Are we all underselling ourselves?

There's a painter on Facebook whom I won't name in case she'd be offended. She paints delightful little watercolours, well composed, colourful, and sells them on Ebay for £10. And this makes me angry - it's a grotesque undervaluing of her work, and I can't believe it does her reputation any good. Moreover, it sets up an expectation of other artists who just can't afford to price work at hobbyists' prices - if you see a perfectly decent painting on offer for £30, and one from another artist at £300, are you, as a potential buyer, going to think the first one is ludicrously cheap, or that the second is ludicrously expensive? Well, it'll vary, according to one's taste and brain-cells I suppose, but I have a salutary tale to tell: a watercolourist was offering her paintings on the Affordable British Art website (don't know if it still exists); she was asking a ridiculously low price, and couldn't understand why she wasn't selling. Normally, I'd have passed on by and left her to work that one out for herself, but this work was good and deserved to sell. So I stuck my nose in and said it's not selling because at that sort of money (again, around £10) potential customers just aren't taking you seriously: they're assuming there has to be something very wrong with your paintings because they're dirt cheap. Multiply your prices by ten, at least, I said (one day I must take my own advice....). Anyway, she didn't go that far, but she upped the price considerably - and her work started to sell. By underpricing her work, she was depressing, even destroying, her own market; and she wasn't doing anyone else's any favours who showed with her, either. You're selling oil paintings for £40, and as low as £5: well - I might do that, I HAVE done that, for someone in serious financial straits who I knew couldn't afford a decent price: and have insisted that they keep it quiet! It'd do me a power of no good if it were widely known ... at the lowest price you charge, you aren't even covering basic costs; at the higher price, you're hardly making a profit - especially considering oil paint can cost £20 plus per tube in some cases. You're not being fair to yourself, and frankly I don't think you're being very fair to other artists either - if someone approaches me for a painting and I quote £300, I don't want to hear "Oh, but Michael only wants £30..."; to which my response might be "well, Michael can b. well paint it then", but it's surely obvious that neither of us is going to benefit financially; you because you choose not to, me because you've queered my pitch for me. There's only two excuses for underpricing work: one is that you're doing a charity commission of one sort or other and are only charging at all to maintain the principle that paintings need to be paid for; the other that your work is so god-awful that people are doing you a favour by taking it off your hands.