Dear all,
See what you think of the following:
Works of art offer unparalleled opportunities for investors, both
individual and corporate. They have proved their worth time and
again as hedges against inflation. The only disadvantage is the
physical work of art itself.
Valuable art is increasingly bought, not to be displayed, but to be
hidden away in warehouses in ‘freeports’: tax- and customs-free
spaces where objects are, legally, indefinitely ‘in transit’ between
countries.
Shares in valuable works of art are now being offered for sale
online, for example via Maecenas (https://www.maecenas.co
<https://www.maecenas.co/>). Investment in art is thus being spread
out from the privileged few to the slightly-less-privileged
not-quite-so-few. If you’re not rich enough to buy an entire work of
art, you can buy a fraction of one instead, without ever seeing or
touching the original.
You don’t even have to know what the original work of art was like.
All you have to understand is its market value.
The more successful online investments in art become, the more
likely it becomes that the works of art themselves will be
permanently hidden from view. They will cease to have any meaningful
existence in terms of physical form, expressiveness or aesthetic
quality. All of this will be dissolved and sublimated into their
market price.
The next logical step in this process is for the artwork itself to
disappear completely, and for the market value of the work to be the
only thing that actually exists, right from the outset.
Therefore, today, we are offering you a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity. You are invited to buy shares in nothing.
Nothing is a completely unique work of art. It’s uniqueness lies in
the fact that it doesn’t exist. It is an absence, wrapped in a
negation, buried in a nullity.
Even though it has no physical dimensions, nothing does have a
precise geographical location. For the sake of security, to preserve
value and avoid taxes, it will be held in permanent storage. The
location of this storage may vary from time to time.Nothing is
currently stored at *51.57057,-0.09667**- **the Furtherfield
Gallery, Finsbury Park, London. *
*The method of storage is itself unique. In Flann O'Brien's novel
**/The Third Policeman,/**one of the policemen (MacCruiskeen) has a
hobby of making tiny boxes, each tinier than the previous one. He
keeps them one inside the other. When he unpacks them, the **last
five**are completely invisible, and in fact there's really no way of
telling if they exist at all. 'The one I am making now,' he says,
'is nearly as small as nothing.' *
*Nothing is being kept inside MacCruiskeen's tiniest box, and anyone
who would like to visit the Furtherfield Gallery to view it in
storage is welcome to do so, **during normal opening hours**. *
*Please be aware, however, **that nothing, and the box in which it
is stored, are both**completely invisible.*
*In keeping with Furtherfield’s copyleft philosophy, nothing is
being licensed on a creative commons basis. Anyone is welcome to
reproduce and display nothing, provided they give fair attribution
to Furtherfield.*
*Also in keeping with Furtherfield’s open and democratic principles,
we are making **one**trillion shares in nothing available, at a
price o**f **************each.*
*Questions: Firstly, for Ruth and Mark, would you be happy to have
nothing on display at the Furtherfield Gallery? An empty room, an empty
plinth, an empty box, or even a pin with nothing balanced on its tip?*
*Secondly, for Rob, is it practical to offer a trillion shares in
something? And what's the smallest cryptocurrency amount that could
practically be charged for each share? In my innocence I was thinking
that you could charge one BitCoin for each share, imagining that a
BitCoin was probably worth about 50p, but when I looked it up on line I
see that a BitCoin is now worth about four and a half thousand pounds.
Is it possible for people to pay for things in fractions of a BitCoin,
for example a thousandth or a ten thousandth of a BitCoin? In order to
do so, if they didn't have any BitCoin already, would they have to buy
at least one, ie. stump up several thousand pounds?*
*It looks as if the cheapest of the cryptocurrencies is the Doge, which
is about 46p at the moment, and you can get a few of them free as a
starter deal. So I suppose the cost of a share could be one Doge:
they're less well known, but more fun. Is that practical? Could you make
a trillion shares available via the BlockChain and charge one Doge for
each of them?*
*The other alternative would be to make very few shares available, and
charge a lot of money for each of them, which would be more like the
proper elitist art market, and therefore perhaps a bit more satirically
pointed... But probably nobody would buy them. And if anybody did buy
them, you might end up feeling as if you were endorsing the whole art
market system.*
*Edward
*
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