Comment by wincy
2 days ago
It’s a very cool picture. Andrew McCarthy sells prints of these and other astrophotography on his website[0] although they’re always limited run prints. I bought the one of the sun with a SpaceX rocket for a friend who is into astronomy.
As a sales strategy, making his photos limited edition is a fantastic way to put the pressure on to actually buy instead of thinking about making a purchase indefinitely, even if from a convenience standpoint it’s a little annoying. Looks like right now the 16”x20” edition is sold out, but other sizes are still available for about two days.
I get the whole scarcity thing -- and I've even asked Andrew about this -- because if I'm willing to give him my money after saving up for it, but it sells out first, wouldn't he make more money if he took mine then?
But, I guess we just have to have an art budget with some money already set aside if we want to jump on opportunities when artists do this. I respect it, but yes it's a bit inconvenient.
PS. The full, uncropped shot is even more incredible IMO: https://cosmicbackground.io/cdn/shop/files/Overhead_black_li...
>wouldn't he make more money if he took mine then?
Marketing is far more complex then you're giving it credit for. Take the Factorio game, they don't have sales ever so the best time to buy the game is now. This both keeps people that buy things on sale even if they don't like it from getting it, and keeps other people that may wait for a sale and forget about it from not buying it now.
The same is true for limited numbers. Some people may want it and put it in the cart, but never actually buy it because there is no strong binary motivator. This motivator can actually increase sales quickly and ensure you dont hold inventory for long periods of time.
Also things are commonly bought in batches to reduce price. Your one painting later could either be much more expensive or require the artist to buy 50/100 units at once that risk becoming stuck inventory.
You can't directly compare the two scenarios. Without the incentive to buy due to limited availability, he might have never sold as many copies, or at least it might have taken much longer.
> because if I'm willing to give him my money after saving up for it, but it sells out first, wouldn't he make more money if he took mine then?
If the piece sold out, he made his money.
It's the same situation with $1000 theater tickets. You aren't the market.
Just print it and glue stick it to your wall
If I were him I would put out a limited edition at a fixed price like he currently does, but then add $X0? $X00? cumulatively to the price of each additional unit sold.
> making his photos limited edition is a fantastic weay to put the pressure on to actually buy
FWIW, limited edition printing is absolutely standard practice for working artists who use media that can be easily or mechanically replicated, including photographers, printers, and digital artists.
The feeling of FOMO that it instills is indeed one reason, that benefits the artist, but the main reason limited editions are used is to add value to the art through scarcity, and this reason benefits you the buyer. People don’t want to be the first to find and buy something unique only to have it get so popular that all your friends and neighbors go buy the same thing, right?
The story of uniqueness is important. There’s a very real perception that art that can be reproduced indefinitely and is always available is cheap and not really fine art. Limited editions prints are trying, even if half-heartedly, to compete with painters and sculptors who produce something unique every single time. I say half-heartedly as a digital artist who prints limited editions, not as an insult. There is a slight degree of having cake and eating too. Limited editions are usually sized near the estimated sales limit, or such that the artist can move on to selling other work without feeling like they lost a big opportunity.
Limited edition print runs do lower the price of a print, but not as low as the cost of printing. If an artist does editions of size 1, they need to make enough money to live, and $90/print won’t do it if you only sell one. You can spread the profit across a run and give a group of people something for a low price instead of giving one person a high price.
If there's any difference between printmaking and photography, it's that printmaking requires one to physically print each item. There's a non-trivial amount of manual setup to do, and the process can take days.
Photography can be printed basically on-demand owing to the nature of the medium.
It doesn't mean that limited runs in photography are less valid, though. Once that print is editioned no reputable artist will just print more. (although there are ways around it, like different colorways) It definitely makes the item more "collectible".
Oh definitely, I agree, woodcut and digital art and photos, for example, are all wildly different media. I’d expect a woodcut to cost more than a photo, all else being equal, because it’s more physical - both making the plate, and setting up the print run - and generally closer to fine art.
The economics of the limited edition part is still the same for printmaking though, right? The printmaker could choose to make a single print and then sell the plate, or destroy the plate, and it would be closer to sculpture - a one of a kind piece of art. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are one or two printmakers that do this and can sell a single print at a time for enough money to make a living. But I think it’s more common to do a limited edition run and sell multiple copies, same as photographers, no?
A lot of modern prints aren't really made like that. They're just run off on (basically) nice commercial inkjets.
Sure that's not exactly fine art, but there's a big market for it, including things like collectors. Virtually all concert posters are printed this way, for instance.
> You can spread the profit across a run and give a group of people something for a low price instead of giving one person a high price.
Why not somewhere in between those options:
For example (made up numbers), sell 100 units at $100 after which the price goes up by $10 for each additional sale. So the 100th unit would be $100, the 101st unit $110, the 200th unit $1100, and so on.
That’s an interesting concept. Can you talk more about how you imagine that affecting the market? My first reaction is that it wouldn’t solve the value problem at all. Yes you can charge more over time, and in practice it would actually limit how many you sell, but the problem is that the first buyer has no guarantee that the thing they buy is collectible, and thus a reduced incentive to buy. Every new sale devalues the original sale, even despite the low initial price. That might be offset by having lower prices for earlier buyers, but not limiting the edition size might also quietly eliminate the market for collectors.
Your idea reminded me of something I’ve thought about trying. It’s not the same concept exactly, but I do digital art sometimes and I was thinking of selling it with copyrights and the generator program included, and allowing the buyer to do whatever they want with it, including sell copies. The thing I was thinking is that I’d start with a low price per piece, and increase the price slightly every time I sell one, so the prices of my pieces would ramp up over time, rather than the prices of prints in a single edition.