A lot of "designer" furniture is priced in that range so that doesn't seem that unusual especially if you consider all the manual working hours going into a piece.
Replying to you, and hopefully everybody who commented on your comment:
Oh man, the line between "art" and "craft" is ill-defined. I think of craft as something that has to fulfill a functional need as well as satisfying an aesthetic need, and art as meeting a principally aesthetic need.
Whether you view the cabinet on stand as art or furniture (craft), I suppose depends wholly on what your needs are :-) I built it as a piece of furniture that would suits my aesthetic tastes and also hold some stuff.
The price on it is $5,200 US.
The pricing on anything is a challenge. I have a woodworker friend who is married to a pricing analyst. She works for a sizable multinational corporation, and he feels as in the dark about how to price stuff as I do.
Broadly speaking, pricing for custom work is likely to be at least at the high end of factory made furniture, and by that I mean really nice factory-made stuff. Think like Thomas Moser[0]. Whether you like their look or not, the quality is excellent and as I understand it, there's a lot more hand work that goes into it than is common these days. I'm going to use them in the discussion below, but this applies to any high end commercial maker.
The reasons for this are complicated: On the one hand, my capital costs are (a lot) lower than any factory, I don't maintain showrooms in pricey locations, and I don't have a staff I need to pay.
On the other hand, Moser is buying lumber in quantities that I couldn't store at a price I can only dream of. They have well established lines of furniture that they're set up to make in quantity, or at least know how to build, whereas virtually everything I build is a prototype in some sense.
What you don't see in the final product is the test pieces or the jigs that I built to build it. Project recursion isn't just a software thing, I assure you.
Because it's unlikely that anybody will ever want exactly the same piece, that cost doesn't get spread out over a production run, or even stuck into storage in case somebody wants one in the future. Storage is a cost, and I pay it for stuff I know I'm going to use again and again (a table saw sled, for example). Project specific stuff gets either broken down and reused or put into my wood stove. At best you get the materials back; the time is a sunk cost.
I've talked to other woodworkers about this, and some take the approach of having a line of pieces that they're jigged up to build quickly and efficiently. This is a valid approach to making money at this. Putting some thought into whether it makes sense for me to develop a line at this point is on the list of things on my business planning TODO list.
Even woodworkers who have a catalog of pieces they know how to build have to make choices about how to design and build. Christian Becksvoort has a 15 drawer chest in his catalog[1]. Every tier of drawers is a different height. That means something as simple as cutting parts to rough size involves ripping boards to 20 different widths (for each of the 10 tiers: 3 pieces full height for fronts and sides, and 1 piece reduced height for the drawer back).
And then you have to keep track of those parts. And then you have to dovetail them. I'm willing to bet that Christian Becksvoort would lose money building one 15 drawer chest with a dovetail jig because he'd have 20 different set ups (10 heights, front and back). Could you make it cheaper by making some of the tiers of drawers the same height? Absolutely! Would it retain the charm of his design? For some customers, no.
Before anybody gives up hope on owning anything Christian Becksvoort has ever had a hand in, I'd like to note that he's an author as well as a furniture maker. He's written two books for Lost Art Press[2], and I recommend both.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fuller_craft/49837855711/in/al...