I own a small company offering the original artwork of a highly renowned M.D., now passed, to the public. Recently, I had a meeting to present his work to a very receptive hospital administrator, one of whose enthusiastic responses was to suggest placing an art print of the doctor’s work in every one of his hospital’s 750 rooms. Not a done deal but very encouraging in so many ways.
Then I returned home and checked my emails. Among them was the notice of a price increase from my friendly (US) framing company. I was told that the special archival, UV-protected, low-glare framing plexiglass (from our German ally), which I have used for the doctor for the past 20 years, has now gone up in price by over 276 percent in one day. The reason? The present administration’s “Big, Beautiful Tariffs.”
This increase will effectively blow my deal out of the water, especially as it affects all the major competitive brands of archival plexiglass on the market. The delivered price of a newly framed print to my customers from this increase would be double what it is today.
At the hospital end, instead of having a beautiful work of art for each patient to appreciate as they (hopefully) recover and heal, they will instead have a blank wall to stare at or a cheaply made foreign print to gaze past.
David Richard
Milford