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Like prints, multiples tend to go up in price as the edition is disseminated; many publishers raise prices after each third of the run is sold. But not always. “It all depends on the artist,” says Thomas Jones, who co-founded Editions Fawbush in 1997. “A lot of times, artists don’t want to raise the price.”

One artist who has built affordability into the concept of his project is Allan McCollum, whose Visible Markers series has been published in four versions so far. Its initial incarnation, published by I.C. Editions in 1997, was priced at $300 for a set of six different-color concrete ingots, each impressed with the word “Thanks.” For the most recent version, in 2002, Cerealart published a resin edition of the bricks, priced at $30 for a set of five.

“Allan was playing with the notion that the person who gives the most away in a certain society is the one who has the most status,” says Inglett. Yet as more bricks were produced and prices dropped, the cost of the original concrete bricks rose. Inglett has only about a dozen individual bricks left from the initial edition, priced at $250 each. “Any object becomes more valuable as it is sold out and fewer can be acquired,” she notes.

The resale value of contemporary multiples is hard to gauge because most have yet to establish auction records. “If you’re buying strictly for value,” Platzker advises, “you should think about where the artists’ market is in general. The editions market isn’t all that radically different.”

Beyond the Galleries

Yet a market for the category itself clearly exists. In the past decade, several museums have begun publishing multiples to raise money, including the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. In late 2003, Christie’s New York renamed its biannual print sales “Prints and Multiples.”

“We were noticing more attention being paid to multiples—to objects that weren’t necessarily flat,” says Kelly Troester, head of Christie’s print department. “Collecting has gotten so creative and gregarious these days, it kind of leads to these other objects too. It’s a way to get an interesting object at a more affordable price for certain names.”

Major art fairs, including Art Basel and the Armory Show, have added special sections dedicated to editions. And growing interest in multiples has led to changes for the eight-year-old Editions/Artists’ Books fair in New York, which is moving to a larger space in Chelsea this year, Nov. 2 - 5. “This is no longer a new medium,” says Weitman of the Museum of Modern Art. “It’s one that has much more widespread acceptance.”

"Art Market: Hot Numbers" was originally published in the July 2006 issue of Art + Auction magazine.