ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the development of artists' attitudes toward pricing art, and considers how prices for fine art by emerging contemporary artists were determined in the art world of the 1980s. Pricing is also difficult because of an attachment to the romantic ideology and an anticommodity notion of art, which creates uneasiness about financial issues. In figuring out the price, students calculate how good they feel their work is not only compared with other students' work but also with that of artists seen in Philadelphia and New York galleries. The commercial career of the artist is based on gradual increases in price, a practice that is rooted in a belief in the artist's continual growth and development. When prices reach too high a level or demand for an artist's work stops because of collectors' lack of interest, "the price never goes down, the work just doesn't sell," as one dealer put it.
