decoy is a mainframe of art-market and culture-industry analyses: ‘reviews,’ writings, and experimental works—encounters and reflections, really—that are set to be periodically published in the gallery newsletter (and later posted to the gallery website). These writings are a kind of autobiographical detour, a kind of confessional feedback loop, that we are putting ‘out there’ as public reading for those interested-in or worried-about the economies and drives that circulate through and along artwork and cultural labor. It’s a decoy, but this time we’re trying to lure you out of the cage—away from where you’re already trapped.*

Since the ‘art market’ is often (purposefully) kept nebulous and exclusive, we hope that this process of sharing our interactions with cultural economies makes the relationships between art and finance more approachable and less mythological topics or structures. We want to materialize and analyze the market in ways that makes it more accessible and undo its repressive tones. We think that this conversational way of working with our public helps to breakdown the money-induced hallucinations of this industry, and that our observations begin to demonstrate and destabilize the class relations embedded in the transaction, exchange, acquisition, and preservation of art. Though, at the start, our motives are guided by questions and anxieties more than convictions or assertions. What is the necessary economy of art? When does desire (for something or someone) begin to act like demand (placed on others)?

(When we saw “we” we are also referring to any of “you.” If you have some kind of work that you would like to put ‘out there’ in circulation with this publication, please reach out to see if what you are thinking-of and working-on wants to be part of the conversation.)

….

A market—an economy—is like glue: made from boiling-down all the bodies ground-up to bake our bread and then it’s just more or less mindlessly, “you don’t mindedly,” applied everywhere as an interstitial, sticky, connection between boring (banal) but necessary persons, places, and things. Nouns—so, nominal. But absurdly necessary. And all in the Name of a common Good: Art! (So why’s the business of it so bad?)

—So that’s why all the surfaces around here are so sticky? All the glue: all the huffing and puffing. (No, that’s why I’m so high that everything seems sticky enough that these words are more spit and breath than letters and sense….) After all, if so much of being giant didn’t rely on saying so many inanities, so many “fee-fi-fo-fums,” would we even think they’re so big? What’s being big besides unintelligible, out of reach—domineering by stature alone? (Remember: it’s only relatively recently that the cultural production of language—reading and writing—are ‘made available’ as public activities; before, for most of the population, there was only listening and being-told—their mother-tongues were valued or beatified as the Word. Text was private property, and the surfaces it appeared were high-cost, high-security materials.** Is this over?) Words, Goods, goods, and bads arrive at the same time, in the same place.

Or, maybe like any temptation toward hazard—toward putting yourself at risk, at stake—any movement toward or within a market is always following a decoy: a lifelike but lifeless look-alike. A magic bean we know won’t work but we buy it anyway because it changes the price of the online order just enough to get that free shipping—woohoo! It’s a joke but it’s real once I pay for it. Maybe that’s why “it seems so real!” is a motto of a consumerism up to the point of augmentation direct injection, ‘fake’ tits and paralyzed flesh for the win. And we’re all winners if we can afford it. That’s what’s so beautiful about the strip of stores you like so much: so thin and so flat it goes almost anywhere and looks the same each time it’s different. A möbius market where we are all out of place. Up a horizontal bean stalk only to arrive at world with all the same not-so-magical rules operating at larger scale, but still functioning at the same size. That’s why you can still see me from all the way up there! Because you’re down here too. 

In any case, pay attention to the themes here: hunting, killing, climbing, consuming, connecting, distracting, luring; cooking-down, eating-up; fairytales; non-orientable surfaces; up-down, left-right(; cheat codes;) desire.

Anyway, it’s about time we find our way out of these sad t(r)opics.

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*The etymology of decoy: mid 16th century (earlier as coy): from Dutch de kooi ‘the decoy’, from Middle Dutch de kouw ‘the cage’, from Latin cavea ‘cage’. Decoy (in the sense of a noun) is from the practice of using tamed ducks to lead wild ones along channels into captivity.

**For example, in the mid-10th century Byzantine Empire, the cost of manuscript production was significant, though slightly lower than initially suggested. A single sheep skin is estimated to have cost around 1 silver miliaresion, and since one skin typically produced two folios (four pages), a 300-page manuscript would require approximately 75 skins. Given that the exchange rate at the time was 12 miliaresia per 1 gold solidus, the total material cost for such a manuscript would amount to about 6.25 solidi. In comparison, historical sources suggest that a regular Byzantine soldier (comitatensis) earned approximately 12 solidi per year, rather than the 3.5 solidi claimed. Therefore, the material cost of producing a 300-page manuscript would have been slightly more than half of a soldier’s annual wage, rather than exceeding it. This estimation highlights the high cost of book production before the advent of the printing press, though still within reach for wealthy patrons, monasteries, and imperial institutions.