Buying Sculpture For Yourself

When buying your sculpture you can feel safe with

values in the neighborhood of six to eight thousand dollars,

if you love the piece. Any value beyond this point and you

should have an established basis for investing the money.

With sculpture, the reputation and ability of the artist to

increase in value becomes exponentially more important

than with wall art, because sculpture values vary to a higher

degree than wall art. Even small sculptures can command

prices of several thousand dollars, large pieces easily climb

into the tens of thousands of dollars, and life size pieces can

reach the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So once again,

there is no substitute for research. I've seen sculpture

prices vary so greatly, where the same artist and the same

edition sculpture was on sale for $90,000 in one gallery and

$32,000 at another gallery.

A big pricing trend in today's sculpture industry is to

increase the value of a sculpture as it continues selling

through an edition.  This is not absolute, but almost all

publishers have benchmarks, where when a certain number

or percentage of the edition has been sold the sculpture will

jump into the next price category. Wise collectors will note

the best deal can be had when the sculpture is first released.

You can get an even better deal if the publisher or artist

offers special pre-publication prices.

With a pre-publication offer you get to see the clay or

wax model or a picture of the model and if you have the

courage to go forward and order the piece, you will benefit

from a pre-publication discount between twenty to twenty-

five percent, below the initial release price. By simply

looking at a wax model or picture of a model you cannot tell

too much, unless you know this artist and habitually like

their pieces. You may benefit from such a purchase even