Ask ArtInfo: Should You Ask for a Discount?

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An excellent question, New to the Market, and one I've often pondered myself. So I asked a number of dealers what their policy is.

The first person I spoke to—a well-established Chelsea dealer—described this as "the fundamental question." He went straight to the heart of things, but would only answer it anonymously.

"Certainly you can ask for a discount on the work," he told me. "And frankly, we price things like, 'OK, this is what we've got to end up with,' and we add on 10 percent or 20 percent because we know that nine out of ten people will ask for a discount. That's become the norm.

"It all comes down to market forces, and it's not really any different to anything else," the dealer continued. "If there's a particular car on the market that everyone wants, you can't go in and haggle for a better price. But if they've got 50 Chevys on the lot, all different colors, they're going to cut you a good deal. It's supply and demand. The market determines its own value."

So that's the answer from a relatively new Chelsea gallery. What's the policy at a gallery that has been around since the 19th century?

James Graham & Sons have been in business since 1857, and I went up to their Madison Avenue gallery to speak with Priscilla Vail Caldwell, vice president of American paintings.

"You can't really generalize because I think every gallery has a different policy as far as prices are concerned. There are places where the price is the price and there's no negotiating, and there are people who handle their businesses differently. Probably in most cases, there is some room in the price, but I think that it has a lot to do with how individual businesses are run."

And does it depend on who's asking? What about someone that you've done a lot of business with?

"A very good client who buys work from me all of the time? For anybody who is a good client of the gallery, absolutely, there is usually some courtesy in those transactions," Caldwell said.

And what about when you're approached by a museum? "From our point of view," Caldwell told me, "We always want to do what we can for museums and make it as easy as possible for them to purchase things for their collections."

Next, I went to the other end of the chronological scale and spoke to Cheryl McGinnis, who—although she’s been working as a private consultant for years—only opened her gallery a few months ago.

"What if you posted a price of $4,500, and someone came in here and said they only had $4,000?" I asked.

"It's important for me to know how much they love the piece," McGinnis responded. "I usually give room for leeway. If it was $4,500, and someone was asking me to give them a price of $4,000, that's just a little bit over a 10 percent concession, and if they love it, if it's something they want passionately, then nine times out of ten, I would make that deal happen for them. I've worked with people who've never collected before, and I'm a great believer in making that sale. I have taken payments over a year. They can take the art and I bill them, and my artists get paid right away."

"But how do your artists feel about this?" I asked her. "Aren't they a little uneasy about having their work haggled for like it was something on a market stall?"

McGinnis responded: "One of the first things I tell artists is, 'I understand the market. I'm not going to undersell you. But I'm not going to oversell you either, because it's not fair to other artists who are further on in their career, or to you ultimately, because you have to build a market—if you don't have collectors, you can't expect to get this money for a piece of art.' So I tell them, 'we'll put price X on this work, but there's a good chance that it's going to go for 10 percent or 15 percent less,' and that's the way the market is."