Debtfair Houston
Occupy Museums, Debtfair Houston (November 20, 2015 - January 11, 2016). Site-specific sculptural installation. Art League Houston.
Debtfair is an ongoing artistic campaign dedicated to exploring the relationship between economic inequality in the art market and artists' increasing debt burdens.
Exhibition Statement
In collaboration with artists from Occupy Museums, Art League Houston is excited to present Debtfair, an exhibition which aims to expose the relationship between economic inequality in the culture industry and artists' growing debt burdens. The exhibition features work from sixty Texas-based artists who responded to an open call inviting artists to submit artworks that are of equal relative value to their monthly debt payment. The works in this exhibition represent a collective debt of over $3 million dollars, with interest rates ranging from zero using income-based repayment plans to as high as 19%.
By focusing on a monthly debt payment as a position of value, artists and viewers are asked to consider the fluctuating relationships of artists' time, development, creative production, exploration, community, and sustainability under increasing financial burdens. Answering questions on their economic realities as part of the open call process, participatingDebtfair artists reveal the enormity of the often speculative loan industry with debts to over 30 financial institutions represented amongst the 60 participants. Displayed directly inside wall openings between studs in Art League Houston's Main Gallery, the work of exhibiting artists will invoke the layers of extraction that exist in most spaces and those particularly present in the rarified value system of the culture industry.
Growing out of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, conceptualization for Debtfair began in 2012 by asking artists to share their economic realities in alignment with their art work. Discovering the complexity of decisions that inform not only an artist's work but also their economic conditions, Debtfair.org collects profiles presenting artist's imagery and their statements on the ways "economic reality affects your art."
With 99 profiles to date and $5.1 million in debt represented, Debtfair.org continues to align artists' work with their economic realities as a new prism in which to consider cultural production in the growing debt crisis. Asked to create profiles in tandem with physical installation, each Texas-based artist's online statements provide a narrative window to the feelings and experiences of being an artist while navigating economic conditions.
While many feel isolated by their economic reality, Debtfair works to build solidarity and community around our shared economic conditions. Art League Houston will host the first fully-realized project using the Debtfair model. Artwork in the exhibition will be organized in collective groupings ("bundles") based on commonalities between each artist's economic realities, presenting artworks and artists in shared rather than individual terms. Total debts amongst the artists are tabulated in a running tally while identifying the institutions in which these debts are rooted, the feelings they elicit and the choices they represent.
Debtfair Gallery Handout (Click to enlarge):
Debtfair Bundle Pricing Statement
Each artist in this exhibition has declared a financial value for their artwork that is connected to their monthly debt payment or a monthly economic burden relative to their art practice. All artists have been free to create associations they see fit within their own economic reality and the details they have chosen to share with Debtfair in our artist questionnaire. The total of all individual values is the base price of each collective bundle. No artworks within the exhibition of the show will be sold individually but rather available as a collective unit in solidarity.
In order to place artists' economic realities in the context of the larger economy, unique interest rates will be applied beginning January 1st to the base price of each bundle. Totals will be compounded daily through the remainder of the show.
The interest rates in general are an effort to draw attention to the ways that our debts and economic risks are financialized and converted to profit for the financial industry based on the continued burden of others. Each interest rate chosen relates to a unique reality among the participating artists or a condition of the broader culture. On January 1, the prices of bundles will increase in the following ways:
The "Bank" Bundle will increase in price by 7%, the average interest rate artists are paying on their debts within the bundle.
The "Works Multiple Jobs" Bundle will increase by 4.4%, the rate of unemployment in Texas as of October 2015.
The "Fear, Stress, Anxiety" Bundle will increase by 13%, the percentage of Americans on antidepressants recorded in 2012.
The "Gallery Represented" Bundle will increase by 8%, the global increase in art sales in one year measured in 2013.
In the event of a sale, individual values declared by each artist will be honored and all interest increases evenly split as artist payment. All payments will go directly to the artists' lending institutions in the form of financial debt relief.
