Affordable art – what does that mean?

The wonders of modern technology (mostly Google – but we don’t feel comfortable giving them all the credit) tell us at artFido that what most people are looking for when it comes to buying art online is affordable art. Not modern art. Not beautiful art. Not contemporary or Aboriginal art. Affordable art. Now affordable art is not an exclusionary term. It can be used to describe any one of the forms of art we just listed. However people searching for an online gallery don’t generally include an additional descriptor. Affordable art is it. That’s the one they start with. And, luckily for us, that is all they need to find artFido, where they can then explore thousands of pieces of art that fall within that singular description. Great. But that got us to thinking…what is affordable art?

There are currently over 2000 pieces of art listed on artFido. An early example of David Bromley’s work is currently listed for $18,500. An affordable piece for a seasoned art collector who is use to paying three to four times that amount for a piece of that size and quality. While David Bromley’s painting sits at one end of the “affordable art” spectrum, the works of photographer’s like Melissa Jane Skehan sit at the other. Prints of her photographic works are regularly available on artFido for less than $50. At the time of writing, her “King of the World” print of a majestic Red Stag roaming the high country of New Zealand is available to those looking to buy art online for as little as $35.  Quite a difference to the affordable piece by Bromley.

These are just two examples of the affordable art available on artFido. But they serve to make a very obvious point. What is affordable to one person may be completely beyond the realms of common sense and reality for another. And that is great. Because if we were all searching for the same thing from our art, there would be much less diversity in the art available to us, and the price on all art would go up. Simple supply and demand. We love that we can offer people the opportunity to own something that moves them, that speaks to them on some level for as little as $35 and as little as $18,500 (see what we did there… you were expecting us to say as much as… but that would have been against the thread of this entire blog).

So when Google (Ok…we’re giving Google all the credit now) tells us that the majority of buyers looking for art online are finding our site by searching “affordable art”, that is all we know. What they’re looking for within the classification and beyond it, we can only guess.