Dealers must walk a fine line between sustaining an artist’s market and closing the sale. © Vasco Stocker Vilhena (for Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art)

Everywhere we look, we’re bombarded by price-cutting: you-pay-what-we-pay employee discounts, summer clearance savings, Presidents Week or Memorial Day or Labor Day or Black Friday sales, tax holidays, trade-in allowances and rebates for recent college graduates and military families. Everywhere, that is, except in art galleries. The prices for artworks that don’t sell aren’t lowered. Instead, those unsold pieces are quietly returned to the artist.

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“Dealers work carefully to maintain consistency,” Penny Pilkington, co-owner of New York’s P·P·O·W art gallery, told Observer, asserting that “the integrity of the artist’s broader market” is at stake. “Sudden reductions or reactive price shifts can have unintended consequences: they may undermine collector confidence, create discrepancies across different bodies of work, or inadvertently signal a weakening demand where none actually exists.”

So, what works in the sale of appliances, clothing, automobiles and cellphones plainly doesn’t apply to works of art. But that’s not to say that prices for artworks are never lowered. It’s rare that anyone shopping at a higher-end gallery pays the list price for a work on display—or even one in the back room. Once a dealer sees that a prospective buyer is serious, a price is floated, followed by the familiar question: “Can you help me out with that?” or “What can you do for me?” That’s when the real negotiation begins. “Especially during tough times, I think dealers are more inclined to be more generous with discounts,” Manhattan gallery owner

© Observer