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Comment by badlibrarian | Hacker News Reader

It's rampant in art museums as well.

It costs approximately $2,000 to frame a 36" piece of art to museum standards. A similarly sized LCD screen, on the other hand...

Art wasn't supposed to be a "by the square foot" kind of thing yet here we are.

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It costs $2000? Why?

Archival preservation materials, anti-reflective glass, and a person who knows what they heck they're doing around artifacts is expensive. Just getting the thing onsite can cost thousands.

It costs a lot of money to create a frame! You need skilled people to make one, get the proper archival glass to protect whatever you're displaying. There's a lot of work and field best practices that goes into this.

And then you visit nearly any museum in Europe, and walls are absolutely covered in paintings with almost none of the wall itself visible and most of the paintings not even behind any sort of glass. It's kind of funny.

The STOP OIL NOW people are changing that with their paint.

(a) Just Stop Oil has disbanded.

(b) They only pulled that stunt on art that was already behind suitably-protective covers. (Whether the stunt is effective or not, they weren't putting artwork at risk: just temporarily disrupting the operation of galleries, and getting themselves arrested.)

It doesn't really have to cost that much. You're mostly paying real estate and a professional waiting for business. Framing material, UV glass, and acid free paper are quite cheap. Anti-glare Tru Vue museum glass costs maybe a couple hundred dollars for a medium sized work, but a lot of museums don't even use it because art framers mark it up like crazy.

>You're mostly paying real estate and a professional waiting for business.

Are these optional? If not, I don't see how this makes sense:

>It doesn't really have to cost that much.

Gallerists always act like having a professional framer is given, but maybe their typical clientele are rich enough to just treat that as a mandatory tax. I framed my art with a diy LevelFrames kit for 10x cheaper which took less than an hour. The frame itself isn't particularly good quality, so for now, boutique framers have a strictly superior product, but this advantage could easily be commoditized away.

Bro, you're not a museum who's invested thousands or more into a single piece. Paying $2000 for the framing service to be done right is worth it when you're protecting a big investment.

It's answered couple times but... The minimum frequency at where costs of these artisanal professional services stop being "part of donation fund that old guy steals from us" and tangibly becoming "actual cost of services" always ends up being higher than one expects.

No museum is framing 2000 arts/year. If they did, then it'll probably come down to more reasonable hourly rates + costs of materials.

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