I may be sponsoring another "Stock Market Art Show" soon. I think it was an interesting experience the last time 5 yrs ago and worth another experiment. The following is the polemical, explanatory manifesto which was in part, a critique of Guy Debord's and Dave Hickey's excellent essays.

"Stock Market Art: A work of art is a commodity. Art is fashioned through the selection and arrangement of pre-existing elements circulating within an administered, visual inventory. The monetary value of art work increases as the art/artist is able to attract interest/capital by garnering the social investment of one or more of a complex of constituencies (mass consumers, patrons, galleries, media, academic institutions). In commodity culture the accumulation of Capital (money, youth, labor, information, celebrity, etc.) until it forms an image, produces spectacle; 'fine art' is spectacle re-presenting itself in sublime form. A share of stock, like other currency (or art) has no intrinsic value. Rather, stocks or money as abstractions, mediate our commitments, our faith, and our investments among interdependent (though unequal) systems of culturally constructed realities. Stocks, like grace, are public visible signs of private, invisible assets. the dependence of the arts superstructure on the economic base is often elided in promoting art's other functions: decoration, moral instruction, dis-interested aesthetic pleasure, class position, and perhaps most significantly providing power/capital with an impotent, institutionally controlled, avantgarde as a relief and diversion from any consequential challenge to it's authority. The stock market art show was conceived, in part, to make apparent the matrix of relations among visual culture and money culture. but. rather than attempting another superficial critique, this project exposes the sublation of the interests of capital in artistic production and expects to profit from it!"

Here is how it worked, I sold stock in the show for 5$ a share. The shareholders and the artists divided the profits, after expenses, among themselves. Stockholders were payed according to how many shares they held. The art floated on the market without reserve price.