Price and Value: What’s the Difference?

Art “Wasn’t for People Like Us”

I was born in Dnipro in the 1990s, into a family where art was never really present as an interest or a hobby. The same was true in the banking environment where I worked. Art felt like something distant there, too. My colleagues had vintage furniture in their homes, designer clothes in their wardrobes, and travel photos in their stories, but their walls were empty. Art remained somewhere far away. Not our world. Not our crowd.

“We understood, in a way, that paintings were beautiful. But having art at home felt like something that simply wasn’t for people like us. Until I saw Sesshū’s Landscape with Broken Ink in Japan. That was my way in.

For the first time, a work of art said something about me. Not about history, not about the artist, but about my inner world. About me.

From that moment on, I started buying art. Not as an investor, but as a way to understand myself. I followed the emotions a work evoked in me. I paid attention to how it responded to the questions I was carrying inside, and how my perception of it changed depending on the context.

That was the beginning of my journey towards Subjektiv — a platform created to remove the barriers between artists and audiences. And, just as importantly, between art and money.

Who Sets the Price of Art and How?

The artists themselves set the prices for artworks on our platform. We moderate the listings and often suggest raising or lowering the price. But the final decision always remains with the artist.

Artists often look to international markets and set their prices high, hoping that eventually they will find “their buyer.” Others, on the contrary, ask us: “What do you think would be a fair price?” This is a normal, living process.

But there are also less transparent practices. For example, some artists choose not to publish a price and instead quote a different amount to each potential buyer. That creates distrust. Especially in the age of social media, where transparency is a basic expectation.

Feedback from buyers is often missing. We try to provide it, but even for us, gathering meaningful feedback can be difficult. And it is important to understand that feedback should not come from a single expert. We can act as an arbiter, but not as a price dictator. That is simply not how a market works.

Our platform also has an incentive system. We track every artwork, and when it is resold at a higher price, we pay the artist 15% of the increase in value.

For example, if someone buys a painting for $1,000 and later resells it for $3,000, the increase is $2,000. We pay the artist 15% of that $2,000 increase.

This changes the logic for the artist. There is little reason to hold out for an inflated price and try to sell everything at once. What an artist earns from the initial sale is not necessarily the last compensation they will ever receive.

An artist can choose to sell a little cheaper today in order to start building a track record: people can see that their work is being bought and resold, that there is demand for it. The artist can then continue developing their practice and their work, while the value of their paintings grows and they continue to benefit from that growth.

It encourages artists not to wait for prices to rise someday, but to start selling here and now, at a price that works for everyone involved today.

In general, prices for paintings under $10,000 are shaped by a number of objective factors:

• Materials: high-quality paints, grounds, and surfaces are expensive.
• Time: creating a work is not something that happens in a single evening. It involves complex intellectual and emotional labor. The amount of time an artist has spent developing their practice also matters.
• Size: a high-quality, large-format canvas has significant value in itself.

These factors account for roughly 70–80% of the pricing of artworks in this segment. The remaining 20–30% can be influenced by temporary factors related to success: a work may enter a “bubble,” causing its price to rise sharply, only for public interest to fade later and the work to lose value just as quickly.

That is a familiar dynamic in any market.

Will the Market Regulate Everything on Its Own?

Not quite.

As someone with a background in finance, I believe in the market. It should, in principle, put everything in its place. But a market only works when there is feedback. When there are real transactions. When there is dialogue between all the participants: artists, curators, and buyers.

In the Ukrainian art scene, that is still largely missing. Everything is too fragmented.

People are afraid to say whether they like an artwork. They are afraid to assess what it is worth. Artists do not know whose opinions to trust. Gallerists have their own motivations. Buyers remain silent.

The result is a closed loop.

Despite all the risks and fluctuations, this may actually be the ideal moment to enter the art market. It is a time to buy, sell, and actively participate in the process.

Why?

The market has gone through a reset. The recession led to a significant decline in prices, making quality art accessible to a much broader range of buyers. What once seemed out of reach can now be genuinely attainable.

The Buyer Has a Voice, Too

If we want to build a real art market — liquid, transparent, and alive — we need to start with something simple: recognizing that the buyer is not just a wallet.

The buyer is a person who creates additional value. And their voices should be heard.

This is one of the things that most clearly distinguishes the art market: the significant role the buyer plays in creating the value of a work of art.

The person who buys an artwork influences its future value. Unlike financial markets, where the buyer’s role is more detached from the history of an individual asset, in the art market the buyer’s influence on the story of a work and, consequently, on the artist’s value is unavoidable and even desirable.

Ownership means participation.

At Subjektiv, we give buyers the tools to document and showcase the life of their artwork while they own it, allowing them to contribute to its growing value over time.

This does not mean that the buyer should dictate the price. But they have every right to say, “This is too expensive for me,” or “I see something in this work that moves me, and I’m willing to pay for it.”

The artist has every right to disagree.

But feedback is key. Because genuine value emerges through dialogue. And it does not always equal the price.

In the end, despite all its peculiarities, the art market is reasonably efficient. Many different participants, at different stages of the process, help maintain the rules of the game.

So don’t be afraid of being taken advantage of.

Learn through buying. Discover what you genuinely love  in art, and in other areas of life.