Artist & Author
Consultant Dan Nelson offers a reasonably-priced copy of a Damien Hirst "spot" painting.
Imperial Services was founded in 1956 in Chicago by Eugene Guarnieri (shown at right with an unidentified client), a semi-retired professor of psychology, amateur sculptor, and violist. As the child of a wealthy diplomat he traveled the world throughout his youth, living in Persia, Italy, Ethiopia, and Norway, eventually becoming fluent in five languages. After serving in in a secretive psy-ops division of the U.S. Army in World War II, Guarnieri taught at the University of Chicago, where he came into contact with an aesthetically rarefied world created by the educated and wealthy of the city. His social ties and savvy way with people eventually translated into informal consulting sessions held in upscale hotel bars, private clubs, museums, and homes.
Phase 4 of "Make an Artist a Millionaire" is called "400 to 1." It entails writing a letter to each of the people on the Forbes 400 list to solicit a donation. The project is more about sussing out human nature and understanding how to get through to the kind of person who, on the surface, couldn't be more different from the average artist: the business person. The same challenge of asking for something in return for nothing that exists on the lower end of the scale of quantity--$1--is amplified many times in approaching millionaires and billionaires.
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Phase 4 of "Make an Artist a Millionaire" is called "400 to 1." It entails writing a letter to each of the people on the Forbes 400 list to solicit a donation. Rather than sending a form letter to each member of the Forbes 400, the intent is to research each person and craft a personalized plea.
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Phase 4 of "Make an Artist a Millionaire" is called "400 to 1." It entails writing a letter to each of the people on the Forbes 400 list to solicit a donation. What at first seemed simply like a euphemism for "your project will never succeed" grew into, if not a more effective approach to getting the million, at least a challenge. More interesting than asking people over and over for a dollar, which in the end possibly just reinforced the idea of the artist as an undeserving beggar, someone who steps out of line when they expect a reward for their gifts.
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for Nina Katchadourian
This poster features one of the letters written to someone on the Forbes 400 list soliciting a donation.
Featuring myself in an executive pose.
edition of 10
A little tribute to Jenny Holzer...
One direction MAAAM could take would be a series of performances, including sitting on the street with a cardboard sign (above); synthesizer busking at a BART train station; and roaming around with a sandwich board. All of these options would create varying levels of discomfort for me, and others, and I might not be the ideal person to execute them. (A healthy white hetero male basically panhandling to solve his art problem?) They could also represent an admission of the project's failure by not finding a compelling argument for someone donating (other than "Why not? $1 is such a small sum."). For this reason, executing them would merely be skirting the issue. This is where an idea for reconfiguring MAAAM came in: instead of trying to collect a million dollars for me, I would make another artist a millionaire with the proceeds. The original project arguably becomes something entirely different, and leeches it of much of its substance. Once the project's focus (though still not the goal) becomes generosity, it once again casts the recipient artist as a helpless, inept victim without effective personal agency. And as the agent of generosity, it puts me on the other side of the same old coin.
Business card. ca. 1957 showing the original logo that bears the Latin saying "Audentes Fortuna Iuvat", i.e. "Fortune favors the bold." Designer uncredited.
Phase 4 of "Make an Artist a Millionaire" is called "400 to 1." It entails writing a letter to each of the people on the Forbes 400 list to solicit a donation. My stepmom, who has a lot of experience and success in university development, collaborated on this project. It was she, in fact, who planted the seed for "400 to 1". After listening to me describe MAAAM, she made the offhand comment "Honey, it would be easier for you to get one person to write you a check for a million dollars than to get a million people to each give you a dollar."
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"Bank Notes" (2010) was issue #4 of Clearinghouse Publishers. The versions sent to subscribers included a $2 bill stapled in as the last page, which alluded to not only how much money was being spent making and sending these issues, but to the idea of art and artists as fountains of generosity, depleting themselves for the benefit, or just the mere entertainment, of the public. Presumably I made this in the depths of the Great Recession as we were all being screwed by bailed-out banks. “No funny stuff”--ha!
Examples of “$2 Art” (2009-2010), which was the third phase of “Make an Artist a Millionaire”.
Examples of “$2 Art” (2009-10), which would ideally be worth no more than their sticker price in time or labor.
Phase three of "Make an Artist a Millionaire" was “$2 Art”. Part of the original concept of this project was that the money would be donations, and not solicited in exchange for something from me. This was important for several reasons: to reinforce the concept that artists deserve to be millionaires as much as people in any other profession; that making art to sell within this project would be jumping the gun; and it would defeat the purpose of trying to establish a day job-free environment. This may not make immediate sense, but to make this project into simply another job would defeat the purpose. “$2 Art” was then a compromise: sell rapidly executed pieces on cheap materials.
The money was collected in a donation box at a few gallery shows and donor names were collected. Alongside the cash, a full list of donors would be displayed. This ushered in phase two of the project: accepting donations of more than $1 from people. The reality of the situation is that it was more important to reach the million mark than to stick to the symbolism of the $1. Plus the fact that we spend more than $1 on so many petty things in daily life without a second thought: coffee, parking meters, ATM fees, etc.
The medium of this project is US dollars, and the total amount would be collected (without any of it being spent for the duration of the project) and finally exhibited in cash form.
$1 from one million people, people.
My project “Make an Artist a Millionaire” started in late 2008, with an obvious objective. The idea was that, in order to make better art, I needed to be able to pursue a full time art practice, and that the way to do this was to make enough money to live on for the rest of my life. A million dollars is also, of course, a symbolic amount of money and the words “millionaire” and “artist” don’t appear together very much, and usually only to perjoratively describe hated artists like Damien Hirst (who I don’t hate at all and who was actually part of the inspiration for this project.)
The very fist manifestation of MaAaM was the statement on the card above, which preemptively responded to the inevitable “why?” question with a “why not?”