So the artist has sold his life to a millionaire
There is a man who has sold another one’s life (and their demise). Minute by minute, live, for the next eight years, unless “freeze frame” advance. He signed a contract that is a bet.
Initiated a project that can be considered, as the points of view, a private version of “Big Brother”, the ultimate attempt to break the boundary between life and art or, as suggested by its creator, “a game with the devil “.
The seller’s own life is Christian Boltanski, one of the best known contemporary French artists. The buyer is a millionaire who lives in Tasmania. In an interview in Le Monde Boltanski said that the buyer has made his fortune with the game, has used an extraordinary mind for mathematics sbancato casinos, to which he was denied access. With the money won began to collect works of art and he wanted possederne also one of Boltanski. Which relaunched: why settle for art when you can have the artist?
The pact works: first in January 2010 by four cameras filming him at any time by sending images on the screen installed in a cave in Tasmania in the property millionaire. What can sit down and have the privilege of watching paint Boltanski (even when it does), but also sleep, eat and do anything else a human being can not avoid to do for eight years. The vision can not be stopped, you can not review what is spent: in his life to overlap the art is no longer crystallizable, can not be put into the frame, becomes a flow, a continuous loss, survives only in memory. This is in fact long been the pivot around which revolves the work of Boltanski: we are all dying, our faces are collages of missing persons (we have the nose of our grandfather, the eyes of our mother). Our life is a photograph in a darkroom under a contrary immersed in the liquid of time vanishes in a milky mist.
What transforms the contract in a bet is a clause on the possibility, not remote, of death. Boltanski has 65 years, it gets to 73 is not mentioned, is aware of this. During the period in which the movie will receive a lifetime and will be paid a life insurance. The beneficiary is the millionaire Tasmania. The possibility of the death of Boltanski by 2018 the compensation for money spent, and with interest. Once again, it would beat the case, or what rule, mathematically or not, the future. But if it were to survive, Boltanski has the insurance premium, doubled by its contractor, but also the priceless satisfaction of having beaten the devil and death. There are, in this project is as unique and as a video game of chance, two covered and two outcomes that are mention.
First hypothesis: Boltanski wins. It goes beyond the limit of life that has established the mathematical calculation of an enriched presumptuous, to leave the satisfaction of having seen in any intimacy, of having spied any gesture or gaze. It takes, in exchange, a pack of money to get clear to the end and the pride that he has elevated the everyday to a different dimension, commercial or artistic work depends on who believes.
Second hypothesis: Boltanski loses. Tasmanian remains in the cave a man even richer than before, even more secure to know the fate of the algorithm, with the right to look at, for days, months or years, the life after life: a black screen. Then there are two assumptions that are not taken into account openly.
The number three: the dealer loses. Or: Boltanski campaign, but he died on millionaire Tasmania. The transmission is not interrupted, the four cameras to continue filming an artist who lives, drinking water or wine, write, delete. But no one sees anymore. Becomes a work of art with the public, a life without witnesses. There is a thing? Not only we must ask if the tree falls in the forest is really dropped when no camera has taken over, but if it is dropped when it was taken but no one has seen. And if a life has a meaning if there is someone, even the other side of the world, a curious or even beat that for what happens.
Then there is, inevitably, the number four assumptions: that Boltanski, used to mix in his creations the true and not true, exposing the fallibility of memory to celebrate the triumph, has created the millionaire, his biography, the cave and the entire mechanism to demonstrate that, far more than a work of art, life is a game with no winners or losers and loneliness a destiny that can be reversed only by the imagination.
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