Exhibition / “Ebay: Buy or Sell or Buy”

an online exhibition @ Pace Digital Gallery
6 May–6 September 2004 online
View the show’s press release

The magazine’s Cabinetlandia project from issue 10 will be included in this show on art projects that have involved or address the ubiquitous Ebay. For the exhibition, Cabinet will be presenting “Land Grab,” an interactive webpage that allows readers who signed up to get a portion of Cabinetlandia to select their their plots and provide some basic information about themselves. Below is a portion of the press release provided by Pace University Digital Gallery:

“Straddling the genres of performance art, web design, net art, photography, and conceptual art, the 10 artists and artist-teams in this exhibition infiltrate the virtual space of ebay, the online auction house, as a conceptual vehicle. These artists are not simply selling their artwork or their belongings online, but rather are investigating ideas of consumer culture, the market, ephemerality, exchange, intangibility, and things that cannot ostensibly be for sale. The shopping experience is ubiquitous in Western consumer society. Ebay is part of a digital culture where more and more daily needs are being met through the interface of our computer screens in a specially designed social space. The experience of online shopping has become like other multi-user experiences including games, dating, and conversation, which have their own rules of engagement within the public realm.

Artists include: Nicolás Dumit Estévez, The eteam, John Freyer, Pete Ippel, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir, Paul Ramirez Jonas and Cabinet Magazine, Eryk Salvaggio, K.D. Thornton, and Carlo Zanni.”