Somebody has to write a number on the card, and it usually falls to whoever is assembling the auction catalogue at eleven at night. The number gets picked from a range the artist mentioned once, rounded to something that looks tidy, and printed.
That number does more work than almost anything else in the presentation. It sets the anchor every bid is measured against, it tells a room whether to take the lot seriously, and it follows the artist around afterward. Worth ten minutes rather than one.
The two numbers, and why they're different
Stated value is what the piece sells for through normal channels. Gallery price, studio price, whatever the artist actually charges.
Opening bid is where you start the bidding.
These get conflated constantly, and the conflation is what produces the two failure modes: a piece with an opening bid at full retail that nobody touches, and a piece with no floor at all that goes for forty dollars.
Ask the artist for the first number. Set the second yourself, at something like forty to fifty percent of it. Low enough that somebody starts, high enough that the piece can't be carried off by the one person still paying attention at the end of the night.
Get the stated value from the artist, in writing
Not a guess, not a range, and not something reverse-engineered from what a similar-looking thing sold for at another benefit.
Artists generally know what their work sells for, because they have a price list. Ask for the number and the size, and put both on the card. If a piece has sold at that price recently, that's the number.
The reason to insist on this is that an invented value hurts in both directions. Too high and the room reads the lot as overpriced and skips it, which is worse than no art at all. Too low and you've published a price the artist now has to live with, because a stated value from a public auction is a data point that surfaces in conversations for years.
Why a low number costs the artist more than the piece
This is the part organizers rarely see, and it's the reason some artists have stopped donating.
An artwork that sells at a benefit for well under its value creates a record. Collectors talk. Somebody who was going to buy a piece at full price hears that one went for a third of that at a gala in April, and the conversation gets harder. The gift wasn't just the object. It was the price the object established.
That's not an argument against donating. I'm giving away twenty-six pieces this year and I'd do it again. It's an argument for the reserve, which costs you nothing and protects the thing the artist is actually risking.
What the value on the card is for
Two audiences read it, and they want different things.
The bidder is calibrating. The number tells them what range this is and whether they're in it. A piece with no stated value gets bid as if it were worth whatever the room's least confident guess is.
The buyer, afterward may care about it for tax reasons. In the United States, a charity auction buyer can generally only deduct the amount they paid above the item's fair market value, which means a genuine bargain produces no deduction at all. Some bidders know this and some don't. Stating the value plainly lets the ones who care do their own arithmetic.
I'm not an accountant and this isn't tax advice. If it matters to your organization, ask one, because the rules are more specific than a paragraph can carry.
The artist's side of the tax question
Worth knowing because it affects how requests land.
An artist who donates their own work in the United States can generally deduct only the cost of the materials, not the value of the piece. For something I make, that's mat-board and glue. Not the price on the card, not the hours, not the years of learning how much adhesive warps a stack overnight.
This surprises people, and it's why the sentence "this donation is tax deductible for you" in a request email reads as slightly off-key. It's true in a narrow sense and irrelevant in every sense that matters. Artists donate because they want to support the thing, or because the room is worth being in. The deduction is not the reason and it's not the compensation.
Setting the opening bid, practically
Forty to fifty percent of stated value is a reasonable default and you can adjust from there.
Go higher, toward sixty percent, if the room reliably bids well on art, if the piece is going into a live auction with an auctioneer, or if you've seen this artist's work perform. Go lower, toward a third, if it's a silent auction with a lot of lots and you mostly need momentum.
Publish the increment too. People bid in the steps you give them, and an unstated increment produces a sheet full of twenty-five dollar bumps on a six-hundred dollar piece.
When the artist won't give you a number
Occasionally an artist will decline to state a value, usually because the work genuinely hasn't been priced or because they don't want a public record. Take the refusal seriously rather than filling it in yourself.
The workable compromise is a range on the card, or a stated value with a note that it reflects the studio price rather than an appraisal. Both are honest. Inventing a figure is the one option that isn't.
If you're pulling an auction together, How to Present Donated Art So It Earns Its Estimate covers the lighting, placement, and card copy that surround this number, and What Actually Sells at a Charity Auction covers which pieces are worth asking for in the first place. When you're ready to ask, the request form is here.
Shawn Kemp makes one-of-a-kind generative artworks fabricated as dimensional layered relief sculptures in Bellingham, Washington. In 2026 he is donating twenty-six originals to charity galas and fundraising auctions.