So who dares to discuss the FRAME Game?

Anyone here play that game? Spend a thousand dollars on a frame, stick it over a painting and then price the painting 10 times the cost of the Frame?

What are you selling? Your ART or a FRAME?

Who dares *not* to play? I don't play. And I never will.

I have long made my own frames. I begin with ordinary 2 X 6 lumber. I don't know what they're worth. Should I price them the same as paintings that take about as long to finish? I assume that those who are smart enough to buy my paintings are smart enough to know the frames are not intended for permanent display. I consider them 'throw aways.' The customer is supposed to re-frame in 'decorator colors' or whatever the frame shop specialist convinces them of.

Where I live, there are MANY galleries - and curio shops - that (try to) sell to tourists. They ALL (try to) sell those 'unlimited edition' prints in frames that are priced at many times what the prints are worth - which is about as much as the paper they're printed on, IMO.

What a coincidence, that this very day I was asked to look at a lady's art work to judge whether it was suited to our committee's standards for displaying art in the public buildings where I live. And the only comment of a positive nature that I could offer the woman was 'nice frames!' And they were. You could tell that she'd spent 'big bucks' to frame her very pitiful attempts at oil painting. All of the frames were heavily gilded (gold) and must surely have been done by a professional frame shop. But her small and dull-dull-dull oils wouldn't even make good fireplace fuel.

Yikes! That's an open invitation to Marxist economic theory. Do we want to go there?

just ONE of the reasons i began oil painting versus water color, way too expensive to frame and hard to exhibit without. now i also make my own frames and i enjoy THAT too. sand and stain some simple strips, spraypaint some others for accent, i had to purchase a hand 'miter' saw, 60 bucks but hey, that's less than one frame...

Reminds me of a trip I took once with a Tribal Council Chairman whose wife had recently delivered a baby boy, Sonny. Irene carried Sonny around in a genuine Chikchansi cradle-board made by her mom. So we go to visit an Indian support group in LA and when Irene entered the room with Sonny this lady there starts falling all over herself with 'Ohhh...look at that' and some assorted squeals...and crosses the room towards Irene. Irene, the proud mom that she was, begins to pull the blankets away from Sonny's face to show him off, but the lady said - 'Oh, don't bother with that. I just want to see the cradle board!?