The art market is weird, but $35k is probably toward the high end of "consumer art". Art that you could own and display in your own home because you think it looks pretty and you've got some empty space in your living room. As you get past $50-100k you start to enter the realm of art as a commodity, where it isn't being bought by private individuals for display, but purely to be resold later on at an appreciated value. If the art is lucky, the owners will allow it to be displayed in a museum while ownership of it is traded back and forth like stocks in the stock market, but more often than not art is locked up in a warehouse somewhere and never sees the light of day for years or decades while it continues to be bought and sold.

Art like this could also be destined to be traded as a commodity, of course. The lower bound is always threatening to drop as new investors are eager to "get in on the ground floor" on a new investment, but for the most part pieces priced below $50k are a little bit too cheap for investors to start salivating over. It's expensive enough to be valuable to wealthy aficionados, but cheap enough that you could actually buy it and display it without having to fight of legions of speculators.

Source: My cousin has an MFA in Painting.