Dispatch: On Value, Cost and Price (no math)

Not sur­pris­ingly, there is an inter­est­ing story behind The Secret Bench of Knowl­edge, a sculp­ture cre­ated by Lea Vivot, one cast­ing of which is located at the entrance the the Library and National Archives Canada in Ottawa. I say not sur­pris­ingly because this sculp­ture has never been quite what it seems.

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A closeup of the Secret Knowl­edge Gar­den. Photo also by Kon­rad Glogowski.

At first glance, it is a pair of chil­dren sit­ting on a bench; he is eat­ing a bright red apple and whis­per­ing some­thing in her ear; she is squirm­ing, ever so slightly, per­haps at his words, per­haps because he is too close, or per­haps she just doesn’t like to sit still. The tourist brochures will tell you that the sculp­ture bears a mes­sage of the joy and value of read­ing. But there is more going on here. Her face shows she is intrigued, they’re, um, not read­ing any­thing, and there’s that bite miss­ing from the apple.

The story told to me on the morn­ing bus com­mute, on route to the Library and Archives, is this: Under the cloak of dark­ness, about one hour after sun­set in early May 1989, Lea Vivot drove a truck with huge winch and deposited her 315 kilo­gram work, then called Secret Bench, Lost Par­adise, in front of the build­ing. The next morn­ing, staff arriv­ing for work were delighted to see the new addi­tion adorn their front entrance. Nat­u­rally, they assumed it had been put there by another gov­ern­ment depart­ment and the memo would be forthcoming.

In fact Lea Vivot had decided to lend the sculp­ture to the Library and Archives, unbid­den. The Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts cites this expla­na­tion from the Ottawa Citizen:

The build­ing needed some­thing and I don’t feel that artists have the time to go through the bureau­cratic approach. In the same amount of time that it would take to go through all this (bureau­cracy) I can cast another sculp­ture and enhance another space.

About a year later, Vivot removed the sculp­ture. How­ever, it had become so pop­u­lar that phil­an­thropist Eugene Boc­cia donated a cast­ing for per­ma­nent instal­la­tion. In 1994, this time dur­ing day­light, the new Secret Bench of Knowl­edge was unveiled. Accord­ing to the Library and National Archives, the new sculp­ture also included engrav­ings about the plea­sure and impor­tance of read­ing cho­sen from the con­test entries sub­mit­ted by school chil­dren and writ­ers across Canada. This time, clearly, a gov­ern­ment memo had been issued.

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This anec­dote offers a use­ful reminder in sales and mar­ket­ing 101, show­ing as it does the tight rela­tion­ship among the cost, price and value of a work or ser­vice. Cost is the amount you spend to pro­duce the work or ser­vice, price is the finan­cial reward for pro­vid­ing it, and value is what your cus­tomer believes the work is worth to them. To max­i­mize prof­itabil­ity, wher­ever pos­si­ble, you should set prices that reflect the value you pro­vide, not just the cost.

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The Secret Bench of Knowl­edge in Bonita Springs, Florida. Photo by Cary Edmond­son, Bonita Daily News.

More cast­ings of the Secret Bench can be found in Toronto, Sar­nia, Mon­treal, Fort Laud­erdale, New York, Lon­don and Prague. In Bonita Springs, Florida, the work sits in front of Com­mu­nity Hall off Old 41 and became the community’s first out­door piece of art in 2003 when accord­ing to the Naples Daily News, it was moved from the neigh­bour­ing city of Naples after com­plaints about its sug­ges­tive imagery. In 2005, Lea Vivot requested Bonita Springs pur­chase the work for $150,000 USD. With no sin­gle phil­an­thropist is site, the city began a year long cam­paign to raise the funds pri­vately. It was a long time com­ing, and it was worth every minute, said Amy Arend, chair­woman of The Com­mit­tee to Save the Bench. You have to sell a lot of pan­cakes and T-shirts to raise that kind of money. Even­tu­ally, though, Lea Vivot accepted $57,000. After what I have seen, what effort they put into it, I decided I couldn’t take it away, she said. Any art object will make the city look nice, Coun­cil­man Alex Grantt noted. It fits here very nicely. The city also estab­lished an Art in Pub­lic Places ordi­nance, which means that future art­works for the city will not need to be pur­chased through pri­vate fundrais­ing. The author of the arti­cle points out that while The Bench off Old 41 remains the same, the dif­fer­ence is that now it belongs to the city and is no longer on loan from the artist. It is also, of course, the dif­fer­ence between value, cost and price.