Admit it. Unless your art collection exceeds a dorm-room Klimt poster and a Thomas Kinkade calendar, you’ve likely had this moment:
Stopping to consider a painting in a gallery, glancing down to the label and having a minor attack of sticker shock. It’s how much?

Paintings that appear offhand and simplistic — Rothko’s washes of color, Pollock’s splatterings — run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and much more. Buyers clamoring to snatch up a piece from the Next Big Artist. To an outsider, it seems head-scratchingly odd.

Nevertheless, welcome to the world of art collecting, and to playwright Donald Margulies’ “Sight Unseen.”

The 1991 play, of which a production by Actors Theatre is running through Sunday, delves into issues deeper than what’s on the canvas, of course. But the overarching questions Margulies tosses up for discussion are on the valuation — and value — of art in today’s society.
The show’s cast has been mulling over those questions since rehearsals began.

“How does art serve the masses? Can it serve the masses? Did it ever occur to the masses?” asks actor Nick Glaeser, a one-time Valley resident who lives in New York but has returned to star in “Sight Unseen.”

“We don’t even like to fathom a world without art and culture, but it’s a fair question if only because most people don’t consider the alternative.”

Glaeser plays Jonathan Waxman, a young artist earning millions of dollars and enough buzz to have a waiting list of buyers for his next works — which they will be buying sight unseen. Over the course of the play, he finds himself justifying his intentionally shock-provoking art (his best-known work depicts an interracial couple making love in a graveyard desecrated with swastikas) to his ex-girlfriend, her husband and a probing interviewer.

The fictional Waxman represents a real situation in the contemporary art world.

“I know several artists who have waiting lists, sight unseen,” says Crista Cloutier, director of Mesa’s Segura Art gallery. “It’s because the name goes for quality; they know what they’re getting. But this is America. It’s easy to manipulate that.”

WHAT PRICE, ART?

When it comes to the high-dollar prices that well-known artists can fetch for their works, artists and curators say it’s a mixed factor of buzz, background and simple marketplace economics. “It’s what experience they have, whether they’ve exhibited, if a museum has collected their work, what the demand is,” Cloutier says. “Prices are never arbitrarily slapped on a wall of a reputable gallery.”

Well, there is a certain arbitrariness, says Rudy Turk, an artist and founding curator of the ASU Art Museum: “It’s just like a hunk of gold. It’s a commodity. We give it a value considering all sorts of reasons, not exactly wise reasons. And as long as there’s a demand, the price will always go up.”

Then there are burgeoning young artists like Mesa’s Scott Allison, 31, who says he prices his art based on a simple formula: Most works go for under $1,000 (“I have to sell my stuff cheap because I’m not popular,” he says, laughing), but as a rule, the larger the painting, the higher the price.

Money is never explicitly detailed in “Sight Unseen,” but it’s suggested Waxman’s works can get roughly $250,000 apiece.

“What am I supposed to do?” Waxman says in Margulies’ script. “Reject the money? Lower my price? What would that accomplish? Would it make me a better artist if I were hungry again?”

ARTISTIC COMPROMISE?

Though they’re different media, Glaeser sees parallels between the worlds of artistry and acting. Both are populated by more strugglers than success stories. And even the successes of both have to contend with economies of feast or famine.

“I did a week on ‘Law & Order,’ and I only worked two days, but I got paid for all five,” Glaeser says. “They showed the episode three or four times that year on network television. I got my original fee four times. I made, for two days’ work, something like $12,000. That just makes me shake my head, until I think, 'Oh, wait, let’s see how many plays I did for nothing.' ”

For Glaeser, the biggest issue of fine art isn’t its high price tag or the compromises artists make for commercial success. It’s the principle that artists’ works go up in value after the artists’ deaths. That great artists aren’t appreciated in their time.

“(Vincent) van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ got something like $60 (million) or $70 million in auction. Is that what it’s worth? What about the time it was made?” he says. “Where’s the tragedy? That we paid $80 million for it, or he didn’t get paid for it when he was alive, when he really needed it?

“I like Jonathan’s world better than Vincent’s. He gets to at least taste it, to make a difference on some level, maybe get an obscene amount of money for it and then laugh all the way to the bank.”