TVs From Craigslist are images of the screens of TVs for sale I found on Craigslist. I download the images, crop all but the screen and enlarge them to approximate screen-size. With hints of the seller’s interior space reflected in them, these utilitarian images offer inadvertent glimpses of intimacy that reveal an unexpected humanity in this context. It’s likely that the sellers have no idea that they’re pictured there (on the CL platform the images look very small) but I can’t help thinking there’s a subconscious undercurrent of exhibitionism here. As I go from city to city on Craigslist in search of TVs with reflections in them, I get a sense of interior America. And as smart-phone technology advances, and sellers can take pictures without using flash, I am finding increasingly more detailed images of people in their private spaces. It’s almost voyeuristic except that Craigslist is a public space. I am willingly invited into these living-rooms and bedrooms to look potential TVs to buy. And there they are, the sellers in all the messy-ness of human life, with unmade beds, and in various states of undress, sometimes completely naked, reflected in the surface of a TV they no longer want. It’s sad really – these are the last pictures of TVs that were once the center of a home, and they all contain a little ghostly image of its owner who no longer wants it. When I exhibit TVs from Craigslist, I print each image in an edition of two and I upload the images to Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org) listing them under the heading "TVs for sale". There, the first edition of each of the prints is available for purchase for the price of the original TV (ranging somewhere between $10-$800, with some being free for pick-up). The second edition becomes available for purchase at gallery prices after the Craigslist edition is sold. In this form, TVs From Craigslist becomes a kind of public work, utilizing the public domain both for its content and its context. On Craigslist, the work is a collaboration between the artist and the gallery, addressing issues of exchange: how differently a piece works on the internet than it does in physical material space, and what happens to the perceived value and meaning of a work when it is transcribed from web-based media to print-based media, and visa-versa. On Craigslist the juxtaposition of the art market with a consumer market engages an unsuspecting consumer public and asks it to consider the value of an art object (made from its own visual vocabulary) to be as worthy of their attention as the consumer object they hope to acquire.
TVs from Craigslist 3/6/2013
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TVs from Craigslist 3/6/2013
- PriceUSD PriceQuantityExpirationFrom
- PriceUSD PriceQuantityFloor DifferenceExpirationFrom
TVs From Craigslist are images of the screens of TVs for sale I found on Craigslist. I download the images, crop all but the screen and enlarge them to approximate screen-size. With hints of the seller’s interior space reflected in them, these utilitarian images offer inadvertent glimpses of intimacy that reveal an unexpected humanity in this context. It’s likely that the sellers have no idea that they’re pictured there (on the CL platform the images look very small) but I can’t help thinking there’s a subconscious undercurrent of exhibitionism here. As I go from city to city on Craigslist in search of TVs with reflections in them, I get a sense of interior America. And as smart-phone technology advances, and sellers can take pictures without using flash, I am finding increasingly more detailed images of people in their private spaces. It’s almost voyeuristic except that Craigslist is a public space. I am willingly invited into these living-rooms and bedrooms to look potential TVs to buy. And there they are, the sellers in all the messy-ness of human life, with unmade beds, and in various states of undress, sometimes completely naked, reflected in the surface of a TV they no longer want. It’s sad really – these are the last pictures of TVs that were once the center of a home, and they all contain a little ghostly image of its owner who no longer wants it. When I exhibit TVs from Craigslist, I print each image in an edition of two and I upload the images to Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org) listing them under the heading "TVs for sale". There, the first edition of each of the prints is available for purchase for the price of the original TV (ranging somewhere between $10-$800, with some being free for pick-up). The second edition becomes available for purchase at gallery prices after the Craigslist edition is sold. In this form, TVs From Craigslist becomes a kind of public work, utilizing the public domain both for its content and its context. On Craigslist, the work is a collaboration between the artist and the gallery, addressing issues of exchange: how differently a piece works on the internet than it does in physical material space, and what happens to the perceived value and meaning of a work when it is transcribed from web-based media to print-based media, and visa-versa. On Craigslist the juxtaposition of the art market with a consumer market engages an unsuspecting consumer public and asks it to consider the value of an art object (made from its own visual vocabulary) to be as worthy of their attention as the consumer object they hope to acquire.