A reader asks Matt what the lowest and highest prices are that he has sold paintings for.
Matt responds:
To tell you the truth, I don’t know what the lowest was. I give away a lot of stuff, so maybe that’s zero. I don’t know what the highest was, because most of the profits go into our peace efforts.
I try not to think about the economics of it, and that’s a blessing to me. When I went from being a businessman to an artist, I purposefully tried to shelter myself from the everyday demands of making money, making sure the cash flow continued, and taking care of all the other the things you must do as a purely economic entity. So today, by design, not by necessity, I pay as little attention to that as I possibly can.
The older I get, I find myself wearing the same clothes over and over again. I don’t drink anymore; I gave up smoking long ago; I don’t do drugs. So I don’t have to buy those things. My biggest extravagance is probably when I go to Gianelli’s and spend 7 bucks on a chocolate soda, which makes me feel like a real swinger. That’s not bad for 7 bucks.
You could drive yourself crazy if you sold one of your paintings for $10 and somebody resold it for $100,000. Because we always tend to think of the best things as things that have price tags on them, I try to think of what is priceless, which is very abstract. The things that I believe are priceless are love, peace, tolerance, hope, and understanding.
When I go into economically deprived places and am greeted by children with smiling faces and umbrellas, that’s priceless to me. If I were to view that as an economic event, I’d start counting the smiles and wondering why the song they were playing to welcome me wasn’t longer, and wondering whether the school I was visiting was the best, second-best, or the worst in the area. That’s how we perceive the world when we look at things as an economic event.
I have no problem with people having lots of money and doing whatever they want to do with it, but I always remember the sermons I used to hear as an undertaker: The caskets have no pockets. We take nothing with us to the grave.
If you as a painter have done something and people give it a good financial value, I get a joy out of that, because you know that as it goes from generation to generation, it’s really making a difference in the world. The other old saying is: People vote with their pocketbook. If people are paying more money for your art, it may or may not help your stomach or how fat you are, but it also helps your soul to know you’re helping to change this crazy world we’re living in.
People may say, “Oh, that’s great for you; you don’t have to worry about it.” But it all comes down to motivation and what does and does not turn you on. I suppose that depends upon the day and many other variables, some of which we have control of and some of which we don’t.
Who would say, “I want to be a multi-millionaire; I’m going to be an artist!”? If you make money as an artist, it’s “By the way, I made some money.”
In a way, people take a risk when they buy one of your pieces; it could go up in value, or it could be a piece of shit as an investment. It comes down to how you view the world and how you view your art.
I remember when Simone Nathan started working with me as an advisor, she asked a friend of hers about my art, and he said, “I’m not going to give you the answer to that. Nobody ever helped me. Why would I help anybody else?” That’s not an inclusive way to look at the world. I think we have to help each other. Money is how we keep track of the economic condition, but in the Roman Catholic tradition we have saints. I don’t know if anybody ever looked at a saint’s checkbook to see how much they were worth when they died.
The measurement of the culture of art, purely as money, is a false measure. What if you have one painting that the richest man in the world pays a billion dollars for—does that make it the best painting in the world? Then you have a painting that might have changed the world—would that outshine the other piece, even though it might have been painted on the back of a milk carton? That’s a very loaded, very complicated situation, which speaks to the diversity of people, what they hold dear, and why.
As Rose and I have always said as we traveled the world, some of the people who are the poorest economically live in some of the most beautiful places scenically, where they watch the waves come in, and eat the fish, and grow the food, and watch the sun set. But in our society, they don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.
Matt