"The economy of printmaking: culture & commodity Part One: Markets and values, institutions and collectors"
Published in Imprint Vol 29 No 1 Autumn 1994
Once upon a time, there was a well-known Australian artist. He was a colourful, charming entrepreneur who set up a unique print publishing enterprise. He and his wife lived in great style, and he borrowed against the business assets to live it up. He liked to make lots of prints himself. He was just a bit too prolific. Pretty soon, he'd made so many prints that he'd flooded the market, and they lost their value. Even his printers thought that the artist was printing wallpaper. Since he was a bit over-extended, he dipped out. He went to live overseas. Some people were glad to see him go. Moral... the laws of supply and demand apply to prints as to all commodities.
Prints can be melancholy things. We invest them with all our loving invention, then set them adrift on the sea of hope like fragile paper boats. Can we direct them more resolutely to the harbour where they are rewarded with acclaim? The survivors of that fleet accrue value and mystique out of proportion to their physical substance... As George Eliot would say, "these things are a parable". Prints are commodities once their maker's inky hands wave them goodbye, off to fulfil their communicative destiny. What forces operate on the fragile mechanism of the interdependent artist, workshop, publisher, dealer and consumer?
Market forces— the mechanisms of desire Prints are paradoxical. Works of art are unique, hence valuable; prints multiply, yet each seeks the prestige of the unique. Prints are torn (metaphorically) between availability and rarity. Silvie Turner writes (of the British scene) that "in the last decade there has been an over-production of mediocre prints. David Case of Marlborough Graphics suggests that perhaps ten prints were made for every one sold."1
In the last three or four years, with the general depression of art sales (and artists!), many printmakers might have hoped that sales of prints would suffer less than more expensive art works. Sheridan Palmer, a Melbourne dealer in fine art, has observed that paintings at reduced prices offered by dealer galleries have become more affordable and have moved into the market position that prints once occupied, attracting the attention of buyers such as state and regional galleries, as well as private collectors. The Australian art market is limited by small numbers of buyers. Experienced artists respond to market forces by limiting their output; young artists have to be aware of oversupply adversely affecting both themselves and the whole market. It is the few, rare works that command high prices, as Palmer points out. Let work out slowly in small editions and good impressions, pace your career, and measure prices carefully against those of your peers; these are the management strategies she would suggest. Supply and demand in the commercial gallery market are a better indicator of the value of the work than the auction market.
With a painting, you don't witness its decline in value unless you sell it. With a print you can witness its decline when someone else sells it. Bill Gregory of Annandale Galleries which show "modern Master Works on Paper", asserts that the Australian market is on too small a scale to give a true value for works on paper, and that therefore the primary value at the gallery is "arbitrarily set" by dealers. Because there is very little secondary market for recent Australian prints, he believes that it is hard to establish credibility for re-sale and thus there is no certainty as to value of a collector's investment. Gregory observes that prints re-sold at auction can, and do, undercut their retail price and this makes prints a less than appealing investment.
On the other hand Cathy Robb, head of painting at Christie's, says that the secondary reputation does not immediately follow on the primary. There is always a time lapse. The primary reputation is always established in the dealer gallery, and with time (sometimes quite a long time) its value spills over into the auction arena. She is enthusiastic about prints at auction and sees some doing well and being bought by investors, but believes that prints address a specialised market. The ones that do well express that magical conjunction of historical interest, artistic merit, and rarity - Fred Williams, Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston, George Bell school, Claude Flight - obviously none of which is available from primary dealer galleries. Of contemporary prints at auction, she mentions a recent Anti-Cancer Council folio of ten lithos "well priced", she says, at $2200. Lloyd Rees' prints she gives as a example of work that has suffered with the recent downturn. 'There were too many available," she says, "and expectations were out of kilter with the market."
As Grace Cochrane has written, "the Western art market has long encouraged the making of artificial products whose only purpose is to appear on gallery walls. I say 'artificial' because these works rarely find any meaningful place in a living or working environment."2 In this frame of reference, prints may be uniquely able to maintain contact with ordinary art lovers (their endlessly renewed prejudice against works on paper notwithstanding), at one end of the spectrum, and to attach to high art glamour at the other.
The value of prints: status and prices "In addition to its economic accessibility, the emergence of the print as a truly independent medium has contributed to its secure place among viewers and collectors. Since the '60s, print has staked out a territory of its own, in defiance of previous categorisation as a secondary medium - and now it competes directly with other media in all respects, such as size and aesthetic achievement. (A Jasper Johns print recently sold in the six figures, though perhaps it was a bargain for an artist whose paintings sell for millions.) ...The world of printmaking is ultimately market-driven, and understandably so. An edition can be a large investment for a studio... and so only artists with a proven record for their work are generally invited."3
Roger Butler, senior curator in prints at the National Gallery of Australia, believes that print prices are high in general in Australia, compared to overseas, and even within Australia young printmaking graduates routinely expect $250 -$300 for their efforts, out of proportion to the expectations of more experienced artists. He puts this down to the "new professionalism" of printmakers. Young printmakers have a "false sense of worth" he says, partly as a result of art education and the institutionalisation of all aspects of art practice. Butler points out too that edition numbers are falling - editions of ten or less are now usual, when editions of fifty used to be the norm - and this rarity would tend to inflate prices. There seems to be little agreement among artists and dealers as to what a print is worth on the shop floor.
Stuart Purves, director of Australian Galleries, is all enthusiasm for prints, but says there is a smaller profit margin in each print and more work compared to most paintings. The success of Australian Galleries in this arena since 1956 relies in part on enormous amounts of stock (five thousand prints!), large turnover and efficient bookkeeping. The market will tell you how to price, says Purves; if it does not sell, chances are it is too expensive; if it sells well and there are a few left in the edition, raise the price for the remaining ones. "Tougher, darker images which reach a deeper market should be in smaller editions," says Purves, "than lighter work which can risk within limits, a larger edition."
Does the very ease of print production place at risk the market value of the whole body of prints for sale, when the market is insecure? Many print dealers and workshops have a backlog of prints in their drawers, representing the equity that the galleries, workshops and artists have invested in their production, entrusted on consignment to the dealer or publisher. With some art businesses in a fairly precarious state, these stockpiles have the potential to undermine the value of an artist's output well into the future, should they lose their already fragile value in a firesale. Watching a shaky dealer teetering on the edge is less than amusing if your precious work is in the stockroom. This parade of disaster has passed before the eyes of many an artist in recent years.
Prints assert and maintain status as fine art commodities by virtue of the hallmarks of the limited edition - the cancellation proof, meticulous numbering and signing - the print's guarantee of authorship, thus value. Those artists and printers who disrupt these conventions of connoisseurship in their practice challenge those who have an investment in these signifiers of excellence, rarity and skill, codified so painstakingly over the last few decades. Garner Tullis, a very well-known American printer, says he has come "under fire" from the Tamarind Institute, that bastion of received practice, because he doesn't use a chop mark on his prints. This seems to indicate a certain paranoia on someone's part...
It may feel pretty gloomy to be out there making flat things that no-one seems to want. On the other hand, "for local artists we have in Australia probably the best art scene in the world," Geoffrey Legge writes. "In relation to our population more local artists have exhibitions and a greater number of people buy local art, all in a situation of art of high general standard."4 There's one person at least who thinks that these are the good old days.
New technologies, old taxonomies or the transition to the institution "Printmakers ...have often resisted realignment of the discourse of printmaking in order to conform to the demands of connoisseurship and the museum."5 Charles Green may predict disaster for printmaking, deracinated and debased by miscegenation, losing prestige in a lather of "disorderly proliferation" at the hands of artists not constricted by the unwritten rules of print-as-craft. True, available technologies for image production and distribution are increasing. Yes, prints are the art of the multiple, distinguished by "seriality" in Ruth Weisberg's term. There is a proliferation of forms with the potential to challenge the categories imposed by those institutions which codify taste and value. Is the temple of art a mausoleum of obsolete, nasty categories whose agenda is to divide and conquer the free spirit of creativity? The transition to the institution is an interesting nexus between tradition and change.
Cathy Leahy, assistant curator in prints and drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria, points out that the distinctions between media are not exclusive to printmaking and arise from separate art-historical specialties and the different requirements for preservation. Prints at the NGV, in contrast to those at the ANG, are catalogued according to medium, then country of origin, then artist. The maintenance of the historical collection dictates the placement of problematic new items. Recent cross-media works by Sue Ford and Bashir Baraki were filed with photography as it was felt that this area would best meet their archival requirements.
At the National Gallery of Australia, unlike the NGV, the work is catalogued according to artist. Roger Butler believes that printmakers have been too tightly locked into technique, and this has put off commercial galleries. He believes there is a current resurgence of printmaking but not as a sub-culture in the ghetto, but rather alongside other art forms. Print will be primarily about content, a sentiment echoed by many printmakers who long to slough off the burden of being identified as a superior sort of tradesperson, and are no longer content to be sidelined by art history. Butler, for one, would be happy to see printmaking re-defined within the museum culture as belonging to the category of multiples, enabling prints/photos and paintings/drawings to be curated together, exploiting their natural allegiances.
Public galleries and the archive The ANG has a long-standing commitment to printmaking, with a separate department for prints, posters and illustrated books since 1981. Sizeable early purchases, for example a complete set of Baldessin prints, laid a foundation for authoritative, systematic study collections which are currently being augmented at the rate of 1200 prints a year. Acquisition on this scale by far overshadows that of any other institution in Australia. A good annual budget for Australian prints is supported by gifts from individual artists and collectors. Many artists donate their life's work, for example Barbara Hanrahan and Alun Leach-Jones. Roger Butler believes that the ANG successfully avoids being an unnatural influence on the print market, since much material is not shown, and cannot go on exhibition, but forms a study collection and archive. The ANG is a "low-key" buyer and doesn't publicise purchases, aiming strenuously to avoid influencing the market.
Within the National Gallery of Victoria, the need to have a varied and balanced exhibition timetable from the whole collection constrains their exhibition program. Next year a major show of contemporary prints is planned, for which most works will be newly bought. Lack of funds, the majority of which are spent on recent works on paper, tends to cramp the style of the prints and drawings department at the NGV, and the lack of specific print galleries, in Melbourne at least, is a problem for buyers of current prints. It's hard to get an overview.
Private galleries and the private collector In dealer galleries a minority of profitable artists routinely subsidise those artists, the majority, who fail to make a profit. Prints may be doubly disadvantaged in being parasitic on the success of artists in more heroic forms like painting. Do prints belong in specialised galleries, where they may best meet their audience, or will prints gain value insofar as they emerge from the ghetto?
Prints need a charismatic salesperson, they say, nostalgic for the likes of Tate Adams. Such a one realises the market potential of prints, presumably hypnotising the reticent buyer with force of personality and enthusiasm for the product. Basil Hall, director of Studio One in Canberra, identifies a "disappointing lack of entrepreneurial push from galleries" so Studio One "steps into the market place in lieu", both in initiating collaborations and in print sales. There are more diffused points of sale now than in the 70s, and several dealers have told me that stand-alone print sales are not economically self-sufficient. Dealers absorb their prints into their broader stock and seek other strategies for viability. The economic climate works against specialisation. Roger Butler believes that prints now are seen less as a sub-culture and dealers no longer shy away from artists producing prints as part of a varied output; Peter Bellas Gallery in Brisbane is an example. Several well-known artists who concentrate on printmaking are not represented by any gallery, especially in Melbourne since the closure of Powell Street Graphics. Other artists have stopped making prints because they have drawers full and nowhere to place them.
Curated portfolios give prints a muscular bulk, and can artfully replay the history of printmaking as a secretive, intimate and contemplative form. They have been a marketing strategy of very variable success, according to Dr. Gene Sherman. Several charity portfolios have found a modest market, but a folio of Stelarc suspension events in photogravure was too challenging for most buyers. Aus Australien, the elegant print portfolio of the 1990 Sydney Biennale found a ready audience. Brian Seidel, a director of Port Jackson Press print publishers in Melbourne, sees no mileage in print folios for his business. The modern print resolutely attaches to the white wall, a lonely limpet of modernism in splendid isolation.
Noreen Grahame runs the only exclusive print gallery in Brisbane, where she finds that she cannot show the work she wants without subsidising the operation of the print gallery with a framing business. She feels strongly that there is brilliant printmaking in Australia, but that artists here need to move out of the parochial local scene. She is taking the unusual step of producing an expanding series of high-quality artists catalogues - "a prestigious ice-breaker for the work itself", she says, "in a territory that overlaps the artist's book and the catalogue." The gallery shows a vibrant selection of Australian artists in print. There is an emphasis on a boldly gestural, figurative, expressionist style. One needs a certain courage to bring the black beasties of Milan Milojevic or Hertha Kluge-Pott into the bourgeois living room.
Stuart Purves believes that the growth of the 80s brought print up to a good status, appreciated and valued. Australian Galleries has recently underwritten the production of prints by Arthur Boyd to the tune of $40,000, and is already in profit. With the aid of such canny strategies, the print market is "alive and well" for Australian Galleries, who show single-minded, ambitious printmakers such as Geoff Ricardo, Graham Fransella and Graham Peebles, in one of the few gallery spaces dedicated to works on paper.
A gallery that challenges the gestural autograph aesthetic is Susan Shehadie Editions. Shehadie's selection of fashionable artists in multiples, such as Dale Frank, Hany Armanious, Gerhard Richter and Nam June Paik brings an all-too-elusive conceptual prestige to the print gallery. The work here neither draws attention to a printerly surface nor to technical finesse as an end in itself. Around this work there gathers that rarefied, expensive air, as of some exclusive perfume. Cool glamour has its contribution to make to the value of any artefact.
The International Works on Paper Fair, in its fourth incarnation in 1993 at the Powerhouse Museum (stage one) and on again next year, is facing some challenges. Art fairs stand or fall on their turnover. Some exhibitors last year felt that the audience they gained was not worth the price of a stand. The most solvent of the dealers can afford a jaunt like the Fair out of petty cash, but it's the little Aussie battlers among the galleries whose future participation is most uncertain. The question is how to hook in a print-oriented buying public—is there one out there, or was last year's Fair just disadvantaged by some problems of location and publicity? Presumably this is the case, as previous Fairs at another venue were much more well patronised and financially successful. In the chaos of battling images that art fairs dramatise, works on paper may be happier not having to challenge the architectonic vigour of paintings and sculpture, yet isolation thrusts them back into the sheltered workshop.
The Print Council of Australia steps into the market place too, with the annual folio of Member Print Commissions having generated funds for the PCA for the past 28 years. Direct financial returns to the artist are minimal, but Imprint as the marketing vehicle is a hot line to the print-aware public and to regional and state galleries, giving artists exposure unequalled by any other venue. Recent moves by the PCA to a more stylish thematic selection by guest curators have potential for an interesting dialectic of artists with the given theme; the risk is of creating uneasy alliances under the curatorial umbrella. Subscribers won't pay a lot, and artists aren't paid much, which tends to limit ambition, but constraints are challenging (so the story goes). The results vary widely in every sense. More recently Art Monthly Australia has also essayed direct-mail marketing of prints, with some success. Prints have a pleasant talent for postal distribution.
Corporate and large public collectors Some businesses buy art merely to decorate the corridors of power, some to express an ideal of corporate taste, genius and identity, some to mop up excess liquidity (in that charming metaphor of commerce as cleaning lady). What place do prints occupy in these paradigms?
Katrina Rumley, currently the director of the S.H. Ervin Gallery, National Trust of Australia (NSW), has advised organisations such as IBM and the Parliament House Collection on art purchases. She says that there is a good range of corporate and public bodies buying prints in quantity, including IBM, Lend Lease, BHP, Art Bank, the Parliament House Collection, and the University of NSW. Many of these do not discriminate against prints in their buying policies - corporate collectors want "the latest and the greatest, regardless of medium". Within corporate spaces such as IBM, the big bosses tend to ask for "originals" (!), ie. paintings, and lesser mortals get prints in thier workspace. I like to imagine those prints, forever representing a beleaguered order of low-tech craftsmanship and trust in the expressive qualities of the autograph mark, decorating the halls of the hegemonist digitising corporation itself, there to be reflected in the unblinking eye of myriad computer screens.
In the experience of Robin Gibson, Sydney gallery director, corporate buyers have not been spending money recently because, even if they are not suffering financially, (as applies to some big law firms among others), they "can't be seen to be spending money on art during the recession". Forty percent of Gibson's sales are to businesses, who tend to purchase prints as fillers for the spaces between paintings. After all, you can get ten prints for the price of a decent painting—no wonder they are still the poor relation. In those public collections that do not have a permanent curator, Katrina Rumley says prints are disadvantaged by their fragility. At the Heidelberg Repat Hospital, for example, works on paper are not going to be circulated in line with archival practice, and are therefore unsuited to light-filled areas; the University of NSW also decided against works on paper for their heavily trafficked, bright areas.
Basil Hall relates how art consultants frequently come to Studio One, looking for prints for major building jobs, hotels and the like. They have an unrealistic idea of expenditure, some expecting to pay a maximum of $100 per room including frame. Hall relates with some irony how these consultants dislike "artist's prints" (meaning "something in black and white that would appeal to other artists"). Their preference is for colour, wildlife, landscape; in that, I suppose, they fatally fulfil all our art world prejudices, just as many printmakers fulfil the prejudices of consultants. The tradition of art for art's sake forbids rapprochement with such suspect patrons.
These issues all form part of the network of interests surrounding print production. In the next edition of Imprint, a look at the economy of printmaking as it operates in education, new technologies, workshops and publishing.
NOTES Except where footnoted, all quotes have come from personal communication. 1 Silvie Turner (ed), British Printmaking Studios, London 1992, p. l8. 2 Grace Cochrane, "Collecting our thoughts". Art Monthly Australia, June 1993, No 60, p.5. 2 3 Cathy Lang Ho, "Collaboration", Artweek, vol 23 Nov 5 1992, p. l9. 4 Geoffrey Legge, "A Case against Trust Accounts", NAVA Newsletter, Sept 93, p.7. 5 Charles Green, "Art as Printmaking: the Deterritorialised Print", Art Monthly Australia, April 1993, No 58, p. ll.