"$26,000 worth of unsold limited edition prints and signed manuscript pages ready to be recycled /transformed into a new work of art."
On Friday 11th June Jonathan shredded of the unsold prints and signed manuscript pages from Cory Doctorow’s ‘For The Win’ novel. The event was filmed by European Parliament Television and will be aired as part of a program on New Economies of Photography.
I could add it to my next compost pile. No slight intended. The one full of my art magazines and the dead coyote (the "Beuys Mound") has stopped composting.
ReplyDeletePatrick - You're awesome, an artist couldn't ask for a kinder patron.
ReplyDeleteHow would you like to pay?
Except they weren't worth $26000 were they, because they were unsold, which meant that no-one valued them that high?
ReplyDeleteAm I missing something?
Yes Benjamin you're absolutely "on the money" so to speak.
ReplyDeleteBut I think the price to value dynamic has a lot of mileage still to be explored. For instance a lot of people are only just coming to the book (as Cory tours and promotes it) and then the trial and then the prints.
This is down to my lack of forethought, I should have allowed Cory's tour and the rise of the book's popularity to filter through but I'd set out an arbitrary time frame at the outset (lesson learned) and didn't want to break any of my promises.
Another testament to this lack of forethought was when I stupidly timed the destruction of the prints not allowing for the time difference between the UK and US, so I had a bunch of people ( and Cory's biggest fan-base) that heard about it for the first time at the very moment that they could no longer buy them.
Which did in effect, increase demand and so would have had a positive effect on the value of the sold prints (this demand was at the 10x higher price), but I didn't realise any benefit from it.
Right now I see no harm in promoting the $26k figure (preferring that to the smaller £ GBP equivalent) as this also establishes an anchor price for the next trial.
Hope that makes sense. jw