The Art Tree
I had an orchard and it was beautiful and small and orderly. This orchard was my life and my fortune. I put a fence around it, I grafted exotic European fruit trees to my trees to enhance and make the fruit more rare and special. The fruit was good and years went by.
It never became the financial success or the spiritual success it was supposed to have become. All types of things were tried over the years. Special fertilizers and special picking machines. Dogs to chase out birds that would eat the fruit. Special imported bees I had to keep. One year I even draped the whole entire orchard in clear plastic and grew lavender in all the rows and this was supposed to infuse the fruit with lavender as it grew. That actually worked but the yield was so low because the lavender fought the trees for nutrients that each bottle of jam that year cost me $114 and it was a hard sell to customers. The market for $200 jam is a very small pool.
I came to the orchard every day. Some days, in fact most days, were terrible outside. This severe weather produced excellent fruit but took its toll on me.
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Why My Punch Paintings Cost $800
Let's begin by discussing the rational laws of Economics.
Economics begins with assumptions of scarcity, no transaction fees, and no taxes. With scarcity, price elasticiy exits. Except price elasticity doesn't apply to art except reversely for very high end collectors(ie trophies).
There is no graph that supply and demand will meet to determine a price for a painting before diminishing returns. The cost of the materials is insignificant, maybe $50. Paintings sell for hundreds to thousands to millions. Cost of materials is not relative.
Thus, the economics of painting don't really fit into my Economics degree I earned thirty years ago.
This is because paintings are outside of time in that they are always present, always giving, always abundant.
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