New City breaks Artshare story

New City April 29, 1999 Ben Winters

Artist Ben MacNeill has found an inventive way to sell himself

Show me an artist who isn't starving, and I'll show you someone who has managed to reconcile their lofty conceptual ideals with the harsh realities of commerce. Ben MacNeill, an MFA candidate at the Art Institute, seems to have a better handle on this than most: He figures that if selling art is about being a good businessman, why shouldn't the art itself?

"Invest in Ben MacNeill," goes the tagline for his new Artshare project. "Put the artist at risk." The handsome three-color prints that MacNeill is hawking at www.artshare.com are more than just art: They're shares on sale for five bucks, redeemable in the year 2004 for ten.

MacNeill swears he's not making fun of stock-and-bond culture. "I'm not against corporations or rules or into any anti-capitalist sort of theme. I'm just kind of amused by all the little things that make everyday life kind of hard." Hence, the complicated, longwinded form that must be signed by Artshare purchasers.

The piece is intended as commentary (among other things) on "all the sort of paperwork that different corporations make you fill out, if you're getting software or things like that," says MacNeill. He is "reversing the role, like when Microsoft asks you to fill out a ten-page form you don't bat an eye, but when an individual asks you to do the same thing, you take it more seriously."

Though the Artshare project - with its high-premise hook and website-as-gallery-space conceit - could very easily be labeled (and dismissed) as "concept art," MacNeill rejects the title. "I'm not a conceptual artist," he says, "because my stuff is pretty down to Earth." And after all, what truly pretentious artist would refer to his oeuvre as "stuff"?

There is some lineage to this sort of "transaction art." Kathryn Hixson of New Art Examiner reveals that local artist Dan Patterson once sold shares allowing the bearer to pollute a certain amount, mimicking the government's similar grants to coporations. Plus, she adds, "there was a check that Marcelle Duchamp wrote to his dentist that sold for a lot of money."

MacNeill assures me that he also works in more traditional mediums - painting, sculpture and all that other stuff. And consider that he once, in a protest against art-world doublespeak, conceived a project in which anyone entering his show had to sign a waiver promising not to use the word "recontextualize."

The artist has some minor concern that his new concept will cause him financial strain when his investors come back to cash in, but he figures that most will hang onto the share, valuing its artistic merit at more than ten bucks. Plus, at the bottom of his press release, it's noted that the artist also works as a graphic designer at a Chicago ad agency. It seems that MacNeill has discovered the other secret of success in the art world: A day job.

 

-- Ben Winters