EXCHANGE at KarlK48

Karl-Kunger-Str. 48.12435 Berlin

A ritual on bartering among artist

Bartering among artists is a practice with a long tradition where mutual af rmation of artistic identity, value exchange and
generosity collapse in a seemingly peer to peer agreement. If cultural and social capital are also in play, the question
raises: What exactly is it that artists exchange in an artwork barter?

At rst glance, bartering looks like a simple pre-capitalistic practice, but behind this act one can easily discover the
actualisation of complex patterns of evaluations of future scenarios / power relationships / psychodynamics of ego /
generosity / exchange of ideas / fostering of a form of artistic communion / mutual support / patronage (etc.).
Furthermore, the exchange of artworks among artists as regularly practice might be a good precaution for their old
bones

The list of artists who exchanged artworks amongst each other is really long: Bacon/ Freud, Manet/Degas, Picasso/
Matisse, Dürer/Raphael, Van Gogh/Gauguin or Sol LeWitt’s exchanges with Eva Hesse, Robert Mangold, Hanne
Darboven, Robert Ryman, as random examples

“For Sol LeWitt, the act of exchange seemed to be not only a personal gesture, but also an integral part of his conceptual
practice.”1 The New York Times reports that after Bob Dylan got a Andy Warhol painting in exchange of a Screen Test
“only later did Warhol nd out that Dylan had traded the canvas for a sofa. The painting now hangs in New York’s
Museum of Modern Art. The last so-called “Ferus Type” Elvis to appear at auction — was sold at Christie’s for $53 million
in May 2019. On the fate of the sofa, the record is silent.”2

During the EXCHANGE evenings at KarlK48 the privat ritual of bartering became semi-public. The event is intended to
give visibility to the status of a work of art before to be introduced in the market or institutional context, but also to the
artist as producer in time of crisis3, and to offer to a selected audience a insight of several dynamic of value activated by
the exchange. More questions: for sculptures or paintings the dynamic of an exchange could be quite clear, but how to
exchange with a peer a performances or dematerialized work? what happened in case of collectives works

Some aspects of artistic practice could be also sharpened during the event (see rules 3): the evaluation of an artwork by
a peer is not the same of a curator, art critic, collector, galerist or random viewer. Artists could have an inner
comprehension of how an artwork “works” and they use often their own speci c vocabulary and references to describe it.
The act of bartering radically simpli es the value of the two artworks in a 1=1 ratio where pricing, speculation, money
transitions are suspended in their respective economic and time frame of actualisation, “Like any industry custom, it
comes with its own rules: offer work of equivalent scale or signi cance. It’s OK to follow up. And be generous.”4

We can propose the following fully negotiable rules to the artists who accept to take part in this experience:

1. During the evening EXCHANGE at KarlK48 two artists (collectives or ctional characters also welcome) agree to
exchange an artwork and to present the exchange in the KarlK48 space. The artists effectively become owner of
the respective piece during the evening.
2. The set up of the two artworks can be curated either by the two artists themselves, by one of them or by a curator of
their choice.
3. The two artists may describe/present their fresh acquisition to the audience
4. The artists may agree that the two works of art can be sold to a third or forth party during the evening. The rules of
this transaction may be decided by the two artists
5. Whoever receives money will issue an invoice.

1 https://massmoca.org/event/exchange-sol-lewitt/

2 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/t-magazine/artist-trades.html

3 The Artist as Producer in Times of Crisis, by Okwui Enwezor. http://www.darkmatterarchives.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/

4 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artist-trades-1512625
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