Self-Auctioning Art
 

This is brilliant. :)

Wow! What a great concept. It would be interesting to keep track of its wanderings, demand curve, etc.

I'll admit I'm half tempted to buy it just to mess with his art by refusing to plug it in and thus suffering the loss of it being declared "no longer art."

Party pooper. :p

No, it'd be an extremely discursive act. What does it say about art if an object ceases to be art simply because the person who created it waves a contract in the air and says "poof! that is no longer ze art!"

By pooping on the party I'd actually be fulfilling to the logical extension the abstractness of what is art. One might even argue that by being unlabeled as art it would in fact become even artier, thus causing the universe to implode.


ETA: I know I did not use the word discursive correctly. It is an inside joke that I realize after the fact that only I will get.

actually, I think the Artist might be amused by Alex's twist - transforming the "art" from object to concept playing with the whole notion of conceptual art- I know I would.

Of course, you could do the same thing by buying a traditional artwork and painting over it, or destroying it.

Only less rude since it wouldn't involve wiping out anything that took real work to create. Everything would remain in tact, ready to be plugged right back in.

Hmmm - So I guess it would be like buying a work of art and storing it in a closet. The object remains intact, but is no longer acting as art.

SFMOMA is already doing that. I was listening to an interview about their 75th Anniversary exhibitions and one of them includes some Rhodesian watercolors that

A) They didn't know they had until recently.
B) They had never wanted in the first place (they'd requested 100 pieces from a Rhodesian art school that they'd sell to support the school; the school sent 700 and most didn't sell).
C) Were stored in crates in closets for the last 60 years.

Perhaps the real art at work here is the art of the legal contract that forces you to keep the thing plugged in.