The Price of an Artist
The photograph illustrates this essay. The conversation took place in another gallery.
During a recent afternoon photographing on the Left Bank in Paris, I stopped at one of the galleries for which the area is still known.
I began talking with the gallerist. Around us were works by artists whose place in art history was no longer in question: Dubuffet, a drawing by Picasso, and other names already supported by decades of exhibitions, collectors and sales.
Our conversation began with a question I had been thinking about since writing about Van Gogh and Monet. Why does one artist become recognised during his lifetime while another remains almost invisible? We spoke about the people who stand between an artist and the public: dealers, collectors, critics, and those who decide that a particular body of work deserves to be shown again.
I then asked him how he recognised, among the enormous number of painters working today, the few who might genuinely emerge.
His answer was direct. Many people called themselves artists, he said, but produced work that found almost no buyers. For him, an artist needed a public, and the clearest proof of that public was a willingness to buy the work.
At one point, he mentioned €20,000. Not quite as a formal threshold, but as the kind of price that showed an artist had entered a real market.
I did not believe that a price could decide who was an artist.
But his answer stayed with me.
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I had heard the same argument among photographers before, though without the figure of €20,000: what is a photographer worth if their work is worth nothing?
The ambiguity was intentional. The value of the work and its market value had become the same thing.
I do not think they are the same. A photograph does not become better when the price of a print rises. That price also reflects the edition, the photographer’s reputation and the market that has formed around the work.
But I am not sure the two forms of value are entirely unrelated either.
A sale means that someone has gone beyond looking. Someone has decided that the work deserves a place and has been prepared to pay for it.
That still does not tell us who is an artist.
But neither does writing the word beneath our name.
Somewhere between self-declaration and €20,000, the work has to meet someone other than the person who made it.
I am still not sure where that point lies.
You can also explore a selection of my photographs and the recognition they have received in Selected Works & Recognition.
Originally published at https://journal.philippetriconnet.com on October 4, 2026.
