Expens(iv)es

When does an art piece become valuable? 

Or value-able?

Society at some point decided that if Damien Hirst were to sneeze onto a sock, this 'Amazing Conceptual Art Work' is worth more monetarily than my entire educational spending.

Is Greatness in the sum of its parts? In a painting does the expense of each portion of paint get added up, plus minimum wage for each hour that is spent of the piece, with petrol an addition for the travel to get the materials and to take the painting to where it is viewed.

Plus VAT.

And if this is not the cause of pricing, is it the name of the artist creating a profit? A particular configuration of letters creating a sensation of value within a piece of ‘art’ or a perception of a specific set of sounds meaning money when attached to a created art object.

A fluid hierarchy of ideas has been (man-)made. A particular statement or motif becomes ‘en vogue’. With this popularity, does it create value? Is the mass enjoyment of a creation equate to a monetary rise and gain? Is each singular dislike include a percentage of value lost or removed?

0.03% revenue lost due to Ralph from the UK “not liking that shade of blue”

Does a reproduction increase or decrease the value of a work? The suggestion that it is popular enough to be desired as a two or more is a gain, but the copy of a work sheds an originality that was perceived as desired, a loss. A triangulation of repetition and markdowns with an increase meaning a weakening.

A Pyramid Scheme.

Sentimentality creates a price range all of its own. Great Aunt Marie’s prized plates may be worth a few quid to the ‘Average Antiques Dealer’, but to your mother they could be the greatest value in her life. More than you and your brother. It could be a Daulton or a Worcester, or ‘that Bobby down the road who paints plates for a living, remember him?’. But what makes his work any different from the ‘Greats’?

What makes it valuable? 

Expens(iv)es: For Sale  SOLD

Rusted

Inside of you is rusting.

Flaking away.

Falling apart.

Each day you rot, decompose, disintergrate into the unknown.

A neuron fires and goes cold. A cell divides and dies.

Here and gone. Everything is temporary.

The Glory Of The Toaster Strudel

We are obsessed with holes. The desire to insert a bodily object into one, or many. The fear of alien objects coming out.

The hole as an object.

Abjection of holes is necessary for society. Cockroaches, ants, rats scuttering through gaps in walls makes your skin crawl as if you are your home and they are weaving under the surface of your being. Capitalism tells you to buy a new house. Move on up. Spend. Fill the holes of your home, both the house you are in and your body, with things. Objects. Stuff the emptiness with material goods until you no longer perceive their significance.

Society tells men to stuff women. Watch the male figure stuff them and use them. Fill them to his pleasure. Holes.

Shrinkage

Nature is cyclical. Life causes death, causes life, causes death. Rinse and repeat.

The universe is expanded outwards equally. Spherical.

Black holes are holes. Round.

The rotational pull to the Sun is circular. The Earth turns. The atoms inside your body spin made up of smaller and smaller and smaller particles. All is circular.

All Change Is Not Growth, As All Movement is Not Forward

As humans progression is a tricky thing, an abjected idea.

We work with machines but long for pen and paper, we create appliances to do our mundane tasks but idealize the history when we were manual, we drive vehicles but see horse-riding as an upper-class hobby.

The fact that technology can move past us and without us terrifies us to the point it becomes a mockery of those it has already lost, the middle-aged, the elderly, the impoverished.

We long for the nostalgia past yet repulsed by the ignorance of the people, of their blatant disregard for their surroundings.

Change is bad. No change is worse. Or is it.

Salting Eden

I was once told all that human beings are are snails. Following the snail in front, all of us following and curving to the point that we, the snail-human hybrids, are all just slowly circling the centre point of being. Circling, never reaching the point of knowledge, but also never acknowledging it, stuck in the loop of follow the leader where the leader is all yet also none.

Continue to entertain the idea of snail people: the softness of their being with the hard exterior of their shell home. The sloping swirl into nothingness with the continuous production of slime. The wavering motion with the atomic solidity. The lowly Sneople, born into the loop, the fear of being trodden on in the dark and damp by godly forces. Forever following those before it, or in fact behind it at the same time, central focus is forward only. What is at the centre of this rotating gardener’s horror? Life. The perfect cabbage. Rotating also. A solar system in itself, spinning upon an unseen point, glistening in its own existence. The Sneople never see it, yet are forever looking for its divinity.

Black (W)Hole

Suction. The sensation of the glass rim pressing around your mouth. The blood rising to the surface of your skin. Breaking capillaries. The blue bruise splintering and spreading under the epidermis.
Your sudden gasp for air releasing the vacuum. The glass falling from your face. Shattering.

Elements no longer grasping at each other. Each blown away by the force of gravity and the crushing against the next cluster of atoms. Clutching at their siblings the pieces of glass shudder along the winning pelt.

Your mouth is a black hole. Pulling in information: taste, texture, particles around you, all are drawn into the gaping maw. The perfect ‘O’ of destruction, producing the non-silence and catapulting it into the universe, into being. An abyss containing and abusing, unsatisfied with all.