The economics of art (and craft) and why you shouldn’t feel guilty about the prices you need to charge to make a living.

The other day, I popped into Michael’s to look for something quickly, and was totally overwhelmed by the sheer amount of crap that people were buying. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been in a big box store since the pandemic started, and this most recent trip reminded me that I haven’t been missing anything. Honestly, it just made me feel sad, waiting in line surrounded by women buying cartfuls of cheap Halloween decorations.

But it also got me thinking.

For years now, I’ve talked to artists and makers who struggle to reconcile their own similar feelings of disgust at rampant, unchecked consumerism with their own desire to make and sell their art.

And for years, I’ve argued that art isn’t part of the problem. It’s actually the solution.

And I still stand by that.

But I’ve also come to realize that there’s a second piece of the puzzle when it comes to the guilt artists and makers feel around promoting and selling their work, one that’s directly tied to the economics of being a person who makes things by hand. (Even if you don’t make ALL the things by hand yourself, if you have people making them in a developed nation, you still have to deal with this economic challenge.)

The problem looks something like this:

In order to build a sustainable business, you have to pay yourself a living wage for your art or craft. And because that art or craft is often labor intensive, it means your prices will be high.

Now, high is a relative term. But they will certainly be higher than the prices we’re used to seeing for things at big box stores or on Amazon.

And those prices will potentially be out of reach for some people.

But that isn’t the problem. Because the reality is that there will always be people who make (or have) enough money to be able to afford your art. (Certainly enough to build a business around.)

The problem is that, if art (and handmade goods) are the solution to rampant consumerism, then it sucks that the solution isn’t financially available to everyone. It sucks that the same factors that make goods super cheap contribute to a large class of people needing to rely on those cheap goods to get by. It sucks that not everyone can afford to have beautiful art and handmade things in their homes. It sucks because income inequality sucks.

The problem then becomes that artists and makers (who are hyper aware of the injustices in the world), in an attempt to make their work more accessible, end up underpricing and not paying themselves a living wage. Which means they can’t afford to stay in business in the long run. (At least, not without outside financial assistance.)

The noble ideal (wanting to make your art or craft accessible to everyone) ultimately leads to burnout or business closure.

But here’s the thing (as I like to say in my class, Sell Without Shame), you cannot fix the problems of capitalism by exploiting your own labor.

Let me say that again.

We (artists and makers) can’t fix the problems of capitalism by exploiting our own labor.

So what do we do?

First, we need to acknowledge, that in our current world, it’s a privilege both to be able to make art, and to be able to buy art and handmade goods.

It’s a privilege to be able to have not just one beautiful, handmade mug, but a collection of them.

But just because others don’t have that privilege doesn’t mean we should stop making or purchasing art.

As Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing, her book about resisting the attention economy, “there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margin – even the tiniest one – to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line.”

Odell is talking about the privilege of being able to shift our attention to things outside both day to day survival and the media (social and otherwise) that profits from our attention. But I think the same applies to those of us who have the privilege to make and purchase art and handmade goods.

It’s beholden to us to keep making and selling our work (priced at a living wage) precisely because we have a margin to do so.

If we stop, out of guilt or shame or because we get so burned out from underpricing our labor that we have no option but to quit, then we lose the alternative. Because large companies aren’t going to stop churning out mass produced crap anytime soon.

Second, we need to stop feeling guilty for the prices we need to charge to in order to make a living.

Beyond that, we need to stop feeling guilty for pricing our work so that we can not only afford to pay ourselves a living wage, but to profit as well.

Because it’s that profit that allows us to make change.

Like it or not, it takes money to have political impact. And it takes real money to have the kind of political impact that can bring about major changes. (And yes, you can argue that it is money that is corrupting politics, but until that changes, we’ve got to play the hand we’re dealt.)

Charging what you need to charge in order to profit from your art (or craft) is one very real way to have impact on the world.

And if you don’t want to use the profit from your art or craft to bring about broader systemic changes, that’s fine too. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to profit from art or craft simply to make a better life for yourself or your family (in whatever way that looks like to you).

Ultimately, what’s important to understand is this – the prices for your art (or craft) aren’t high because you’re a greedy corporate capitalist. If you’re charging what you need to charge to pay yourself a living wage and make a profit that gives you some sort of financial stability, chances are, your prices are going to feel high.

But they only feel high because the prices we’re used to seeing in the marketplace (and here, I’m talking about the broader consumer marketplace, not just the art or craft worlds) are artificially low. Most things are cheap because they rely on the exploitation of both human labor and environmental resources.

Feeling guilty for charging what you need to charge to make a living doesn’t solve that. Instead, you need to remember that you’re providing an alternative that is part of the solution to all those cheap, exploitive, mass produced goods.

Which brings me back to the beginning. As long as we live in a capitalist society, there are always going to be stores full of cheap crap.

And people are always going to buy those things. Not because of marketing, but because we’re humans, and we like things. (We like things so much that our love of acquiring them predates capitalism.)

Which means it’s up to us, as artists and makers, to provide the alternative to the cheap, mass produced crap.

But being the alternative doesn’t mean we should try and compete on price. That’s a game we can never win.

Instead, being the alternative means pricing in a way that reflects the true costs of producing our work, including our own labor.

And yes, sadly, that means that not everyone will be able to afford our work. (Though there are ways to make some of your work more accessible.) But it also doesn’t mean we need to feel like it’s our job to make sure everyone can afford our work.

Which brings me to my final point, which is that we (as artists and makers) need to stop feeling disdain for the people who can afford to purchase our work.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard artists and makers complain about the “rich people” that they presume are the customers for their work, particularly if they raise their prices. But this assumption has two core problems. The first is that only rich people can afford our work. True, if we price our work where we need to in order to make a living, there are people who won’t be able to afford it. But that doesn’t mean our work is only available to rich people. I know plenty of people who happily buy lots of art and handmade goods (myself included) who certainly aren’t rich.

The second problem is that it makes the assumption that all rich people are awful. True, some rich people are just not nice people. But the same is true of middle class and poor people. Some people are nice and easy to deal with, and that makes them great customers, and others aren’t. Honestly, there are nice people and not nice people in every class of our economic system. So not pricing your work where it needs to be in order to pay yourself well because you “don’t want to deal with rich people” is just another way that artists and makers get stuck on the losing end of a capitalist system.

Being a sustainable alternative to rampant consumerism brought on by capitalism means starting with the sustainability of our own businesses. And that means accepting that the economics of our art (and craft) will never make us the cheapest (or even a cheaper) alternative, and that paying ourselves a living wage (and the resulting higher prices that come with that) is also, in the end, not the problem, but part of the solution.