Significant Objects

My friend Josh Glenn, and his collaborator Rob Walker, have been running an interesting project: Significant Objects. I’ll quote from the project info page:

THE IDEA

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

THE PROJECT

1. The project’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales.

2. A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object!

3. Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story.

4. The winning bidder is mailed the significant object, along with a printout of the object’s fictional story. Net proceeds from the sale are given to the respective author. Authors retain all rights to their stories.

5. The test’s results — photos, original prices and final sale prices, stories — are cataloged on this website. The project’s curators retain the right to use these materials in other venues and media. For example: Maybe we’ll publish a book.

They are up to their 100th and final entry: Jonathan Lethem vs. the Missouri Shotglass (The Missouri Shotglass would be a good nickname. Greg “the Missouri shotglass” Whillikers.) Now, just as if that little birdy on the glass flew to my ear, I hear the project will continue as some sort of charity fundraiser type thing, which I think sounds like a fine model for a charity fundraiser type thing.

I think it’s interesting how central the investment of cultural ephemera with significance has been to cultural and artistic imagination, lo the last 40 years or so. Ephemeral is the new eternal. Yard sales and eBay, the new sites of the Sublime (whereas a Romantic poet once had to trudge to a picturesque ruin, the seaside, or a mountaintop.)

That’s not really an adequate summary of the state of art and culture, in case you are disappointed I can’t do it in two sentences flat. But it does seem to me interesting and actually quite appropriate, in our present age, that so many artists feel compelled to build almost exclusively by repurposing ‘low’ cultural products. They can’t build to a decent height any other way. Pop culture – nay, aged mass culture, in its dotage – is the new Nature, to which one turns for authentic inspiration: the ever-returning waves of the sea, no mere wading-pool of nostalgia. (Fear of the future combined with contempt for the present, as a wise comic book character once said.) Oh, it might seem this sort of dumpster diving and incessant craphounding around is just amusing, ironic subjection of the whole culture to Mystery Culture Theater 3000-style snark commentary. But these artists aren’t just kitsch-whisperers and camp followers, my dear sir or madam. Nay, these are so many brave Aeneases (what is the plural of Aeneas?), passing through Gates of Ivory, which they bought cheap on eBay, and it works out ok for them, for what dreams but false dreams could be true doors into themselves. Am I right, or am I right?

I’m most interested in repurposing-the-low because it is the spiritual engine of most good work done in comics for the last generation, ‘course. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed watching the Significant Objects project roll along. Best of luck to them, going forward.