(screenshot via, by the author for Hyperallergic)
With the advent of new technologies, reproduction in art has been a thorny issue for collectors, dealers, and artists alike. And while Walter Benjamin famously tackled this problem in the context of mechanical reproduction, questions about the art object and authenticity abound in an age of digital reproduction. Is the JPG I create in Photoshop different from the one you’ve copied onto your USB drive? And what if you upload it and share it with the entire world on Flickr? Where is the work, who owns it, and what does it meant to have an original?
Despite the reproducibility of so many digital objects, though, some digital artifacts cannot be easily replicated or shared: job applications, medical databases, bank information, and other forms of data that have more narrowly defined boundaries of ownership and authenticity. And, of course, social media accounts. As I explored recently with Tricia Wang’s theory of the elastic self, although the internet is a very flexible space for exploration and experimentation, many social media platforms encourage a bounded form of identity and can’t be flexibly rearranged or altered.
That’s one of the themes of a recent event that bills itself as the “first ever digital artist auction” (not to be confused with the first ever digital art auction, which Hyperallergic wrote up earlier). Organized by Bailey, Mathé and Hunt, it was a one-day event on Sept. 28 that placed artists’ social media profiles up for bidding. Anthony Antonellis‘s Facebook profile went for a whopping €290,000 (~$392,000), and Kim Asendorf‘s sold for €250,000. According to the site explaining the auction, the valuation for accounts was determined “based on actual purchase price for 24h ownership, assuming 10 more productive years per artist and near 0 interest rate since treasury bills go for 100 cents on the dollar.” So, in reality, the bidders on the Facebook profiles only paid for 24 hours of surrogate ownership, meaning prices between €50 and €95.
The project emerged out of Art Hack Day Berlin, whose theme this year was “going dark.” In an interview with Hyperallergic, organizer Olof Mathé explained the auction’s origins:
We chose to interpret the theme quite literally, as ‘vanishing.’ Personally, I had been obsessed by people who chose to disappear and the struggles they face, one of which is how to credibly establish a new online persona. (Incidentally this is also something undercover agents now have to deal with). One of my favorite artists, Addie Wagenknecht, had previously mentioned how she had deleted her Facebook account, and it struck me that that was kind of a shame, since it could have come to good use elsewhere.
The auction touched on a number of themes Mathé and his team members wanted to address with regards to our contemporary relationship with social media — a relationship wrapped up in commerce, identity, performance, and privacy. It’s a rich concept explored in greater depth on the project site, but suffice it to say that the simplicity of the action belied a more complex series of questions around the value we place on our lives online.
“What [does it mean] now that our digital lives are no longer divorced from our lives AFK?” Mathé said, who bid for Jeremy Bailey’s Facebook account. “Our digital identities are technologically and ontologically fragile, sadly — we conceive of them as robust.”
