jo+kapi will be showing ENZYME 1.1 (2023) at a group exhibition at K.L.8 Exhibitions in Brussels, Belgium from 25 March, 2023 to 09 April, 2023. Details below.
WORTH MORE / WORTH LESS
OPENING 25 MARCH 2023, 18h
OPEN 26 MARCH, 1, 2, 8, 9 April 2023, 13h - 18h
View more on their website here.
For this upcoming group exhibition, we will show artists whose work reflects on the concept of ‘value’ in art. In what sense can you say that an artwork possesses worth? And does this need to be limited to monetary and material value, or can art have other kinds of value, such as social value, spiritual value, emotional value, ...?
For over a century, the boundaries of this concept have been investigated by a diverse array of artists. Duchamp started out by using an industrially manufactured object for his Fountain instead of creating a traditional, unique art object. Conceptual artists Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner sold written instructions to gallerists and institutions, and considered the physical execution of these instructions to be of secondary importance. With Merda d’Artista, Manzoni sold his own tinned excrement at the gold price, while recently Maurizio Cattelan had a golden toilet plumbed into Blenheim palace and managed to generate an inordinate amount of attention for a banana he duct-taped to the wall at an art fair.
Historically, there have always been gatekeepers with the power to determine the value of an artwork—from the wealthy patrons in ancient Greece and Rome, the Catholic Church, over Renaissance aristocracy, to feudal rulers and emperors. Today might not be that different: those with capital exercise considerable influence in the contemporary art world, and established commercial galleries and well-funded museums govern the market.
Despite such confinements, modern and contemporary artists have widely experimented with value in their works, challenging the conditions that can decide the nature of value, still eliciting discussion and outrage. We are curious what the new generation of artists has to add to the conversation. Surely they are met with the same problem as ever: the possibility that their work is ignored or deemed worthless by the current gatekeepers. In our modern economy, raw materials are usually transformed, through labour and engineering, into products that are more valuable than the sum of their components, yet many artists buy their art supplies and transform them into something that loses almost all of its original economic value.
The artworks will engage with this complex and elusive notion of value in art, and contribute an unexpected point of view to an over-used question: ‘In the end, what is it worth?’.