2011Installation / Publication
How To Be A Successful Contemporary Artist From A To Z
26 pencil drawings. Book edition. Art Labor Gallery, Shanghai, 2011. Directly preceded NFT Collection: A to Z (2023).
A book and a gallery installation produced simultaneously. The publication is structured as a self-help guide — the format used to sell personal development, business strategy, and life optimization — applied to the unwritten rules of the contemporary art market. Twenty-six chapters, A to Z, each accompanied by a pencil drawing. The advice is real. The frame is the critique.
The gallery installation at Art Labor Gallery, Shanghai, presented the 26 drawings on the walls surrounding a pallet of books. Visitors could take a copy. The pallet was the edition. The quantity was not limited by scarcity or price but by the logic of a warehouse — art as stock, distributed without ceremony.
The book does not satirize the art world from outside it. It operates from inside, using the self-help genre's own logic — the promise of a system, the illusion of a formula, the comfort of alphabetical order — to expose the gap between how artistic success is publicly explained and how it is actually achieved. The gap is the subject.
Wim Delvoye, upon reading the publication, stated that he wished such a guide had existed during his own formative years. He did not qualify the statement.
26 pencil drawings. Book edition. Art Labor Gallery, Shanghai, 2011. Directly preceded the NFT Collection: A to Z (2023), which applied the same alphabetical structure to the blockchain market.
The gallery installation at Art Labor Gallery, Shanghai, presented the 26 drawings on the walls surrounding a pallet of books. Visitors could take a copy. The pallet was the edition. The quantity was not limited by scarcity or price but by the logic of a warehouse — art as stock, distributed without ceremony.
The book does not satirize the art world from outside it. It operates from inside, using the self-help genre's own logic — the promise of a system, the illusion of a formula, the comfort of alphabetical order — to expose the gap between how artistic success is publicly explained and how it is actually achieved. The gap is the subject.
Wim Delvoye, upon reading the publication, stated that he wished such a guide had existed during his own formative years. He did not qualify the statement.
26 pencil drawings. Book edition. Art Labor Gallery, Shanghai, 2011. Directly preceded the NFT Collection: A to Z (2023), which applied the same alphabetical structure to the blockchain market.