The project examines the notion of political economy in the realm of art constitutive processes, i.e. production, evaluation, circulation, and consumption. The economic standards and its influences on the art world and to creation, in general, is a key theme of the project. Critically appropriating principles of such dual discourse (capitalist influences, neoliberal values, political economy versus art, financialisation of art), the artist seeks for synthesis and interaction between those two dichotomic paradigms. The participant of the project is invited to rethink the existing connotations of these assumptions, elevating the moral and aesthetic values of the discourse to a more critical level.
It is a speculative project in the realms of post-conceptual art questioning artwork’s reception through economic principles, i.e. through rethinking the notion of the artwork as commodity. There might be an overarching approach to discussing a conceptual principle: the price of an artwork is an artwork. It is also a critique of one of the main characteristics of the contemporary art world – the segregation of the art world and its public escalation of the monetary values.
The transformation from numerical aesthetics into monetary aestheticsappears in change of values. The exposure of monetary value, a face value, happens in a common way – through the numbers. However, it is not just a simple exposure of numbers, in the way they appear – they contain a direct financial value. This turn brings more concrete financial means, reshaping and finalizing the numerical aesthetics with a punctuation sign and turning a whole number (integer) into a decimal (fractional) number.
Project by Vygandas Simbelis aka artist Das Vegas.
Artist’s portfolio: www.Simbelis.com
ART VALUE online: https://artvalue.org
