[Image: Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #273: Lines to points on a grid, 1975, water-soluble crayon on wall. Installation view, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2007. Photo: Bill Jacobson.] ” [...] Last year, during the months of dismay and recovery that followed the news of LeWitt’s death, an amazing thing happened: Brand-new works by the artist sprang up all around the world, beautiful, vast, delicate images pulled from manila folders and executed to plan as if part of a vast file-sharing festival. Whereas the value of a typical artist’s work lies in the sensibility and rarity of his or her personal output, the value of LeWitt’s wall drawings is that they can be made by many people in many places, simultaneously and repeatedly, without LeWitt needing to be present and with no appreciable loss of quality. For a long time (and still), artists made money from their art by having its value understood as an object to be possessed, usually in exchange for money. Thereafter, both the cash and the artwork are subject to their respective markets, the vagaries of history, and either an increase or decrease in value. LeWitt’s wall drawings forestall this linear fate by shattering the irreversible moment of exchange: He never really has to surrender his product and is never really paid in full. In any wall drawing, the network of idea, institution, local draftsmen, and LeWitt (if not in body, then in spirit) determines the value of the work, a value that does not rest on any one substantiation but gets remade and recalibrated over time. Which is not to say that distribution and profit margin were LeWitt’s guiding principles, but that his instinct for how an artwork might “be” in the world embodies a fundamental shift in how and where we assign value. Like the best aspects of the Internet economy, LeWitt’s starburst Wall Drawing #273: Lines to points on a grid, 1975, collects and makes sense of diverse points in space without privileging any of them, creating value (and income) out of the relations between things rather than out of the things themselves…

[...] many artists who, for economic reasons, work on a small scale, use consumable materials, attempt alternative distribution strategies, or move to marginal locales have fallen prey to an insidious strain of art criticism that can see their production only in negative terms, that is, as a critique of the mainstream commodity makers and of money in general—the pursuit of it, and the capitulations to both consumption and spectacle that invariably follow. From this point of view, all portable, ephemeral, or otherwise modest artworks, by the likes of Rashawn Griffin and Mitzi Pederson or Trisha Donnelly and Tino Sehgal, are to be understood solely in relation to the big commodity makers and only as a reaction against them, as de rigueur dematerialization. Of the original generation of critical revolutionaries, only Lucy Lippard has recanted (and thirty years ago, at that), writing, “Some of the blame for this situation must fall on those who, like myself, had exaggerated illusions about the ability of a ‘dematerialization of the art object’ to subvert the commodity status and political uses to which successful American art has been subjected since the late 1950s. It has become obvious over the last few years that temporary, cheap, invisible or reproducible art has made little difference in the way art and artists are economically and ideologically exploited and that it can hardly be distinguished in that sense from Cor-Ten steel sculptures and twenty-foot canvases.”[...] ” From Modest Proposals by Joe Scanlan, Artforum. [via]