Pay what you're paid.
Maria Kling · Original Simulation, aluminium prints
Art Claims Impulse, Berlin · September 2026
Deutsche Fassung →
The price of this work is twenty hours. You supply the rate.
Not the hours it took to make. That was months, and it was never only mine.
Twenty hours is what comes next. It funds the artist and the gallery to make twenty more hours of work like this, under the same conditions you are given.
Complete lines 1 to 6
Nothing you type is stored, sent, or seen by anyone, including the artist. This form calculates in your browser.
This is not what your hour is worth. It is what you are paid for it.
| Buyer | Income, year | Paid h/wk | Unpaid h/wk | Per hour | Price |
|---|
Where the twenty hours go. Of your twenty hours, about five reach the artist and about five reach the gallery. The other ten go into VAT, taxes and material.
After tax, not before. Lines 1 and 2 are what actually reached you, because that is the number people recognise about their own lives. Your contribution to everything we hold in common has already been made before this form asks you anything. The same happens at the other end: what you pay is taxed again, as VAT and then on our two shares. Both ends are measured in hours that have already paid their part.
Why unpaid hours are counted. Across the OECD, women spend about four hours a day on unpaid household and care work, roughly twice as much as men. Counting those hours here does not make them worth less. It makes visible how many of them go unpaid.
The forty-hour week. Forty is the number everyone pictures when they say a full working week, and almost no European country puts it in law. Line 9 is fixed at 2.080 hours for everyone, whatever was entered above. Work more and the excess is printed on line 10 and dropped. Work less and the full week is applied to you regardless. The denominator is an inherited round number that fits nobody's life, and it is doing exactly the job here that it does everywhere else. It is also twice twenty: what this work asks of you is half a recognised working week. Where the forty hours come from →
The floor. The German statutory minimum wage is 13,90 € per hour from 1 January 2026, rising to 14,60 € in 2027. It is the floor here because the gallery is in Germany, and because the artist also has to live.
Nothing you enter is saved. This form calculates in your browser. No income, no hours, nothing you type is transmitted, stored or seen by anyone, including the artist. Nothing you enter leaves this page at all. Making an offer is a separate step, and the only thing that travels to it is the figure you decide to carry there. How you got there stays yours.
How the price is shared, and why it is printed here. Sale price, less VAT, less materials, and what remains is divided equally, fifty fifty, between the artist and the gallery. Both then pay income tax and social charges on their own share. That split is confirmed, not an assumption. Art Claims Impulse agreed to publish it, which almost no gallery does. It is printed because a work that asks you to disclose what you are paid, while concealing what the people selling it are paid, would be making the argument in one direction only. And half is not a toll. A gallery willing to take on an experiment like this one, and to put its own time into sharing the work and into keeping it sustainable, is part of what makes the work grow. Their half of the hours goes back into a working life that fosters art too.
Sources: BMAS · OECD · further sources on the concept page