Open Letter to Charles Thomson About Pricing Art

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No Tit Le Ok? 2025. Acrylic on cardboard, 11 x 14"

The following is an excerpt from by recent book Making Friends With Wild Dogs: Reflections on Stuckism for its 25th Anniversary

Open Letter to Charles Thomson About Pricing Art

A part-fictional reply upon a disagreement about another Stuckist’s 16 × 20" studio canvas painting being marked for sale at £2,000:

I agree Charles. Founding Stuckists are historical, and should be fetching much higher prices for their work. That is, if the market was a free one, which it is not. It’s for players (millionaires) to make money make money. And it’s rigged. It needs to be democratic like an Oaxacan Saturday flea market. Which is why I am adamantly opposed to random art pricing. Painters, if painting, should fully realize that their ship has already come in. In our bloated Western economy, time to paint means one is already privileged with roof, food and fuel, and doesn’t need the money to survive. So why set prices out-of-the-blue? Sure, some colors cost more than others, but not that much. Is it out of spite, delusion or stinginess that a painter jacks up a price with no rational accounting? Does he or she wonder why nobody buys the paintings? Random pricing is wrong if they aren’t bought up in regular fashion, such as other fair-priced, hand-crafted commodities (Oaxacan woven blankets for instance). Arbitrary pricing undermines the working painter. I am more interested in the artists who cannot support a family. Those who can are “made”, and all power to them, for sure. Unfortunately they just add to the problem, becoming part of a speculative faux market that cheats the people with inconsistent pricing. I fully understand that historical work must have higher value than something I just put out from my basement today. That’s a no-brainer. However, what makes you and Paul historical is the founding of a popular movement. Very rare, and scarcity sells. Your work will fetch big money in a future time. (That’s why we’re keeping your prints in a safe). Reality tells me though, that without representation and/or universal fair pricing, everyone else who isn’t historical, or “made” by a millionaire’s gallery is just a fool waiting for the postmortem garbage dumpster to get dropped in the driveway. I am so tired of 20th century celebrity art. I don’t love everything by Picasso, and wouldn’t buy it at a flea market unless it was signed “Picasso”. But then I’m not interested in a painting, am I? I’m buying a name. I don’t accept the commoditizing of human beings. Especially living ones. Subjective art pricing does not benefit the major majority of image makers. In fact, it hurts them deeply.
I was wrong about Paul’s painting. I see your point and agree with some reservation. His asking price is still subjective and conceptual. And why is that? Why not sell it for 2 million? What special magic have galleries conjured to selectively set prices that marginalize the vast majority of art-makers? Feels more like a brute force art takeover by the non-artists, making “successful” painters no better off than chosen sweatshop workers in a corporate profit scheme (scam). That little book I gave you has an essay on how I would price a painting. If art is a commodity, then there should be a universal, worldwide accepted way to sell it, like a bottle of wine or dress slacks. I too want to promote artists, but not the already “made” ones. Unfortunately, at present, I’m just a nobody who is burdened with an advocate personality. In a Tate Modern world, Joe Machine and his legacy will be cared for. Yours too. Congratulations! Now what about the other million painters making decent work prolifically? Maybe, if prolific, they too would hope to support a family. Those are the people I want to help along. $75 at a flea market for my 2 hour painting is like manna from heaven. Look Rose, a gringo bought my blanket! Now I can take us out for memelas and call myself a professional artist. Everyone wants to be a millionaire. I just want to be a janitor who paints.
I would want to ask you or Billy Childish, or any early-on Stuckist why y’all can’t come together and find an honest way to set your prices. All this lip service paid to getting around the “white-walled” gallery middlemen to show art, yet still using the galleries’ influence to price your own art arbitrarily. Myself, I never became an image-maker so I could be unscrupulous. Does Billy Childish really think his colored 60 centimeter canvas to be worth $30,000 more than Andrew Makarov’s? Probably not, privately. But he’s gotta buck up for the biography camera and show his toothy smile whenever the powerbrokers call. That is, if he wants to make the real money — not just the “get by” income for the basic necessities, and a little extra for travel and pride. Good for Billy Childish. Stink-rotten for the art world and the other million painter prostitutes who can’t seem to turn a trick no matter how much they make up the price of their art.
Powerbrokers of the late 20th century made the bulk of every day art-makers neurotic with desperate dreams. The worst crime though, was creeping their sour influence into the minds of the actual artists, or, as I like to call this rarer type, the activist philosophers. Painting is just a means to the end of the masterpiece work, which is making living an art. That is how I believe history should separate the wheat from the chaff, or the true artists from the money-making art-makers. Only dead artists should make a killing with their paintings. It’s the living art-makers, corrupted by the pseudo social
science of art history, and its banging dissonance, who charge £2,000 for a studio canvas painting that no one worthwhile can afford.



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