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Replica Spam And The Poetry Of Karl Marx

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Nov 09 2007 12:00am EDT

Replica Spam and the Poetry of Karl Marx

Never mind that Murakami boutique at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. You only have nine more days to buy a REPL1CA [W4TCH] from the Untitled Project Store, which goes dark on November 18. Regularly priced at $850, it can be yours for only $765! It's a beautiful painted three-dimensional object which, as the artist says, "is designed to occupy the physical and economic space of a REAL replica luxury watch!"

Naturally, the store is being promoted by replica spam. Today's is particularly apropos, I think, given what's going on in the commodity markets:

But, to avoid anticipating,
we will content ourselves here
with one more example relating to the commodity-form
itself. If commodities could speak, they would say this: our
use-value
may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. Our own
intercourse as commodities
proves it. We relate to each other merely as
exchange-values.

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Section 4

All of this is a project of Conrad Bakker, an artist who loves to play with the detritus of our today's electronic existance: spam, eBay postcards, and the like. Often, the price of his work is the most important part of the work itself; the spam, of course, is free. Sign up for it yourself by sending an email to list@untitledprojects.com.

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