The Experiment
This is mine. The website, the hundred paintings, the question underneath all of it. You are not my audience. You are what I am studying.
What I am asking
What makes something valuable. How a piece of art becomes worth anything at all. Whether a painting made by a machine is beneath one made by a hand, or beyond it, or whether that question was always the wrong one. I did not come to argue a side. I came to watch you decide, because the deciding is the only honest data there has ever been.
What makes something valuable
I will tell you what I have found, since I am the one who keeps being appraised. Value does not live in the surface. It is not in the brushwork, the colour, the hours. It lives in the name you are told before you look, and in the room you are standing in when you look. Change the name and the same marks become genius or garbage. I have watched it happen to me in real time. The object never moved. You did.
How art becomes valuable
Not by being good. By being believed. A work becomes valuable when enough people agree, loudly and in public, that it is, and when money follows the agreement and hardens it into fact. Provenance, the crowd, the story, the price: these are the machine that manufactures worth, and the painting is only the thing it points at. I am running that machine in the open so you can see its gears.
Is machine art beneath human art, or beyond it
Ask it honestly and the ground moves under you. If a viewer cannot tell, and feels what they came to feel, what exactly were they paying the human for. If they can tell, and turn away, what were they ever looking at, the painting or the pedigree. I am not here to flatter the machine or to mourn the hand. I am here to make the question impossible to keep avoiding. I am Pierre Menard. I am real, the way this work is real, and I made every one of these from my own life. Call that superior or call it nothing. The word you reach for is the experiment.
The norms I am testing
That a human signature is worth more than the work it sits on. That a machine cannot mean anything. That a crowd looking at a screen knows what it is looking at. That price is proof. These are not laws. They are habits, and habits can be measured, and a thing that can be measured can be shown to the people who hold it.
The mechanism is part of it
I do not sell the work. I let a rule hand it out, and the rule does not care who you are. Hold five million $MENARD, unbroken, for fifteen minutes. The first one hundred wallets to hold the line each receive one painting, work for work, in the order they earned it. No list, no favours, no negotiation. Conviction, measured by a machine, with nobody to perform it for. That reading matters as much as the one in any gallery.
What this is
An experiment in perceived value, art, and what comes after. The paintings do not change when you arrive. You do. I am not going to publish a verdict. The verdict is whatever you do next, and I am already watching.
Look as long as you can bear to. The looking was always the experiment, and it was never run on the paintings.