Den gjennomsnittlige bestselger

En bok/et kunstprosjekt utgitt i forbindelse med åpningen av House of Foundation i Moss. Boken er trykket i ett skinninnbundet eksemlar og selges i en eske. 

http://www.thomaskvam.com/

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(Fra The Average Art Manifesto): I am spending my 37th year practicing average uncreativity. On Friday, May 19, 2009, I began repainting Edwards Munch`s oeuvre, some 1789 paintings, stroke by stroke, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, canvas by canvas. I used the average color value found in each original Munch painting. Today, August 23, 2009, I stopped painting, two month’s work and I am not even half way through the project I originally intend to finish by New Year’s Day.

The object of the project is to be as uncreative in the process as possible. It’s one of the hardest constraints an artist can muster, particularly on a project of this scale; with every stroke of paint comes the temptation to “express,” “decorate,” and “distort” the average monochromes. But to do so would be to foil the exercise. I’ve long been an advocate of extreme averages in film, painting and art in general – as my feature film The Average Idiots (2008) – where each frame from Lars Von Trier’s film, The Idiots (1998) is processed frame by frame to its average monochromatic color value. When the average value of some 197 210 frames where finished, Jean-Luc Godard’s postulate; cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second, revealed itself as true idiocy in the same frequency.

Average art seems to be a perfect place to locate a valueless practice; as a gift economy, it is one of the last practices allowing non-functionality in late capitalism. Both theoretically and politically the field remains wide open. But in capitalism, labor equals value. So certainly my project must have value, for if my time is worth an hourly wage, then I might be paid handsomely for this work. But the truth is that I’ve subverted this equation. I rescued the Average Munch paintings, through laziness, from the surplus value of conceptual consistency.