Yes! We Have No Bananas: What Should Art Cost?

The question of what art costs always leads back to the banana. In 2019, Maurizio Cattelan famously duct-taped one to a wall and called it “Comedian.” In 2024, a version of the piece sold for $6.2 million at auction to crypto bro Justin Sun, who promptly ate it onstage. People decried the vapidity, wastefulness and brazen capitalism of Cattelan’s piece, which was surely the point; unlike the equally conceptual currency that brought Sun his billions, the art at least made a nutritious snack.

The anecdote also illustrates that art pricing provokes Big Feelings. To some, prices seem absurd or opaque, based on nothing but the creator’s whim. That can feel true to artists, too, who are sometimes at a loss for what to charge. And many people who might feel no compunction about paying twice what they used to for a burger balk at buying art they like because they don’t know if it’s “worth it.” So, for this year’s Money & Retirement Issue, Seven Days asked several people in the field a not-so-simple question: What should art cost?

Patricia Trafton, owner and director of Soapbox Arts gallery in Burlington, said one problem is perceived value. People have a sense, she said, of what objects such as a T-shirt — or a luxury version of that T-shirt — cost. “You have these price points in your head of what is expensive, what’s not expensive. We don’t have these associations built in, for most of us, with artwork.”

An artist’s costs may not be the ones that spring to mind. For instance, they could include access to special equipment or a space to work with toxic materials such as oil paint, getting stretchers built or custom framing, and non-art-specific obligations such as childcare.

“$10,000 might seem like a shocking price tag, but when you break that down, that person is making below minimum wage,” Trafton said. And there’s no guarantee the piece will sell.

Commercial galleries such as Trafton’s work on commission, typically 50 percent. Unlike museums or nonprofit art spaces, which are more concerned with giving people access to the artwork, gallerists are actively trying to sell it, suggesting prices and marketing the work in addition to showing it — a service that’s invaluable to many artists. “I have a network of connections to people who have the means and the desire to buy this work that the artist oftentimes does not have,” Trafton said. “I’m also then able to facilitate that sale, start to finish, in a way that the artist may not want to or may not be well equipped to do on their own.”

Most artists in Vermont, equipped or not, are doing it on their own. Hannah Morris is a Barre artist who has shown her mixed-media paintings at venues from BCA Center in Burlington to Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. She doesn’t currently have gallery representation, she said, and her full-time job as a graphic designer at National Life Group doesn’t allow her as much studio time as she’d need to keep pace with showing in a commercial gallery.

“It’s sort of a catch-22, in that I’d have to make some changes or work myself silly,” she said.

Instead, Morris sets her prices herself based on a formula she came up with — about $2.55 to $3 per square inch, depending on the size and including the sides of the canvas, which are also painted. She actually lowered her prices a year ago, once she started showing mostly in Vermont, she said. “I don’t want to undersell the art and my work, but I don’t want it to be just unattainable for people.”

Northern New England Museum of Contemporary Art president Mark Waskow has made attaining art one of his passions for almost 30 years. He started collecting on a blind date at the 1998 South End Art Hop. “It was like an Easter egg hunt for art,” he recalled, “and it was just the most wondrous experience.”

He bought three or four pieces that weekend, he said, which escalated into purchasing a few hundred art objects in his first year. His collection, known as the Waskomium until it became a nonprofit under the new name in 2018, now holds more than 34,000 pieces of art.

Waskow noted a few common mistakes artists make when pricing their work. “People are very precious about their work when they first start,” he said, getting so attached to a piece that they might ask a ridiculous price. Instead, he recommends setting a price by looking at work of comparable size and medium by artists with comparable résumés.

Another misstep is listing only “price on demand,” meaning that buyers should ask, which Waskow described as a hedge for artists uncomfortable with the idea of selling. “If you’re embarrassed by the price, it’s not the right price,” he said.

Painter and sculptor Glen Coburn Hutcheson seems to run toward that perceived awkwardness, setting his prices based partially on the buyer. Visitors to his 2025 show at the Front in Montpelier saw labeled prices such as “$10x your hourly wage or 0.5% of your yearly income.”

“It was entertaining and drove a lot of conversations,” Hutcheson said, “but everyone had to do a fair amount of math.” That prompted him to alter his scheme slightly. Today, visitors to his website see a “wealthy person’s price,” one for “average people” (80 percent off) and one for “struggling people” (90 percent off). He trusts buyers to assign their own rate.

Hutcheson started considering alternative pricing after reading a 2013 New York Times article about Morrisville stonemason Thea Alvin, who at the time set her hourly labor rate based on her age, upping it by $1 on her birthday. (That has changed, she said by email. Ironically, increased demand for her sculptures after the publication of the article prompted her to rethink her rates.)

Hutcheson said that, in addition to wanting his peers to be able to purchase his work, he believes that “everyone’s time, as a human being with a limited lifespan, has equal value.”

He acknowledged that his pricing scheme might turn off wealthier buyers and wouldn’t fly if he were represented by a commercial gallery; moreover, it wouldn’t be realistic for him if art were his only job. But he sees the pricing as itself a kind of conceptual art piece that he hopes will prompt viewers to consider how we assign value.

“One of the things that you get to do as an artist in the 21st century is think by doing shit,” Hutcheson said. “So you just change your price tags and then see what happens.” ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Yes! We Have No Bananas | What should art cost, and why is pricing it so hard?”

Corrected April 1, 2026: An earlier version of this story misspelled Mark Waskow’s art collection, the Waskomium. It also misstated the year Northern New England Museum of Contemporary Art was founded; it was 2018.

This article appears in Money & Retirement Issue • 2026.

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