined to varying degrees of reliability by an appraisal, or by offering it for sale either via auction or gallery (traditional or online), or by an advertisement placed in a newspaper or magazine. [A much more in-depth article on this subject is coming soon.]About the buying and selling of art: "Art among a religious race produces relics; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade." Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), English Romantic painter. "The works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale, are becoming articles of trade, following as such the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion; and public and even private patronage is swayed by their tyrannical influence." Prince Albert (1819-1861), husband to Britain's Queen Victoria. "The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it." John Ruskin (1819-1900), British writer, art critic. Modern Painters (5 volumes, 1843-1860, epilogue, 1888). See art critic. "Of all the world's markets, the art market is perhaps the most intrinsically subjective. No one calculates the price of a painting by tallying the time it took and multiplying that by the artist's hourly rate. Nor do raw materials count for much: expensive paintings are, more or less, made of the same stuff as cheap paintings. For all the experts and connoisseurs and scholars and analysts, when it comes right down to it, the price of a work of art is based on what buyer and seller agree it's worth, and that's all. And as in almost every other field, where money changes hands in society, women's production has been and continues to be valued below that of men, except in this field, the difference is sometimes tenfold or more." Greg Allen (contemporary), American journalist. "The X Factor," New York Times, May 1, 2005, Section 2, p. 42. See connoisseur, feminism and feminist art, and subjectivity. Internet resources concerned with monetary value: "Chalkboard" on pricing art. Chalkboard is produced by Ralph Larmann, an art faculty member at the University of Evansville, IN. Artprice.com provides its customers daily updated art marketplace information on more than 306,000 artists, with over 3.7 million fine art auction records covering 2,900 auction houses worldwide, details of upcoming sales, biographies, along with images of 36,000 signatures and monograms (in 2004). Artprice's pages are available in English, French, and German. Also see Artist PensionTrust (APT), bad-debt art, commission, commodity, and numismatics.