About Sal Randolph

Sal Randolph lives in New York and produces independent art projects involving internet-mediated gift economies, social architectures and one-on-one interactions. She is the founder of Opsound, an open sound exchange of copyleft music. Other recent projects include The Free Biennial and Free Manifesta, which brought together several hundred artists in open shows of free art in the public spaces of New York and Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as well as Free Words in which 3000 copies of a free book have been infiltrated into bookstores and libraries worldwide by a network of volunteers. She is currently developing work in the areas of experiential and participatory art including a series of works where she gives away money.

Uselessness, Refusal, and Money (Why Works of Art Keep Turning into Treasures) Part 3

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Sal Randolph

A copy of Towards an Athropological Theory of Value in a book bag

Reading Between

Unalienated Life

It’s no accident, I think, the avant-garde began its move at the same moment when Europe and America’s period of political revolution had cross-faded into the industrial revolution. Money, that mysterious force, was dominating more and more of life. Work was becoming wage labor, and wages, in turn, were becoming the primary means that most people use to meet their basic needs for food, housing, and everything else.

One of the things I think we see in artworks is the ideal of the unalienated creative work that we imagine went into making them.[9] This flips right back to the questions Marx raised about our human life and labor. How is it, he asks, somewhat plaintively, that we have taken something precious in the sense of priceless–the human capacity for creative action–and made it into something that can be bought and sold? Something fundamentally incommensurable, the individual and unique human soul, becomes (under capitalism) reduced to its status as a fully exchangeable and replaceable unit of labor. In this model, as in the bohemian and countercultural fantasy, there is something directly opposed about money and the ideal of unalienated life. It is the situation of exchanging (needing to exchange) one’s own incommensurable and specific self stuff for the blank potentiality of money that causes alienation in the first place.

Continue reading →

Uselessness, Refusal, and Money Part 2

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Sal Randolph

click here for part one

Sal Randolph's Reading Between Project

Reading Between

There was a time when I spent my afternoons with the jangle of Bollywood music, stacks of books, post office customs forms, and a mountain of padded envelopes. I would collect addresses from my email, write them out in sharpie on the envelopes, and slip in a copy of David Graeber’s “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value; The False Coin of Our Own Dreams.”

I was sending out the most interesting book I had read in the previous year. Graeber is an anthropologist, also an anarchist and activist, and his book is one of those where a hundred ideas spin off every page. It includes lucid critiques of postmodernism, discussion of gift economies, a really interesting perspective on Marx (which caused me to spend that summer reading Capital), a theory of social creativity, and countless lively anthropological examples. I’m still mulling over a small aside he made on the meaning of men’s and women’s fashion.

As I had turned its pages on my couch every morning, I thought about the way in which books are simultaneously social and solitary. Graeber’s book started up a vigorous conversation in my head, but no one I knew was reading it. My solution was “Reading Between,” an art action where I sent a free copy of the book to anyone who wanted it, creating an elusive network of co-reading [5].

One of Graeber’s projects in “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value” is to try and make a link between moral values and financial ones, to create a theory that makes sense of why we use the same word in both spheres, even though they are in some ways quite inimical to each other (“values,” after all, are typically the things that money can’t buy: love, community, peace, honor). Values and valuables are both kinds of things we care about, things we would give up something else for; surely there’s a way to sort through how they relate to one another.

Continue reading →

Uselessness, Refusal, and Money

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Sal Randolph

Beautiful Money

Once upon a time I suggested that art is just another form of money (a beautiful money) — that artists are like tiny nations each minting their own currency, and the art world is an instrument for calibrating the values of all those currencies as they move against each other [1]. Though I meant this in a somewhat flip way, I think now I was actually quite wrong.

I had wanted to point to the way in which the value of artworks was arbitrary, or to use a favorite word, imaginary. In some sense this is true of all forms of value: value is something we assign to things, something we give them, not something inherent. But it’s clear that we treat the value of a hammer in a different way than we treat the value of a work of art. The more dramatic this difference, the more it becomes a puzzle to be investigated.

Continue reading →