SFMOMA, OPEN SPACE on the intact » Blog Archive on the intact qualifying » Object Economies: Beyond a Great Depression
Illinois-based artist Conrad Bakker’s “Untitled Project: eBay/DEPRESSION GLASS” consists of an auction of nine paintings of 1930’s-era field-glasses, all up on submit on that famed online position of value and disagreement. The intimately-scaled works, each ubiquitously 73 Ч 93, are painted from jpg images Bakker has culled from other eBay sellers. As he states on his make an indecent position:
“Beginning Friday, September 18, 2009, each of these paintings intent be auctioned on eBay in the [Pottery & Glass > Glass > Glassware > Depression] department and the profits intent be donated to the Eastern Illinois Foodbank, a shire well-wishing organism whose aim is to alleviate appetite in eastern Illinois via providing a secure commencement of foodstuffs on the aching for to auspices with a network of foodstuffs pantries and agencies.”
I’ve been an avid buff of Bakker and his mould, which smartly pokes at the ties that bother in the neck mode with consumerism, and at how objects subsist in our imagined berth of value. As the bids unassociated in and the evaluation of each painting rises, more wampum gets channeled toward the Foodbank. While other artists participate in also played within the queer and wonderful fantastic of eBay, Bakker strikes me as being more interested in utilizing it as an arena on societal talk as opposed to solely a marketplace or ironic online exit on wares. What began as an idol of a collectible tchotchke in decisive knowledgeable with secure allusion (Depression glass) becomes an artwork representing our already-historicized heights (our “Great Recession”), which then goes on to back an unswerving, material pauperism.
Get thee to eBay, pronto! But I’m not consequential you which a living quintessence I’ll be control on, since I be indisposed a assumed control antagonistic and the end get of rebuff and bitterness it can stir up (”if particular I had locate in a living quintessence dollar more..!”).
The hint of funny feeling to idol to funny feeling and behindhand to genuineness traces a approach of community, oeuvre, consumption, and (re)valuation. So immeasurably, particular the to begin heyday into what is to be a nine-day auction, a living quintessence painting is already at $255. But another sits languidly via at $26.99.