For the Walker Art Center, a Shop That Peddles Evanescence - The New York Times
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ARTS
For the Walker Art Center, a Shop That
Peddles Evanescence
By MELENA RYZIK MARCH 17, 2015
Visitors to the gift shop at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will soon be able to
buy something a little more esoteric, alongside their Chuck Close posters and
Pantone mugs. “On Mother’s Day,” the promotion might go, “how about a new
ringtone calibrated by the composer Nico Muhly, just for stressful family calls?”
Maybe Dad or Sis would enjoy an instruction manual for a technology that has
yet to be invented — or, to unwind, a vacation property with a short commute, on the
virtual network Second Life. Even more accessible is a series of images from the
photographer Alec Soth, sent via Snapchat and meant to disappear moments later.
These items are all wares from Intangibles, a conceptual art pop-up store that
the Walker, the contemporary-art and performance center, plans to unveil on
Thursday. Created by Michele Tobin, the retail director of its gift shop, and Emmet
Byrne, the museum’s design director, it is in equal parts a digital bazaar with pieces
priced to sell, and an exhibition, of sorts, with curated original artworks.
It upends the logic of a regular shop. “The priority isn’t ‘get as much as you can
for that item in the marketplace,’ ” Ms. Tobin said. “The priority becomes the artist’s
intention and what we all think is right for that work.”
Sam Green, an innovative documentary filmmaker, will charge $2,500 to create
a hybrid video-performance piece specific to the buyer. The ringtone compositions
by Mr. Muhly, the modern classical arranger and musician, are $150 each. The
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2. Snapchat photos by Mr. Soth, the recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim fellowship, are
priced low at his request — $100 for 25 of them.
In the tradition of Conceptual art, documentation of the process is part of the
point. “A lot of people won’t be purchasing actual products,” Mr. Byrne said, so “we
want the online representation to be just as compelling as the objects themselves.”
The Walker sees Intangibles as blurring the boundaries between art, shopping
and media. It’s hardly the first such effort: Eliding commerce and art, mass and high
culture, was in vogue long before the advent of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop, the SoHo
store that sold clothing and other items with his work from 1986 to 2005. (It still
operates online.) This month, Red Bull Studios, a gallery and performance space in
Chelsea, opened the Gift Shop, its own artist-led store. But to have a museum shop
peddle ideas, rather than artsy T-shirts or coveted décor, is a digital-age twist.
The experiment is also an acknowledgment that artists, especially those well
versed in technology, are more comfortable in entrepreneurial roles. Where it once
might have been anathema, or at least deeply uncool, for an artist to consider
marketing and audience engagement — let alone inventory codes — salability and
consumer savvy are now frequently embedded in original work. And not necessarily
at the behest of art dealers or curators; as artists engage with potential collectors via
Instagram or YouTube, they are becoming shrewd digital marketers and
self-promoters. And there seems to be no shame in that.
“I think there’s an increasingly broadening definition of what it means to be a
cultural creative practitioner,” said Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, which
last year initiated its own version of a start-up incubator for artists called New Inc.
In a space with whiteboards for walls, they learn career development skills and
commune with technologists and designers. “Artists are much more aware now, and
empowered,” especially when it comes to the commercial value of their work, Ms.
Phillips said, adding: “Their ideas are often copied in the commercial realm. So why
shouldn’t they get the credit and profit from it themselves?”
Adam Harvey, 33, is a Brooklyn-based artist and New Inc member. His work
includes wearable countersurveillance technology — an “antidrone hoodie,” for
example, woven with metallic fabric that is intended to thwart the thermal cameras
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3. that drones carry from capturing your image. In 2013 he exhibited a version of the
hoodie at a New Museum pop-up. Now he sells his pieces online at his own Privacy
Gift Shop; his most popular item is the OFF Pocket, a cellphone case that functions
as a Faraday cage, blocking incoming and outgoing transmission signals. He said he
had sold about 1,000 of them at $80 apiece after financing the project through
Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London
recently added one to its collection.
“I’m not opposed to galleries or museums, but if the goal of your work is to
connect with people and for your ideas to engage other people, to get responses from
them, by setting up an e-commerce and allowing people to buy it — they don’t even
have to buy it, just to see it for sale — it enters this world of ideas,” Mr. Harvey said.
“I love that.”
Mr. Harvey, who freelances as a technology developer to support his art
practice, already had most of the skills he needed to build an online store; at New
Inc, he is learning the principles of running a business for what he conceives of as his
functional art. “I wanted to own the concept and not have it only exist in someone
else’s system,” he said.
The work of Martine Syms, a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles who
explores identity, race and communication, is exhibited more often than sold; she
refers to herself as “a conceptual entrepreneur” who creates “machines for ideas,” a
riff on Sol LeWitt’s vision of Conceptual art. “I think of entrepreneurship as a way of
creating value,” she said.
That sentiment was echoed in a more alarmist tone by the critic William
Deresiewicz in a recent essay in The Atlantic titled “The Death of the Artist.” It’s no
wonder, he suggests, that so many “creators” these days work in multimedia. “The
point is versatility,” he wrote. “Like any good business, you try to diversify.”
For Ms. Syms, 26, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who
supports herself through freelance graphic design work, multimedia is simply a
language she grew up speaking, and digital tools are a source of freedom. She has
worked with galleries but is happy to showcase her work online or in do-it-yourself
publications. The traditional gallery system “doesn’t give you a lot of control over
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4. your work or your audience,” she said.
“Especially for myself, a woman of color, I think that a lot of times, these
systems aren’t really interested in what I’m doing or what I’m saying,” Ms. Syms
added. “A lot of times, I would rather create my own world.”
For Intangibles, Ms. Syms will perform in the guise of her fictional one-woman
band, Maya Angelou, on the voice mail of her buying public; the piece will be
accompanied by an online blurb about the so-called band, which has yet to record a
note. Ms. Syms said she didn’t want to deal directly with her customers — “I feel I’m
already bad enough on the phone” — and that she likes the evanescence of voice
mail, which is often automatically deleted after a certain period. (In “Surround
Audience,” the current New Museum Triennial, she also has a room-size installation
dealing with the shifting norms of sitcoms.)
That many of the items for sale in Intangibles are interactions rather than
objects does not surprise Christine Kuan, chief curator for Artsy, the online art
platform. With the growing commercialization of the art world and daily life ever
more tethered to devices, “people want life experiences and memories that aren’t
mass-produced for consumption, that are special and created by an artist,” she said.
“It’s a kind of consumerism that is a little bit of anti-consumerism.”
Mr. Soth, whose photojournalism has been featured in The New York Times
Magazine, views Snapchat as a way to engage with the changes in photography as a
medium. “For me, it’s about stopping time, documenting the world, preserving it,”
he said in a telephone interview from his home in Minneapolis. His 12-year-old
daughter was nearby, glued to her cellphone and, he said, “communicating, as we
speak, in pictures.”
For her, photography is “simply conversation,” Mr. Soth said. “And I think that’s
fascinating and terrifying.”
An early adopter of many new technologies who has also started a small
publishing imprint — “I either dabble with these things or I just say, ‘My time’s
over’ ”— Mr. Soth, 45, explained why he didn’t want his work for Intangibles, called
“Disappear With Me,” to be expensive. “When it’s less about economics, I feel freer
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5. to experiment,” he said.
Proceeds from the projects will be split between the artists and the museum. A
few artists, like Ms. Syms, deferred to the Walker on pricing, which in some cases
gave the organizers pause: how to assign a monetary figure to a brief message from
the ersatz singer of a fake band? Ultimately, said Mr. Byrne, the design director, “we
really thought that sticking to the logic of the marketplace would add some rigor.
And we also knew that we are giving a better profit-share rate than galleries.” (The
voice mail messages are $10 each.) Many of the artists involved said they were in it
less for the money — though they viewed that exchange as a necessary part of the
deal — than for the creative inspiration. The designer and engineer Julian Bleecker
and the Near Future Laboratory, a research company that typically charges
thousands of dollars for corporate consultations, will produce briefs on items that do
not yet exist (some future antibiotic’s warning label, for example, for $19.99) — what
he called “design fiction.”
There are a few literal objects, like the extra parts and doohickeys that end up in
a junk drawer, marketed as “Box of Evocative Stuff,” but Mr. Bleecker said the
project was mostly a conceptual provocation “to get a larger public audience to think
more deeply about the implications and conveniences of new technology.”
“I’m hoping that, with a commitment of $19, we’ll have a conversation,” he said.
For his Intangibles project, Andreas Angelidakis, an architect and curator, is
aiming to offload a technological creation: a house he designed on a plot of land in
the virtual world Second Life. Once popular and hyped as a place to foster
community, Second Life is now “like a ghost town,” Mr. Angelidakis said.
Second Life has its own currency, the linden dollar, and Mr. Angelidakis priced
his so-called Suburban Seastead at one million linden — about $4,000, according to
the museum, the equivalent of what one of his small architectural maquettes would
fetch in real life. “I wanted to sell it for one million something, even if it’s these fake
dollars,” he said.
But the rules of Second Life mean that buyers cannot simply enter the house;
Mr. Angelidakis has to log on to show them around. “It’s almost like being a real
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