$10K Scratch-Off Artworks Offer the Chance to Win $100K

Artist Victor Solomon incentivizes his new show BE FOR REAL with the chance to win $100,000. The show, presented by Joseph Gross Gallery at CONTEXT New York, is comprised of 20 brass plates in hand-made mahogany frames. Each is exquisitely laser-etched and embedded with a gold coin with the famed line from Citizen Kane, "It's no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money."  The plates, however, are actually ornately disguised scratch tickets satirizing the practice of art "flipping." For each day of the fair, May 3 to 8, art buyers have a one-in-twenty chance to buy a $10,000 artwork and scratch away the surface only to realize that the purchase has won her/him a whopping $100,000 (a sum produced by the works' own sales).

Solomon's playful show, which the artist himself describes as "something naughty," taps into a few of the most pressing polemics of art market economics. The artist took on a related social phenomena in his previous project, Literally Balling, which literalized society's deification of sports figures through his collection of gilded basketballs, stained-glass backboards, chain mail jerseys. In BE FOR REAL, Solomon defamiliarizes the context of exhibited art and its value to point towards art commodification practices that have become normalized in our current art market– as the press release describes, "the aggressive growth of secondary market 'flippers,' an influx of strategic capital and valuation algorithms like ArtRank."

When I asked the artist directly how his show engages with these issues, he replied, "Some people are ambivalent to work’s creative aspiration and reduce art to a commodity with financial up-side. BE FOR REAL removes the pretense and satirizes how [people] see the game with [these] scratch tickets." Once the $10,000 works have been scratched, however, there's no telling what the financial impact on the art might be. It's the same gamble one might take cracking open a Brad Troemel print to reach the Bitcoin embedded at its center or in the reverse, restoring a great artwork only to destroy its authenticity. In other words, for the nineteen unlucky buyers walking away with their intentionally altered purchases, what comes next is entirely up to chance a.k.a. that often arbitrary entity called the art market.

As a parenthetical afterthought, Solomon adds, "ha ha ha."

BE FOR REAL opens May 3 and runs until May 8 at CONTEXT New York. Find more of Victor Solomon's work on his website.

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