When the edition sells out: paying for prints now or later

In September 2011 the blind gable ends of central Łódź started to fill. Aryz, Kenor and Remed came from Spain, Sat One painted alongside the Polish duo Etam, and M-City and the pairing of Sepe and Chazme took walls of their own, all under the name Urban Forms Gallery. It was the first festival edition of a plan the city’s Urban Forms Foundation had been working towards since 2009. The foundation’s own timeline sets out how the gallery has grown since, to more than thirty walls.

A mural is the one form of this work that nobody can own. It belongs to the building, then to the weather, and eventually to whoever repaints the facade. By 2021 the city’s own portal was listing walls already lost, a bird by Remed and a balloon by Etam among them. So the people who follow these painters collect paper instead: the screenprint, the stencil on card, the signed and numbered sheet that can hang indoors. The pattern is familiar. The edition is announced, the sale opens at a stated hour, and a few minutes later the page says sold out.

How a release sells

The model most British collectors grew up with came from Pictures on Walls, the print house Banksy and Steve Lazarides set up in 2002. It published signed, numbered runs of a few hundred and put them online one image at a time, at prices the resale market soon overtook. A 2010 academic study of the company describes traffic climbing so steeply minutes after one release went live that the hosting provider fined it for disrupting the other customers on its server.

The mechanics have multiplied since. Some artists and galleries still sell first come, first served, with a countdown on the product page. Others run ballots, where buyers register during a window and names are drawn afterwards; Banksy’s Gross Domestic Product shop worked that way in 2019, one item per applicant and a tie-breaker question on whether art matters. A gallery hanging a show will often keep a waiting list for the edition released with it.

The numbers pencilled on the sheet are part of the price. An edition of 150 means 150 numbered impressions, plus a handful of artist’s proofs outside the count, by convention about a tenth of the run, marked AP and sometimes priced above the rest. When those are gone the artist has nothing left to sell at the release price, and a latecomer buys from someone who was quicker, at whatever that person asks.

The Polish market

At the end of 2012 the daily Rzeczpospolita reported that Art Agenda Nova in Kraków was selling serigraphs by Zbiok and Dariusz Paczkowski from 600 złoty, with resale prices well above that, and that Poland’s first street-art auction had been held the previous year at the Rempex house, with Zbiok and M-City among the lots. DESA Unicum in Warsaw held its first sale devoted to street art in May 2020 and has run urban-art auctions since. So a Polish collector faces the same two prices as a British one, the day’s price and the resale price, and the gap between them is what makes a drop feel urgent.

Paying now, paying later

A print at 900 or 1,500 złoty is a real sum, and a release does not wait for payday, so some buyers spread the cost over several months with an instalment loan instead of saving first. The sheet is the same sheet and the number is the same number. What borrowing gives that saving does not is the date: owning the print in October rather than in February. The loan’s cost is the price of that date and of nothing else.

Consumer credit is regulated country by country, so the example has to be Polish. A buyer in Łódź or Warsaw who wants to spread the cost can ask a bank, use the instalment option many Polish cards offer, or go through an online service that arranges instalment loans from a partner lender, such as Hoprata, a credit intermediary registered with the KNF, Poland’s financial regulator. Whichever is chosen, what it delivers is the print this autumn instead of next spring, and that earlier date is the thing being paid for.

So one question settles most cases. Would the same object still be for sale, at the same price, once the money had been put aside? Usually it would. An open edition stays in the shop, a slower edition can sit in a gallery’s plan chest for a season, and plenty of artists release again within the year. There, paying over time buys a few months of impatience, which is a poor thing to pay interest on. A timed release of 150 that clears in ten minutes is another matter. After it closes the release price no longer exists, and the honest alternative is buying later from a reseller at a mark-up. Then what the loan will cost in złoty from first payment to last can be laid against that mark-up, and the smaller number wins. Where a gallery will reserve a piece instead, taking a deposit and letting the balance follow over a few weeks, that beats both: the edition is secured on the day and the wait costs nothing, because the print stays at the gallery until it is paid for.

All of this assumes money that is coming anyway. The reasoning holds for someone who could save the sum from ordinary income within a few months and chooses to have the print sooner. Borrowing to cover a shortfall, for rent or a bill that lands before wages do, is a different thing from paying over time for something chosen, and nothing above applies to it. If the instalments would compete with rent, the print is too dear this year, and the artist will release another.

After the drop

Missing a release is the ordinary experience, and the checks on the secondary market do not change from London to Kraków. The number on the sheet should fall inside the edition size the artist announced, and an AP should come with some account of where it has been. The original receipt, or the gallery’s record of the sale, matters more than any certificate printed later, and a seller who cannot produce either is asking the buyer to take the history on trust.

Timing can inflate a resale price as well. A sheet listed on the evening of a sell-out is priced for the people who have just missed it, and the same edition offered a year later is priced for whoever still wants it. The walls in Łódź, meanwhile, cost nothing to look at.