How To Tell If Your Artwork Is Worth Any Money

In late 2024, headlines were made when a banana duct-taped to a wall at an art auction sold for $6.2 million. The conceptual art piece, titled "Comedian," created by an Italian sculptor by the name of Maurizio Cattelan, first debuted at Miami Art Basel in 2019, where three different copies were sold for between $120,000 and $150,000. Though the art piece itself is meant to be a joke about a society filled with excessive consumerism and vast price gauging, it does beg the question: how does one place a price on art?

Aside from bananas duct-taped to walls and old photographs you may have that are worth a ton of money, there is indeed a strategy for placing a price on art. And in the case that you find yourself fortunate enough to come across a piece of art work that may be valuable, it will be useful to know just exactly how it is done. That being said, let's take a look at the simple steps that you can take to figure out whether or not your art is worth any money.

If you ever find yourself blessed enough to inherit some art work and want to figure out just how much you can sell it for, there are a few steps you can take by yourself before you decide to consult with some sort of curator or art expert. The first and most obvious step is, if the person you inherited the art from is still alive, ask them where they received it from. However, if this much is not possible, then there are alternative routes you can take instead.

The first alternative step you'll need to take in ascertaining the value of your art is to figure out whether it is a print of a painting. To determine if it is a painting, you can use a magnifying glass or gently touch the canvas to see if you can feel any brush strokes on its surface. If the piece is done with water color, then it will not have any brush strokes, but other types of paint like oil or acrylic will. In the case that the artwork is not a painting but instead a print, it will usually have some sort of edition number on the bottom of it. Unfortunately, most prints are not worth much money unless they are, of course, an artist edition, like a lithograph, which is the most common of these. Lithographs are essentially chemical copies of art work created through a sort of pressing mechanism.

Another way to determine if your art is worth any value is to try to locate a signature on the painting, which is usually found in the bottom left or right corner of the piece. In some cases it may be in a different location on the painting, but regardless, just take a picture of the signature once you find it, upload it to something like ChatGPT, and simply ask who the artist that wrote out the signature is. Once you figure out who they are, try searching some of their other works on Google to see what they are priced at. This will give you a good general idea of the value of your art, but make sure you're looking at reliable fine art marketplaces instead of somewhere like eBay.

Now obviously, as previously mentioned you can always instead hire an expert to get an appraisal for your artwork. However, these can be quite expensive, and your art may not even be worth enough to warrant an appraisal. For that reason, it is better to take any of the aforementioned steps first before considering this. And for those of us who haven't been so fortunate as to inherit expensive art, it might be time to take a look at some of the spare change you have lying around, because if you have some of these rare coins they could be worth a ton.