MARKET FORCES

curated by Simona Lodi
ONLINE GALLERY

Share Festival- Market Forces, November 3th-8th
Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali, via Giolitti 36,  h 10 am – 7 pm

Taking as its starting point Salvatore Iaconesi’s special project for Share Festival 2009, Squatting Supermarkets, which narrates how our everyday lives have evolved through “augmented” shopping, the statement made by the exhibition explores the issue of whether artists can be an alternative source of information on the economy.
Simona Lodi, curator, explains, “I sought out artists who have produced works relating to marketing, e-commerce, and commercial communication. These tongue-in-cheek and at times paradoxical works often use the real or virtual supermarket as a favourite setting. In this thematic context, the supermarket is a space for best action, an unquestioned temple of our consumer identity, which artists subvert and transform into an artistic field of action, often of an activist bent. The supermarket is a representative microcosm of social dynamics par excellence, the stage, or rather non-stage, of our lives, giving us the chance to take a concrete look at the abstract aspects of economic market forces.”
The global market is the context in which the contradictions of our lifestyles emerge, the shock chamber of choice for piecing together our personal everyday stories, where the purchase of goods shapes our individual identities.
The exhibition brings together works that make us cringe at the screech of over-used words such as marketing, e-commerce, global companies, credit crunch, new-economy, neo-capitalism, gift-economy, free-economy, and neo-liberalism.
Exploring market forces is a vast issue that has inspired many artists from Duchamp to Jeff Koons. As a result, it was decided to focus on recent works tied to new media only.
For instance, there is the work of Slovenian artists Janez Jansa and Igor Stromaier – the Problem Stock Exchange – where problems can be bought and sold, because ultimately it is conflict that gives rise to profit opportunities. The US artist John Freyer auctions off all his belongings, including a baby tooth, on eBay, raising almost five thousand dollars. Then there is the viral marketing project of the collective Les Liens Invisibles, driving Facebook users to suicide. The exhibition features artists who act like real companies, inventing marketing campaigns and issuing corporate announcements. Instead of setting up exhibitions in art galleries, they invite the public to “conventions”, and act through third parties such as legal representatives, managing directors and shareholders, directly influencing stock markets and the share prices of the companies at which they target their nuisance campaigns, involving fake websites and pranks, squatting supermarkets, anti-games, fake supermarket and guerrilla activism.
Alternatively they take action directly in supermarkets through shop-dropping, the most famous being Banksy’s drop of three thousand fake Paris Hilton CDs, sending stores and supermarkets out of control. Other famous initiatives include eToy, RTMark, Yesmen, and Problemmarket.

In this way, the old idea that art and the market are completely incompatible has become a thing of the past. Many contemporary artists not only voice their opinions on the market and the economic consequences of art in the media but use their art to make us think about economic mechanisms, or just outright parody them.