BLUM is pleased to announce Innate Value, artist Darren Bader’s 3½th solo presentation with the gallery. Designed to be the exhibition companion/appendix to the artist’s 20th anniversary project—an attempted sale of practice [1]—Innate Value will be the final show at BLUM’s 66th Street location.
Innate Value presents artworks [2] for which collectors determine a permanent monetary value [3]—a sum that will remain innate to the artwork. Over the course of the show, prospective buyers propose monetary values for a given work. At the show’s end, Bader will compare offers, choosing the buyer-proposed value that best fits the work. Outlined as such in its certificate of authenticity (COA), an artwork will retain this value in perpetuity, with any future sale or purchase for less or more (excluding taxes/duties/premiums/etc.) rendering the work a forgery. The exceptions are three "mutations," their values increasing between 1.25% and 5.8% each calendar year (beginning in 2025). A buyer won’t know they own a "mutation" until receiving its COA.
Those interested in ascribing value to a work/s are strongly encouraged to view it/them in person. Please contact gallery staff at [email protected] to inquire about a work or offer a bid.
Darren Bader lives and works in New York. Institutional solo exhibitions include Mind the Gap, BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, China (two-person with Li Ming, 2023); fruits, vegetables; fruit and vegetable salad, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2020); (@mined_oud), Museo Madre, Naples, Italy (2017); The World as Will and Representation, Kölnischer Kunstverein (2015); and Images, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2012). Awarded the Calder Prize in 2013, Bader has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and biennials including Mirage: Contemporary Art in Augmented Reality, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2020); the 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live In Interesting Times, Venice, Italy (2019); Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2018); 13th Biennale de Lyon, La vie moderne, Lyon, France (2015); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2014); Antigrazioso, Nouvelles Vagues in the Palais de Tokyo, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2013); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2010); and To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2008).
Notes from the artist
[1] Boucher, Brian. “You Can Be an Artist. This One Is Selling His Practice." New York Times, May 27, 2023.
[2] What originally perplexed me about making art was a notion(/station?) of ephemerality—how an object exists only for a time—an ineffable poetry "resident" to that dynamic. Add the endless paradox of the timeless and one might arrive at the kernel of what art most commonly means: meaning itself, chancely material, arguably inviolate. How to preserve and protect—and consummately pretend? How to prove that art is art? We contemporaries look to two primary means of proof: museum(ify); market value. Another proof of note would be medium specificity: painting [word needs further qualification] most inexorably. Art has a trying time residing outside these concepts
[3] The price of an artwork: enough to make a person think it valuable? (Do we bank on not selling because the best value is the incalculable one?) I don’t mean to demystify/depreciate art [objects] but I can't help but recognize participation in the ceremony of market stability lacks as much sense as it demands prudence.