Art For Sale: Rethinking of Convention and an Investment in Interpretation
Baseball cards. We buy them and collect them and trade them and
idolize them. But what are they, really? A fantasy? A dream? A hobby?
Appropriating baseball cards for sale is an answer to one of the many
questions posed at the beginning of this project. What is the value of
the card? What is the value of art? It is also an attempt at poetic justice:
irony. Any value the cards once had diminishes with the mass production
of greedy companies.
Any value that these cards that I spent so much money on as a kid, I have
reconciled with and accept the devaluation as the cards are now torn from
the sacred condition of mint, and any value left in the tradition of “look
but don’t touch,” is reconditioned and recontextualized from the original
purposes of being hung on a wall, stuffed in a closet, hidden in a vault.
To be collected. Collecting is the irony that marries the original purpose
of these cards with their new value as works of art. The difference is that
although any monetary value these may have had as collectable works of
mass consumerism is nullified, the art that I have created does, however,
have its qualities as works of art: they have meaning.
Like my work in general, I have taken the cards out of the context of the
traditional and have replicated that tradition into a new context for the
cards that deconstructs that tradition and in the new context, each card
is a question on consumerism, mass commodity, what is value, what is
phenomenon behind the cards that causes them to have quantitative
value? What is the motivation that drives this consumerism and the
fanaticism of something that really is just a game but created into a world
of obsession and frenzy that goes along with it? My cards may have lost
their monetary value of commodity, I took that chance, but they are a
“Rethinking of Convention and an Investment in Interpretation.”