Commissioning a Portrait of the Digital Crowd
"The history of art commissions is the history of wealthy people paying artists to make something about wealthy people," Electric Objects co-founder Jake Levine says.
“The history of art commissions is the history of wealthy people paying artists to make something about wealthy people,” Electric Objects co-founder Jake Levine says in the Kickstarter video for his company’s latest endeavor, the $5 Commission. It’s easy to picture what he’s talking about — Hans Holbein’s fulsome “Portrait of Henry VIII,” or more recently, Paul Emsley’s less-flattering depiction of Princess Kate.
Levine and co-founder Zoë Salditch hope to turn that history on its head by enabling a collective commission, what Levine describes as “art made for us, by us, and about us.” After the Kickstarter campaign ends April 10, they’ll send out surveys to their hundreds of backers. Four diverse artists — Addie Wagenknecht, Casey Reas, James George, and Lauren McCarthy — will then each create a single artwork based on all the resulting data. In June, the works will be shown in New York and in an online exhibition made available exclusively to those who back the project.
“We want to make original art accessible and interesting to a larger audience: the people that don’t attend art openings in Chelsea or auctions at Sotheby’s — in other words, everyone,” Salditch told Hyperallergic via email.
Their project isn’t the first to try to do so in recent history, 20×200 being one early print-centric example. And obviously, many hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and performances have also been born through crowd-funding. What makes it interesting is that, just as in the past, the subjects of the work will be those commissioning it — though this time, they’re the presumably non-elite, non-wealthy people that make up the digital masses (at least, the relatively non-wealthy; in our globalized world, anyone spending even $5 on an artsy Kickstarter project are still more than likely to be living life at the tip top of the world’s economic pyramid). As Salditch explained, “The $5 Commission’s aim is to explore a collective identity of its backers and to bring more people closer to the commissioning process.”
Without knowing what kind of questions will be on the survey, it’s hard to guess what the end artwork might look like. But whatever the result, the project sets up an interesting experiment that touches on much that makes the technological age we live in so fascinating — the democratization of art, the power of crowd-sourcing, our ever-growing, digitally empowered narcissism. Hopefully the final works will together hold up a revealing mirror that helps make sense of it all.
You can back Electric Objects’ The $5 Commission at Kickstarter.
