Courtesy of a Dept. Of Safety email newsletter, I found out about an artist named Jeffrey Thompson (associated with the Texas Firehouse gallery and performance space). Jeff is working on, among other projects, something called the Artforum Ad Project.

In case you didn’t drop out of art school like me, Artforum is a snooty art magazine with a fairly large following. Jeff’s project seems to be cutting up a full-page advertisement in the magazine into 4000 squares, each of which is about 3/16″ x 3/16″ - which is hella small. But you can pay $1.50 per square to Jeff via PayPal to get your “artwork” into this grid layout (however, if you buy multiple spots, he can’t guarantee they’ll be placed next to each other).

This seems to be an adaptation of that kid who made a million dollars or whatever selling pixels on his homepage for a dollar each. I’m too lazy to do a proper search on that though, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Unlike that kid who became quite wealthy, Jeff isn’t making any money off this:

NO ONE IS MAKING MONEY ON THIS PROJECT… WELL, EXCEPT ARTFORUM

The $1.50 you will be charged goes 100% to getting your image in Artforum.

The price of a full-page ad is $4,200. PayPal takes $0.30 on each transaction, plus a small percentage of the sale price and, depending on location, a currency conversion fee. Therefore, the total price of the image is $1.50.

While I love “art in general”, I can’t say that I understand the business sense behind projects like this. Yes, everything that people do does not need to be motivated by profit. I’m in fact a big fan of that type of thinking. But what’s the point of giving $4,200 to a snooty art magazine and another $1,260 to PayPal? If Jeff charged only 25 cents for the value-add of organizing this project, he could make $1,050. If he bumped the price up to $2.00 even, he could make $2,100.

And that’s still worth it if you’re an artist - but you need to pitch this differently. Because what you’re selling to artists here is not the chance to “express themselves” (a 3/16″ x 3/16″ space is woefully inadequate for that), but the opportunity to put on your resume (or CV, if you’re fancy) that your artwork was in Artforum. In other words, you’re ultimately selling the legitimacy that a connection to Artforum magazine has in the eyes of certain people - and all that for only $2.00 a pop. This to me would make this project a lot more interesting and not to mention focused and profitable for everyone involved.

Good show regardless!