Smithsonian Craft Fair, and showing and pricing art

https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/smithsonian-cliff-lee/smithsonian-craft-show-artist-shops---cliff-lee-5689

Sure aren't Etsy prices and quality.

If you are a crafts person yourself, you shld study the quality as well as the listing and pricing. For instance, the high prices at listed on top.  It's like going to Wh Foods and finding the least exp hand lotion on the lowest shelf.

When toilet paper was scarce, I cld not find them, then suddenly they were near the checkout counter.

Smithsonian is really for very well-heeled collectors, not the hoi polloi, but everyone should elevate their taste and aspire to excellence in one's chosen field, and artistic merit should be reflected in such prices.

I don't condone kitsch and cartoonish Burmese paintings.

A long time ago an opera singer, and another woman who showed me her paintings, said, "Don't give things away for free."

Van Gogh in the popular imagination is depicted as "crazy" and naive, but in fact even after the ear incident, he was writing to his brother Theo, who was an art dealer,  that since Gauguin was so taken with 2 of his Sunflowers, he should give back (to Johanna, Theo's wife, who later started the van Gogh craze)

Gauguin, quite a volatile as VG, is said to have precipitated the ear cutting when they tried working and living tog. in the yellow house.  The letter was written AFTER the incident, when G was afraid to see VG, in case it created another outburst.

VG wrote--he should give back to Johanna,

"2 paintings of his of comparable or better quality."  Note he did not talk of size.

A former friend wanted to exchange her painting of a prairie chicken for one of my big abstracts, but I didn't want a small picture of a prairie chicken.  That's the problem with barter, non-co-incidence of wants.  I just wanted money.

So that did not work out.

But she became "former" bc she went back to her home city, not bc of the chicken.

My late cousin once went back to Burma and exchanged a lipstick for a ruby ring, wh I think was like going to the Amazon w trade beads--

--if you are an artist or a writer (who is an artist too, of course) I would say, "Know your worth"

At the same time, try to build your market and yr brand.

You also have to price what the market will bear.

That's all I have to say today.

kmk

10-13-2020